OnlyFans had a 75% increase in signups in April, with 150,000 signups a day, as digital sex work becomes a more mainstream source of revenue during the pandemic
Ansel Elgort, Blac Chyna, and Caroline Calloway have all popped up on the adults-only platform. But what about the actual professionals? Tweets: @taylorlorenz , @eiffeltyler , @chaykak , @eternalrique , @miri_kane , @scottnover , @ellemagazine , and @katykelleher Tweets: Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : OnlyFans has is becoming a normalized/mainstream subscription service for many male + female influencers, who (understandably) want to move toward more directly monetizing their audience. But worth remembering that sex work is an incredible amount of work https://www.elle.com/... https://twitter.com/... Tyler McCall / @eiffeltyler : This quote calling OnlyFans “the farmer's market of porn” nearly TOOK ME OUT: https://www.elle.com/... Kyle Chayka / @chaykak : OnlyFans, she says, is “the farmer's market of porn. The creator is selling directly to the consumer.” https://www.elle.com/... @eternalrique : Sadly I can see that, because Onlyfans themselves barely like to even acknowledge who are truly making their site popular (go to they social media and see) and with celebrities coming, I believe they might spin it to the whole “get personal life with your fave star” without sex https://twitter.com/... Miranda Kane / @miri_kane : So onlyfans was built on sex work, and is getting more support from celebs and influencers. How long, do you think, it will be before all sex workers are kicked off? Scott Nover / @scottnover : “As millions of people filed for unemployment last month, OnlyFans reported a 75 percent increase in signups, with 150,000 new users creating accounts daily.” - @clairecdowns https://www.elle.com/... Elle / @ellemagazine : “What Caroline Calloway and other celebrity drop-ins to OnlyFans fail to realize is that sex work is actual, serious labor, not a bandwagon to hop on.” @clairecdowns https://www.elle.com/... Katy Kelleher / @katykelleher : Ah! A good piece about why only fans is good (and why a certain influencer is... kind of an asshole) https://www.elle.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
OnlyFans's April signup surge lands at the exact moment celebrities like Ansel Elgort, Blac Chyna, and Caroline Calloway are opening accounts, turning a platform built by and for adult performers into a general-purpose creator subscription service. Commentators including Taylor Lorenz argue the celebrity wave normalizes the site while erasing the labor behind it — the same displacement professional sex workers describe days later in Rolling Stone.
The arc runs through the rest of 2020: performers of every size migrate toward intimate direct-pay services per The Ringer, and by December the company reports $2B+ in sales and 1M+ paid creators. But the growth strategy carries legal weight — the NYT profile notes the deliberate absence of search and tags minimizes liability under SESTA/FOSTA, the same law sex workers later blame for Meta's harsher Instagram moderation.
First-order effects
- Professional sex workers on OnlyFaces face immediate competition from mainstream celebrities and influencers with pre-built audiences, a dynamic they say is pushing them out just as their industry locks down during the pandemic.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent direct-monetization services like ManyVids and Snapchat absorb performers fleeing OnlyFans's celebrity tilt, fragmenting the market into intimacy-first niches rather than one dominant platform.
Third-order effects
- As subscriber platforms scale past adult-industry origins, Section 230-adjacent laws like SESTA/FOSTA push operators toward design choices — no search, no tags — that trade discoverability for liability cover, reshaping how all creator-economy platforms govern content.
The trend: Direct-to-fan subscription platforms are absorbing mainstream celebrity creators faster than they can protect the professional adult performers who built them, making moderation-by-design the industry's central governance question.