What do young creators do for a living? Different jobs, sex working too
Showing off online for money can help pay the rent and be a political act. They don’t have clients, but a lot of fans
Bella Thorne and the $2 million OnlyFans debut
On August 19, 2020, Bella Thorne joined OnlyFans. In 24 hours she made $1 million. Within a week, $2 million — part of it from subscribers who paid $200 for a photo advertised as nude. It was Thorne in lingerie. Refund requests came in numbers large enough to force a company response: pay-per-view content capped at $50, tips capped at $100, creator payouts pushed from a seven-day cycle to thirty days.
OnlyFans said the changes had nothing to do with any single creator. Sex workers on the platform didn’t buy it. Creator Erika Heidewald did the math on Twitter: “That’s what’s happening to 450,000 content creators… People have bills to pay. Kids to feed… This is REAL HARM.”
Tim Stokely, Leonid Radvinsky and who controls OnlyFans now
Tim Stokely founded OnlyFans in 2016 on a £10,000 loan from his father. He kept 80 percent of every transaction with creators, 20 percent with the platform. In 2018 he sold 75 percent of the company to Leonid Radvinsky, owner of the adult streaming site MyFreeCams, for $30 million. Radvinsky died of cancer in March 2026. Control of the platform now sits with his widow, Yekaterina Chudnovsky, a corporate attorney, through the family trust holding his shares. Talks to sell the company to Architect Capital have valued it between $3.5 and $5.5 billion — down from an $8 billion asking price Radvinsky set weeks before his death.
OnlyFans by the numbers — creators, fans, and earnings
Registered accounts grew from 13.5 million in 2019 to over 377 million by 2024. Fans spent $7.22 billion on the platform in 2024 alone. None of that growth reaches creators evenly. The average creator earns $131 a month. The top 1 percent earn about $49,000 a year; the top 0.1 percent earn roughly fifteen times that. There are now 82 fans for every creator on the site.
How celebrity headlines pull income away from sex workers
A 2022 interview study of 22 U.S. creators found Thorne’s headline pulled people onto the platform directly: “She’s already fairly famous, but then she did one day of OnlyFans and she made one million dollars… that was pretty persuasive,” one creator said. Another: “I was swayed to do it after the Bella Thorne incident.”
That’s the mechanism sex workers point to. A celebrity headline draws new accounts to a platform with a fixed subscriber base, and each new account competing for the same audience pulls income from people already earning a living there. Abby, 21, a sex worker on OnlyFans, said her subscriptions drop “every time a new celebrity joins… pushing her and other existing creators down in the pecking order.”
Why sex workers move online — safety, control, and stigma
Sex workers turn to the industry mostly out of necessity. Low-income Black women make up most prostitution arrests in the U.S. In 2013, Black women were 66 percent of prostitution arrests in San Francisco while making up 6 percent of the city’s female population. A review of 28 studies put sex workers’ lifetime odds of experiencing sexual violence at 45 to 75 percent.
Moving online changes the calculation. No physical contact with clients. Control over hours, pricing, content. No rating system to manage, unlike Uber or DoorDash — creators can block a subscriber outright. “It allowed for me to establish my boundaries better,” one creator said, comparing OnlyFans to her old customer-service job, “unlike… where I can’t talk back, I can’t cut out a customer because it’s up to the manager.” For seven of the study’s 22 participants, OnlyFans was their primary income.
“Get out”: sex workers respond to Bella Thorne
Thorne’s entry point was different. She is not a sex worker. She is a former Disney Channel star with 6.6 million Twitter followers and 24 million on Instagram, and she framed the account as activism: “remove the stigma behind sex [and] sex work,” she wrote. Sex workers on the platform read it differently. “We don’t want people who are not sex workers telling our stories,” one wrote, “because you believed the stereotype about us all being scammers and followed suit, which resulted in a loss of income for everyone on the platform. Get out.” Cosplayer Stephanie Michelle told BBC News: “Bella Thorne has no right to speak for us and could never know the challenges we face every day.”
Blac Chyna, Cardi B, Iggy Azalea — celebrities cashing in on OnlyFans
Thorne isn’t alone, and the roster keeps growing. Blac Chyna, a former stripper turned reality star, now tops the platform’s earners at $20 million a month, largely from non-nude content: $950 FaceTime calls, a weekly foot-fetish video series. Cardi B earns $9.5 million a month, promoting music and personal-life content at $4.99 a subscription. Iggy Azalea now earns $9.2 million a month — after tweeting in 2021 that she’d “NEVER, EVVVER join” because it would “fuck up the bag for ppl on there who really bout that life.” She joined in January 2023. One user reposted her old tweet with the words “remember when.” Another wrote she was “simply using only fans to further build her pockets, which only bothers me… because it was a platform for SWs who may not have had another source of income.”
The 2021 explicit-content ban and reversal
In August 2021, OnlyFans announced it would ban sexually explicit content, a decision it said came from Mastercard’s new rules for adult merchants. Creators and subscribers revolted, and the company reversed the policy within a week. The reversal didn’t resolve the leverage behind it: card networks and the estate now running the company, not creators, still hold a controlling interest in what the platform allows.
Anna Malygon — from OnlyFans to Paris Fashion Week
The traffic doesn’t move only from fame into OnlyFans. It moves the other way too. Ukrainian creator Anna Malygon skipped modeling agencies and talent handlers and built her following directly, on TikTok and OnlyFans, through a strategy she names outright: “I realized that most controversial videos get the most engagement and views… I kind of gained all my views on hate and controversy.” By late 2025, she was walking the runway for Vetements at Paris Fashion Week and appearing in print for Gucci and Versace.
Thorne borrowed sex work’s terrain to expand a following she already had. Malygon reversed the transaction. The audience she built through OnlyFans became the credential that got her past the agencies that once decided who reached that runway.
A platform that rewards stars, not sex workers
What OnlyFans accomplished, in the end, is a split in whose sex work gets rewarded. A star can walk on and off the platform and into Paris Fashion Week on the strength of what she built there. A working sex worker, one of 4.6 million on the platform earning a median $131 a month, gets neither. “OnlyFans destigmatized the hot chick who wants to sell some nudes,” one creator said. “It’s ‘you go girl, make your money.’ But those of us who are actually sex workers are still thought of as filthy whores.”
OnlyFans is a subscription platform based in London, operated by Fenix International Limited. Tim Stokely founded it in 2016. Yekaterina Chudnovsky now controls the company, following the death of majority owner Leonid Radvinsky in March 2026. The platform processed 7.22 billion dollars in gross fan transactions in fiscal 2024, across 377.5 million registered accounts and 4.63 million active creators.
