OnlyFans, and the media's parasociality vortex

Sophie Rain made $43m on OnlyFans last year – how?

Are you tempted to buy Old Spice deodorant based on the rippling torso of the man in the adverts? Did you snarf Flake after Flake in the 1990s because of some woman in a bathtub? Did you get hooked on Lucky Strikes in the 50s based on saucy imagery of sailors asking women, clad in immodest bathing suits, whether they “inhale”? If so, you might be a victim of one of the oldest maxims in the advertising industry: sex sells.

And sex does sell. Just as the tobacco industry got the nation hooked on a vague fellatory promise, so too is sex changing the digital media landscape of the 2020s. And nobody typifies that more, right now, that a 20-year-old Floridian called Sophie Rain.

This week, Rain posted on Elon Musk’s X that she had made $43,477,695.01 in the last year on a platform called OnlyFans, which is predominantly used by NSFW content creators. Having made a name for herself on sites like Instagram and TikTok, and collaborating with rapper NLE Choppa (just writing this paragraph is making me feel approximately 1,000 years old), Rain launched an OnlyFans where she posts softcore pornographic content, and, apparently, her fans eat it up.

Now, I treat these figures with a degree of scepticism. Rain has posted a series of further screenshots apparently showing payout data from her OnlyFans page which appear to corroborate the $43m figure. But whether these are doctored or not remains to be seen. What’s clear is that, at the very least, the figure is plausible. It is plausible that a 20-year-old social media influencer could earn more than a Premier League footballer, simply by uploading photographs of herself in varying states of undress. And, for the sake of this piece, imagine it is true – and imagine that it’s not even uncommon. Imagine that there are thousands of women now making seven-figure incomes from OnlyFans. What could this tell us about the landscape of the internet and its increasingly fraught relationship with value?

Firstly, you have to understand the structure of an OnlyFans page. Most have a hard paywall set at somewhere within the margin of error of $10. This is a low-barrier to entry: most of Rain’s fans can afford to spend $10-a-month to enter the Shangri-La of exclusive content. But the genius of OnlyFans, as a model, compared to say Netflix or Spotify, is that this isn’t where the true revenue extraction lies. Those sites are like Chinatown buffets, where a fixed fee gets you access to all the dim sum and noodles you can eat, whereas OnlyFans operates like a private members club. $10 to get through the door, $10 to show your status. And then you start spending the real money.

Value is predominantly extracted through a mechanism called Pay Per View content (PPVs). Imagine that Rain’s page only has a few bikini pictures after the paywall (I don’t actually know; I’m not a subscriber, I promise!), maybe the occasional live video where she teases new, exclusive content. Then every day, she’ll launch new PPVs showing content that is sold to the gentlemen of the private members club, but is, definitionally, too premium for open access. And by premium we, here, mean: naked. So, if you want to see Rain naked, you have to pay an extra price, on top of your subscription, and that price could be anything. $20, $50, $100 or more. Content creators are routinely able to sell sets of pictures – still images, kids – for in excess of $100.

Ok, ok, brilliant. Porn makes money, well done Nick. And while $43m is a hell of a lot of money for a single creator, these sort of figures have existed in porn before. Estimates from the past decade have put the global value of the porn industry at anything from $97bn to a, more realistic, $15bn. But even that lower end figure is still staggering: the global box office for movies (without unsimulated sex, largely) in 2023 was $40bn. It’s not implausible that the porn industry is more valuable than Hollywood. So what makes OnlyFans different, and interesting, from a digital media perspective?

I don’t want to do too much of a psychic evaluation of male heterosexuality, but something strange is happening here. I don’t know this for sure – and please do write in, perverts – but I don’t think Rain does full frontal nudity. She certainly doesn’t do porn, in the conventional sense. Instead, she basically just posts photos of her boobs. Over and over and over. And she’s not alone there, in fact there are many creators who are a lot more chaste. Former Dr Phil star turned teenage rapper Bhad Bhabie has earned a rumoured $59m on the platform since 2021, despite never appearing naked. What exactly her subscribers are paying for, in that instance, eludes me. But it’s the same question that could logically be posed of Rain’s fans too: what do you want in return for your money?

Look, the appetite of men to see fresh, exciting angles of the same pair of breasts shouldn’t be underestimated. All the same, a perfunctory Google search would reveal, to them, that most of these images have been leaked out of OnlyFans’ extremely porous paywall. It is, after all, a platform extremely vulnerable to piracy – or so you’d think. And yet, this year, Rain has made $43m from selling pictures which will – within 24 hours – be available freely, all over the internet. And so, once again, the question must be: why are these men paying for this? Why are they giving her money when they don’t need to? And the answer is a phenomenon known as parasociality.

A parasocial relationship is, fundamentally, one-sided. It’s a term that has emerged, in the internet era, largely to describe the interactions between YouTubers and their fans. The idea is that these YouTubers invited a form of intimacy: they showed them inside their houses, made them privy to their relationship struggles, at all times sold a form of authenticity. And, in return, their viewers felt an investment in their lives. They felt like they were part of the family, part of the friendship group, part of the squad (note how many of these digital creators use some variant of ‘team’ to describe their broader fanbase). And so it was a one-sided relationship, yes, but one that was born out of invitation. Come into my home, these creators seemed to say, and feast of my domestic bliss.

But really, parasociality goes far beyond YouTubers. Think about the number of men who are obsessed by particular athletes (there’s a good line in a new Sabrina Carpenter song where she says “I swear I'm movin' on/ With your favourite athlete/ Shoot his shot every night”, which exposes the masculine sensitivity around hero worship, and also makes me wonder how my partner would go about trying to shag Mark Noble). That relationship, between bloke and sports star, is parasocial. Fans of Cristiano Ronaldo will post starry-eyed workout videos, or Saudi propaganda, that has nothing to do with his prowess on the field. In point of fact, it’s a trend that has been developing, exacerbated by the delocalisation processes of the internet. Kids are no longer fans of football teams, they’re fans of football players. “Are you City or United?” has been replaced by “are you Haaland or Hojlund?”

And parasociality is the reason why so many grown men are giving money to Sophie Rain, notionally to see her breasts (over and over and over again). It is because the transaction creates a relationship. A tenuous, vapid, mercenary relationship, but a relationship all the same. Look: of course, it’s important that she’s young and pretty and willing to strip off. That’s the idea she’s selling. But exploiting that ‘idea’ requires the boring necessity of ‘content creation’, and assuming that she’s not willing to consistently escalate (as some creators have done, by evolving from innuendo to nudity and then, ultimately, to porn) she has to foment an illogical response in her subscribers. She has to defy gravity (haha, this newsletter is sneakily sponsored by Wicked, as everything is this winter).

So, I’m Joe Normal, a 40-year-old accountant from Medianville in Modal County. I spend $150 a month on content from this American-Filipina model because it’s about the most I can a) comfortably afford, and b) hide from my wife. I do it because I have something slightly broken in my brain which makes me feel like treating this girl, who I can never truly interact with, shows that my life has value. It makes me feel successful. It makes me feel like I am taking the road I didn’t take, back when the road forked many years ago. It is a time machine. She is my hypothetical past wife; I am her hypothetical future father. Paging Dr Freud. Etc.

This ascribing of illogical value is kind of anathema to 20^th century capitalism, but it’s something we’re seeing more of amongst Generation Z and young millennials. Take, for example, a free-to-play video game like Fortnite, which costs nothing to download but makes huge profits off the back of selling cosmetic upgrades to your character. These skins are designed to have no competitive advantage but instead are an opportunity to flex: they allow you to support other IP within the game, to show off how long you’ve been playing, or to gas up your disposable income levels (even if you’re disposing of it pretty sillily). Indeed, the video game community is huge on this irrational ascription of value: Twitch, the main streaming site for video gameplay, is based on a model of tipped tiers which represent status and parasociality, first and foremost, and utility very much secondly.

The problem is that this mechanic is financially indistinguishable from value-for-commodity subscriptions, like Netflix or Spotify, on the one hand, and mortgages, electricity, TV licenses on the other. I’ve written in the past about how the insidious rise and rise of subscriptions is unsustainable – indeed, it’s the most-read thing I’ve ever written – because functions that were previously bundled are now being atomised. In order to watch every Emmy-nominated TV show in 2024, for example, you have to maintain a dozen or so subscriptions. I wrote that piece over a year ago and it’s way more true today, thanks to what has happened to journalism in the meantime. Now, every other journalist has a small Substack, often on top of a full-time job in the media (much to the chagrin of low-income Substackers). How are we expecting consumers to keep paying even small amounts for access to all this content?

The effect is that small content creators are being squeezed, at the bottom. And I don’t doubt this is true of OnlyFans as well as Substack. There is a natural temptation to focus on people like Sophie Rain who glamorise the process and post their voluminous receipts. There are also, undoubtedly, a lot of creators on the platform who are not making ends meet, and who have put future careers, and personal relationships, potentially at risk in order to create this sort of content. (There are also a lot of women who are being exploited by third-party promoters, but that’s another story).

Last week, Kate Nash, the singer and actress, launched an OnlyFans page where she will be posting photographs of her bum, apparently. She was all over the BBC, Sky, the newspapers, talking about how she was using it to raise money for her next tour. Because music, and touring music, is failing, while OnlyFans is thriving. And there are enough people who’ll pay £10 a month for some images of Kate Nash’s arse to rectify this imbalance. But the situation ought to worry us. Firstly, it shows a growing awareness of how easy it is to exploit this parasocial relationship when it comes to NSFW content. Secondly, it must frustrate smaller content creators that celebrities like Nash (and Lily Allen) will jump into this space, semi-seriously, with little to lose and much to gain, and divert potential funds from actual sex workers. And thirdly, it does, of course, say something completely terrifying about the state of the arts.

The question is whether the market on OnlyFans operates like a rational consumer market, where people make trade-offs and set limited budgets (“If we have a leg of lamb on Sunday, we should avoid pricey red meat until the Thursday after,” etc) or whether it operates like the gambling industry. The gambling industry has near impunity to encourage spending, which is particularly crazy given that it’s a) extremely addictive, and b) that the addiction is, fundamentally, to spending money. Sex and porn are also addictive, and plenty of people have been bankrupted by visiting sex workers or taking out premium subscriptions. I don’t doubt many men have racked up huge credit card debt in an attempt to be a ‘sugar daddy’. It is not an area that tends to encourage fiscal responsibility.

And so, I suspect that OnlyFans will continue to post great returns for content creators, even while other platforms, more subject to economic realities, cool. The combination of parasociality and addiction is financially groundbreaking – and extremely dangerous.

But it’s beginning to infect all of the media. We can see this in the way that Elon Musk has repositioned X. He has a clear prerogative – to increase the amount of time that users spend on his platform – and that has meant that he is encouraging native creation. This is fundamentally at odds with the way that traditional media currently uses social media, but it is a source of encouragement to individuals who might seek to create this parasocial relationship. In effect, he is trying to TikTokify journalism: make it more personality driven, more independent, more creator powered. The financial rewards on this new X are heavily predicated on engagement metrics – views, reports, likes – and so even though, at present, it is X who are disbursing the cold hard cash, it is X users who have the power over its allocation.

One of the podcasts I make is a show which we record in a pub in west London. I have been, at times, keen to take the podcast out of the pub and start recording in a proper studio, where engineering would be much easier. And yet our listeners love the pub. They love to think that they are part of the group, sitting down for a pint and a Scotch egg. Moving it out of the pub would erode that. But what I’ve created there, inadvertently, is another form of parasociality. Productive parasociality, but parasociality all the same. I don’t doubt that there are plenty of listeners who would consider the hosts of that show to feel like ‘friends’ and I don’t doubt that many would reach into their pockets if we asked them to donate £5, £10, £20 to the show’s running costs. This is, after all, what a good media product should seek to achieve: a sense of community, of understanding, of engagement.

But it still galls to see how effectively OnlyFans models are able to extract revenue, while most of the, serious, media is still struggling at the very same task. Is the answer to conflate the two and have Megan Barton-Hanson present live bulletins from Gaza or send Belle Delphine to cover the Trump inauguration? That sounds like a joke, but there’s something plausible in there – many of these creators would be well served by trying to build their brand out a bit, beyond busts. It would certainly be to the advantage of the media, who have known full well for many years that sex, after all, sells.

More realistically, the impact of the continued expansion of these types of subscriptions will be on the other type of subscriptions. I wrote previously that it would be good to see places like Substack introduce subscription bundling, so that I might pay a slimmed down fee for, say, 5 writers working in tandem, rather than 5 separate subscriptions. But the reality might be more like OnlyFans. Amazon Prime already does it, to an extent, luring subscribers through the paywall with a set fee and a large library, and then tempting them to pay more for individual titles that aren’t included. Netflix could well move to something like that – after all, plenty of people could be induced, by Sabrina Carpenter, to pay an extra £5 for A Very Nonsense Christmas when it launches this week.

Soft-paywalling and PPV (pay per visit, instead of view) wouldn’t change the industry as radically as giving Bonnie Blue a Pulitzer, but it might be a start. Newsrooms have been experimenting with parasociality for years, which is why podcasts have become such a big part of the mainstream current affairs offering despite the fact they often don’t cover their costs. They want audiences to become familiar with their journalists: how they look, what they sound like, how they think about the world. But that’s a dangerous game, because, right now, many of those journalists have decided that they’re better off striking out on their own. On Substack, on X, and, perhaps, on OnlyFans.

Because, ultimately, parasociality is a trap. A trap for sucker audiences, sure, but also for participants. $43m is a lot for a young woman to earn, but what has she exchanged? Privacy, for sure. Personal security, likely. And this is the absolute blockbuster end. At the other end of the spectrum, there are doubtless people excited to be drawing the same salary as Joe Normal, accountant, in exchange for giving up these same fundamental stabilities. It’s a situation that ought to challenge us as consumers, and the government, as regulators.

Right now, I think a good test of the strength of a media business is to ask: how parasocial is its relationship with its readers/listeners/viewers? Are the audience there for the brand or the personality? Would they migrate if anyone left? Or is there a sufficient distance between creator and consumer that they could retire to a farm in upstate New York, and never be heard of again? Distance has to be retained, even if it feels like revenue is being forgone.

“Sex sells,” but it also plays on the irrational part of the human brain. I don’t doubt that if Sophie Rain were to sign up to SuperMegaCorp and start producing content for them, they couldn’t generate anything like $43m in subscriber revenue. The subscription economy is built on foundations of perceived authenticity, where people are encouraged to spend their money far less rationally than, say, buying a $5 newspaper. Which is why Sophie Rain’s boobs have proved more profitable than a pantheon of impeccably dressed and mannered columnists. Maybe we’ll see her at Davos next year.

Follow me on Bluesky, if you’re that way inclined, or TikTok, if that’s your poison (my OnlyFans is tbc).