key: cord-0647429-mqn97ts6
authors: Hamilton, Vaughn; Soneji, Ananta; McDonald, Allison; Redmiles, Elissa
title: "Nudes? Shouldn't I charge for these?": Exploring What Motivates Content Creation on OnlyFans
date: 2022-05-20
journal: nan
DOI: nan
sha: 8baa76347a986b92151735b93ae77ca38f6b94ef
doc_id: 647429
cord_uid: mqn97ts6

Social media platforms are increasingly considering models to incentivize creators to publish high quality content on their platforms. As a result, social media content creation has transformed into a form of gig work for some creators. In order to better design social media platforms to support this labor, we need to understand professional creators' motivations. In this work, we present a qualitative interview study of the motivations of $22$ U.S. OnlyFans creators. OnlyFans is a subscription-based social media platform that is unique in that it is primarily associated with sexual content (although it is not marketed as such) and thus creators are positioned at the intersection of professional content creation and sex work, exposing them to a unique set of potential challenges. Beyond the typical motivations for pursuing other forms of gig work (e.g., flexibility, autonomy) our findings highlight three key factors explaining the rapid growth of OnlyFans despite the potential stigma of sexual content creation: (1) societal visibility and mainstream acceptance of OnlyFans, created through a combination of celebrity hype and the design of the platform itself; (2) platform design: affordances for boundary setting with clients, privacy from the public, and content archives, which together create a labor environment participants viewed as better than other forms of gig work, a natural avenue for sexual expression, and enabling monetization of existing content, audiences, and skills; and (3) the pandemic, which led to both high demand for immediate income while waiting for -- or after running out of -- unemployment benefits, and increased free time, which increased general demand for pornographic content.

the content of these creators. OnlyFans creators can receive funds from their fans via monthly subscription fees, tips, paid private messages, and the pay-per-view feature [13, 7, 32] .

OnlyFans is unique from its predecessors in that while the platform advertises that it hosts a wide variety of content, it is primarily associated with adult content (i.e., sexual photos and videos that are protected by a paywall), rather than game streaming or artistic creation [78] . Comparative to other social media platforms (e.g., Twitch, YouTube, Patreon, Facebook), OnlyFans' terms of service are relaxed for adult content creation [13, 32] . Thus, OnlyFans is uniquely positioned between the spaces of digital sex work and subscription-based social media. Further, OnlyFans experienced rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic: revenue grew by over 500% [19] and is now estimated to equal that of Twitch, despite having fewer subscribers. 1 While prior work has examined what motivates professional creators on other social media platforms, less is known about what motivates people to create content on OnlyFans. OnlyFans creators traverse the intersection of professional content creation-a growing form of gig work-and sex work. As a result, especially for those who were not previously working in the sex industry, joining OnlyFans to create sexual content can create unique risks, including anti-sex-work stigma, even by proximity. Our work aims to understand what motivated people, especially those who had never worked in the sex industry, to create content on OnlyFans and why they chose OnlyFans over other labor options.

We find that celebrity hype around OnlyFans created by popular culture news such as Beyoncé mentioning the platform in her 2020 "Savage" Remix and creator Bella Thorne making $1 million in her first day on the platform [66] , led the "cultural assimilation" of the platform, as one participant described it. This assimilation reduced the stigma of joining a platform associated with adult content, and created significant interest among potential creators about how much money could be made. Further, the very design of the platform itself-which requires creators to advertise on mainstream social media platforms to drive traffic because there is no search or opportunity for creator discovery directly through OnlyFans-drastically raised the visibility of the platform, drawing in new creators. Beyond the hype and reduced stigma created by celebrity notoriety and the carefully curated visibility of the platform, creators were also motivated to join the platform by typical gig work motivations (e.g., money, flexibility, accessibility). However, in many cases our participants considered creating on OnlyFans preferable to other gig work because of the platform's affordances: a lack of rating of creators, ease of blocking harassing customers, and autonomy over what content to create and how to construct their business model. Other factors that motivated creators were a desire to engage in sexual expression, the usability of the platform for curating their existing (non-commercial) sexual content, and the opportunity to leverage existing digital audiences or skills from other recreation or labor (e.g., cosplay, waitressing) in which they were already engaged. Finally, the pandemic resulted in both increased client-side demand for digital entertainment and increased creator-side need for paid work due to job loss. We highlight how our participants intersect and diverge from other workers in the spaces of professional content creation, the gig economy, and sex work. Interestingly, we find that our participants are proximal to prior sociological work on other kinds of sex work, whilst still sharing many challenges of gig and professional content creation work.

Here, we review prior literature on people's motivations to create digital content and to engage in gig work, as well as on the role of technology in sex work.

Prior work has explored people's motivations to recreationally and professionally create digital content. Prior work finds that recreational creators have a variety of motivations, including a desire for self-expression, recognition, to promote ideas, to help or inspire others and/or to build community [14, 21, 56, 50, 54, 47, 43, 75, 55, 80] . Creators may become professional creators -that is, monetize their creation, by happenstance or more intentionally, driven by entrepreneurial spirit, a desire to generate their own "media brands", to influence others, or to become famous [28, 51, 26, 23, 55] .

In contrast to platforms like YouTube, creators on OnlyFans do not have the affordances to attract fans from the platform itself [79, 65] . In order to succeed, creators must promote themselves and their content on other social media platforms [12] . Hence, OnlyFans creators fall in the category of influencers (internet micro-celebrities) since they manage and engage with relatively large followings on social media platforms for self-branding [41, 79] . In this work, we explore how OnlyFans creators leverage self-branding while still producing content on the platform and how their motivations for creation intersect with and diverge from those of other content creators.

The "gig economy" is defined as a labor market where independent contracting happens through, via, and on digital platforms [83] . A digital gig economy platform is one that offers tools to bring together the supply and demand for labor [30] . Gig work can consist of both in-person and remote work such as food delivery, ride-sharing, housekeeping, freelancing, and crowdwork [82, 39, 29] . The work performed on gig economy platforms is non-permanent, of variable hours, and with little job security [83] . Moreover, gig workers are paid on a per-job basis and prior work suggests that gig economy platforms lack potential for career development [60] .

Several studies have analyzed the factors that influence the growing adoption of gig economy platforms, finding that this work offers greater autonomy and flexibility to clients and workers compared to traditional formal labour [83, 82, 29, 46] . Further, gig workers may be able to access more clients and thus greater income through platforms that connect them with clients from diverse industries and, in some cases, allow them to take on increasingly complex tasks as they gain more experience [82, 29] . Prior work finds differences in the motivations of part-vs. full-time workers, such as ride-hailing drivers: Rosenblat found that part-time ridehail drivers are mostly motivated by the flexibility of work offered by the platforms, whereas full-time drivers were motivated by having similar previous experience or lack of other job opportunities [62] .

While gig economy platforms therefore offer some preferential working conditions over fixed labour jobs, prior work also finds that gig workers suffer from low pay, crowded marketplaces, discrimination, employment insecurity, social isolation, overwork, financial precarity, and stressful and dangerous working conditions [30, 29, 63, 24, 69, 72] . Gig workers do not enjoy the benefits and protections provided by labor and employment laws as well as other benefits such as paid sick leave, health insurance and pensions [24, 25] .

Recent work has studied the impact of COVID-19 on the gig economy, finding increases in opportunities for fullydigital gig work, decreases in the number of in-person gig workers, and changes on the part of in-person gig work platforms, including both positive (employment benefits, including limited paid sick leave) and negative changes (restricting the flexibility and freedom of workers) [76, 17, 40, 1] .

OnlyFans creators are independent contractors and earn their money through the platform's business model of subscription and tips [65] , much like other gig economy workers. In this work, we highlight similarities and differences between the motivations of those joining more typically studied gig work platforms such as those aforementioned and OnlyFans creators. Further, many of our participants had previously participated in other forms of gig work prior to joining OnlyFans and we report on their perspectives on the differences and similarities in their labor experiences.

OnlyFans creators sit at the intersection of professional content creation (a form of gig work) and sex work. Prior work finds that sex workers -those who receive money or goods in exchange for sexual services or erotic performances [53] -are increasingly using digital platforms for various business development purposes such as advertising, payment processing, service provision, vetting, client management, and brand development [67, 18, 38, 3, 52] . Furthermore, prior work suggests that sex workers build communities online for activism, networking, peer-support, and sharing health and safety information [67, 3, 6, 52, 2, 73] . Most recently, Uttaparong et al. show how OnlyFans creators create community in this way [77] .

Digitally-mediated sex work brings opportunities such as improved working conditions and increased autonomy for sex workers [67] but has its own challenges [37] due to stigma, censorship, and surveillance [3, 10, 11] . Platforms often deplatform sex workers [3, 10] while others take away peer-support from sex workers by censoring conversations around sex work and even sex education [2] . Blunt et al. discuss how online sex-work platforms constantly update their algorithms and terms of services to sanitize online space, impacting sexual expression while simultaneously monetizing the data and content of online sex workers [9] .

Much of the prior work in this space has focused on the provision, benefits, and challenges of digitally-mediated sex work. In this work, we build on existing knowledge by exploring the motivations of adults to create and monetize adult content as a form of gig work on a relatively mainstream subscription-based social media platform: OnlyFans.

To understand what motivates people to publish content on OnlyFans, a subscription-based social media platform, we conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with current and past OnlyFans creators in the United States during September and October 2021.

We sought to recruit a broad range of U.S.-based content creators on OnlyFans.

We intentionally avoided references to sexual content in our recruitment materials (see https://osf.io/ws54t/?view_only=3f553c40cfd940728f8e6329cd9a2795 for anonymized recruitment graphic) and interview protocols, in order to be inclusive of participants making any type of content. Despite this, all of our participants did create sexual content. We recruited our participants online by posting on social media, sending out recruitment flyers to the researchers' contacts to share in their networks [8] , and recruited in-person by posting flyers around several university campuses and cities (at coffee shops and grocery stores) in different parts of the U.S.

The recruitment materials linked to a Qualtrics screening survey. To ensure diversity, we intentionally added maximum quotas for combinations of race, gender and age to the sign-up process in Qualtrics to ensure a diversity of participant demographics. We also used the survey to screen out those who had previously created content on OnlyFans but had stopped creating such content more than 18 months ago (as these creators would be less familiar with the current affordances of the platform), and those who had previously engaged in sex work, as our focus was on creators who were new to sex industry work (if that was the type of content they were creating on OnlyFans). Qualified participants were redirected from the screening survey to anonymously self-schedule for an interview using a Calendly link.

Participant Demographics. All of our participants were 18 years old or older, with median age of 29.5 years (σ = 7.01). Our participants self reported their genders as: woman (12), man (3), non-binary (8) , and three participants self-described as trans. 2 Participants who reported their race/ethnicity reported as: Black (3), Asian (2), Asian and white (1), Hispanic and white (2), and white alone (11) .

Three of our participants described during the interview that they had participated in some kind of sex work prior: we had attempted to only interview those without such experience but can account for this by understanding that these participants could have either mis-read the screening survey, or not identified their types of work (stripping, intermittent phone sex, professional BDSM work) as sex work for the purposes of the study.

Our participants had spent a median of 15.5 months using OnlyFans; three of our participants had stopped using OnlyFans less than 6 months prior to the interview. Our participants reflect a wide range of income and subscriber numbers: small creators and creators with enormous reach. The minimum reported income was $135 and the maximum $332, 000 with a median of $1, 237.84 (σ = $83, 974.24). The minimum number of subscribers reported was 10 and the maximum 13, 000 with a median of 60 (σ = 4, 143.13). For seven of our participants, OnlyFans was their primary source of income.

Using semi-structured interviews [5] , we sought to understand and investigate why people create and publish content on OnlyFans. Interviewers first explained the goals of the study and answered any questions that the participants had before asking to record the interview. At the start of the interview, participants verbally gave their consent to be interviewed and recorded and interviewers verified the screening survey information that was filled out by the participants. Participants were then asked background questions to understand the kind of work they did before joining OnlyFans. We then asked questions related to their experiences in those prior jobs and asked our participants to make comparisons with their experiences on OnlyFans (e.g., how do you find OnlyFans different or similar to these prior/current experiences?). We asked our participants questions about their initial exposure to OnlyFans and their motivations to start creating, publishing, and promoting content. The interview discussed what kinds of content the creators were making on OnlyFans, and the kinds of skills or interests they needed to do this work. Finally, we asked our participants platform-related questions, which are out of scope for this paper. Participants were also invited to not answer any question that they did not want to answer. The relevant interview questions can be found at https://osf.io/ws54t/?view_only=3f553c40cfd940728f8e6329cd9a2795.

All the interviews were conducted in English via chat, voice, or video. Each interview lasted between 37 and 96 minutes, with an average interview length of 60.5 minutes. Participants were compensated $50 via Amazon gift card or PayPal. All the interviews were then transcribed and any incidental identifying information was removed.

We analyzed the interview data using an iterative open-coding process [20] . One author randomly selected five interview transcripts to identify common themes and create a thematic framework for the interview data. After creating the codebook, two of the authors coded another five transcripts. The coders achieved a Cohen Kappa of 0.75, which is considered a substantial inter-coder reliability score [44] . Subsequently, both the coders resolved any minor disagreements and refined the codebook, which was then used by one of the authors to code all the remaining transcripts. Given the qualitative nature of our results we report our findings primarily qualitatively, sparingly providing counts of overall themes (i.e., how many participants reported each motivation) only to highlight the prevalence of patterns in the interview data.

Our work was approved by our institution's ethics review board. Since our participants are undertaking stigmatized work, we took extensive measures to protect participant data, anonymity, and privacy at every stage. Some examples include using platforms that are end-to-end encrypted for conducting virtual interviews (e.g., paid Webex), offering instructions on how to create an encrypted (ProtonMail) email address to organize an interview and receive reminders, and using a scheduling system (Calendly) that did not require personal information such as name from participants for scheduling. We offered participants multiple options for compensation: anonymous Amazon gift cards or PayPal payments (which could be sent to an encrypted email address they had created using our instructions). We took great care to protect the identities of participants and any unintended identifying information has been removed. Further, in alignment with research justice principles, we employed a sex worker to transcribe the interviews and will send a copy of published research using this data to those participants who requested it [49] .

Our hope for the positive impacts of this work is that adult content creators are taken seriously and considered part of the gig economy workforce. There have already been efforts to use research regarding gig workers in attempts to improve their working conditions and regulate employers and platforms in this area to their advantage (see the many papers in the Related Work section for research on gig workers), however the stigma of sex industry work often prevents adult content creators from being included in these efforts, which leaves them behind in terms of workers rights [16] . Sex worker and gig worker rights groups can use our research in conversation with policy makers to improve the working conditions for all content creators. We will provide plain-English, 1-page summaries of the results of this research project to be disseminated widely among the population studied. OnlyFans creators are already in community and overlap with sex worker communities, with whom we already have established relationships. Potential harms from the publication of this work include use of our findings by anti-porn and anti-sex-work lobbying groups to advocate for OnlyFans banning adult content, as there has already been pressure to do [78] .

The researchers are scholars of technology and sex work. We consulted with OnlyFans creators on the research design and interview protocol. However, those creators were not directly involved with the data analysis or writing of this paper. Additionally, there were participants with genders and ethnicities who are not reflected in the research or interview team, notably male and Black creators, since we are white/brown and American/british 3 /Indian.

Our study has several limitations. First, we conducted interviews only in English and only of U.S.-based creators, which limits participation to U.S. English-speakers. Future work should explore the motivations and experiences of OnlyFans creators in other geographies and contexts. Second, while we aimed to recruit only OnlyFans creators who had not done other forms of sex work previously, and used our screening questionnaire to screen for these participants, three of our participants had previously done sex work (see Participant Demographics above). Third, our interviews ask participants about their experiences conducting business in a competitive market. Thus, it is possible participants omitted relevant information about their business strategies.

Overall, we find that our participants were motivated to join OnlyFans due to: 1) the visibility and acceptance of OnlyFans in society, which was created through a combination of celebrity hype, platform design, and peer conversation; 2) the potential earnings on OnlyFans, which they perceived as a (better) alternative to other forms of gig and service work; 3) a desire to engage in digital sexual expression; 4) already having existing content, audiences or skills that allowed them to quickly build a profitable OnlyFans page; and 5) pandemic factors such as increased free time, increased safety concerns about other forms of gig work, and loss of other forms of income due to economic impacts.

OnlyFans gained significant visibility and mainstream acceptance, particularly starting in 2020. This came as a result of: 1) celebrity participation and conversation about OnlyFans, 2) peer conversation about the platform as a result of reduced stigma from (1), and 3) high visibility of the platform from both (1), (2) and OnlyFans' distinct design: it offers very limited creator discovery on the platform, pushing creators to promote their content and the platform itself across mainstream social media platforms.

All 22 participants discussed this visibility or acceptance in some way. Our participants felt comfortable becoming OnlyFans content creators as a result of the societal pervasiveness of OnlyFans combined with broad participation from celebrities and peers, which decreased the stigma of creating on OnlyFans. For example, P11 explained that COVID-19 and the positioning of OnlyFans as "part of the gig economy" made people more comfortable with consuming and creating adult content through the platform and thus, "every day regular people are associated with" OnlyFans, which made it feel like the platform had a "personalized feeling to it of like this isn't for porn, this is [a platform] for someone I just happen to know [to create adult content]." As a result, P11 explained, there is "less of a whorephobic 4 stigma" around creating content on OnlyFans. As a result of the growth of OnlyFans and lessened stigma around the platform, P5 remarked that "in the future I think that there will be a lot more acceptance of sex work" in general, not just as part of OnlyFans.

Celebrity Hype. Celebrities announcing on their social media and in the news that they were starting OnlyFans accounts also helped bring attention to the platform. Cardi B joined in August 2020 5 after Beyoncé mentioned the site in a remix in April, causing, according to a spokesperson for OnlyFans, "a 15 percent spike in traffic" in the subsequent 24 hours. 6 It is important to note that clip sites (websites where adult performers can upload video content for clients to purchase) have existed for a long time, as have sites with other features that OnlyFans has, such live streaming. However, OnlyFans' specific brand notoriety was important for our participants: P2 described OnlyFans as "becoming a mainstream term and semi-accepted (more so than other similar sites)" and P8 told us that the mention of OnlyFans by "internet celebrities...was definitely how it caught my attention first." However, it was not simply finding out about OnlyFans through celebrity mentions, but also imagining why celebrities joined the platform that inspired our participants: P8 continued "I thought it was cool, I liked the idea of these mostly women... reforming sexuality in their own way and being able to claim, reclaim something." Several participants were also motivated by the monetary hype created by celebrity earnings on the platform. The high earnings of several specific celebrities were referenced by our participants as a motivating factor to join. P5 discussed Bella Thorne joining OnlyFans, remarking "she's already fairly famous, but then she did one day of OnlyFans and she made one million dollars...that was pretty persuasive." Similarly, P10 "was swayed to do it [OnlyFans] after the Bella Thorne incident."

Our participants also read articles about how non-celebrities had increased their income by changing from regular jobs to OnlyFans work: "there's a nurse that started OnlyFans after the pandemic started and started making more money than being a nurse." (P1). P2 had "seen a couple posts about people being able to buy a house from OF earnings."

Overall, the celebrity allure, with the promise of money was a common theme. P17 explains how these threads combined: "at first I was hearing that it was lucrative...[and then] I kept hearing about [OnlyFans everywhere]... [I] wanted to see what the hype is about." Peer Suggestion. Perhaps as a result of the reduced stigma created by celebrity discussion of and participation in OnlyFans, participants' friends and family also directly discussed OnlyFans with them, either as a conversational topic, or because they were creators themselves. P20 explained that they were motivated to join OnlyFans because a friend told them about it, saying "oh you should probably just start OnlyFans and started sending me [clients] ." Additionally, these current creators could serve as information bridges, helping new creators onboard. For example, P4 said they had "a lot of friends who have been doing OnlyFans" and so they "ended up just talking to them mostly about it." P13 had a similar experience: "I also had a friend who started doing it...so I started talking to her about it a little more and asked her how is it and she had nothing but good things to say so I was like okay I'll try it out." Platform Design. Finally, a large number of our participants described finding out about OnlyFans through other social media sites, where they saw friends or influencers posting about it. P8 describes how ubiquitous mentions of OnlyFans became on mainstream, non-sexual content platforms: they "found out about [OnlyFans] through Twitter" and "had seen a few comments on it and it was trending at one point."

Since OnlyFans does not have internal search functionality nor robust content discovery, creators have no choice but to use external advertising to drive clients to their accounts, in turn exposing the existence of OnlyFans to other potential creators. P1 told us that "on every big tweet that blows up, there's usually someone's OnlyFans invite." Twitter was mentioned by many participants, including P12, who called the phenomenon of becoming aware of OnlyFans "cultural assimilation," adding that "many people who I know and followed on Twitter were talking about and in some cases had OnlyFans accounts."

18 of our participants were motivated to create on OnlyFans for money. While for some participants this was the only reason they created an OnlyFans-as P1 put it "money! Honestly, that's about it"-for others this was just one of multiple reasons for joining the platform as a creator.

Among our participants, some were motivated to join OnlyFans for many of the same reasons as gig workers on other platforms: flexibility and control [82, 83, 29, 61, 46, 34, 58] ; while others perceived OnlyFans as better than other forms of gig work either due to greater flexibility, enjoyment, ease, or income.

Similarities to Other Work. Similar to other gig workers, our participants sought the autonomy to direct their own working hours on OnlyFans. P12, comparing it to other jobs, described it as "one of the better ones that I've had, just in terms of affording me flexibility." P14 summarized it thus: "I can sign in on my own times, my own hours... the fact that I could schedule my own time, I don't have a set time... with OnlyFans I can just show up." This autonomy was even described as pleasurable for some, with P10 explaining: "OnlyFans allows me to keep a schedule that I enjoy." Beyond the flexibility of being able to choose their own hours, there were other kinds of accessibility that participants described. P4, who had multiple diagnoses, had delivered food prior to working on OnlyFans; however: "I can still do OnlyFans even if my legs aren't working...because I can just kind of sit." Neurodivergence was also mentioned by more than one participant as a reason why OnlyFans was a more accessible workplace than regular jobs. For example, P21 explained that "due to the nature of my ADHD, my neurochemistry makes it very hard to maintain schedules, routines, consistency." P16 added "I have a lot of trouble working like regular jobs," describing their neurodivergence as "a bit of a barrier" to other kinds of work. Johnson has documented similar accessibility in digital patronage work for disabled creators on Twitch [35] .

The flexibility to attend to caring responsibilities also made OnlyFans a viable workplace for some participants. Even though P20 had already been working from home, when their mother became ill, they lost that job due to workplace surveillance: "they're watching you, if you leave the computer they know that you left the computer so it was one of those things where I couldn't work and take care of her."

Better than Other Gig Work. Whilst most of our participants did not make the kind of money they described hearing about in the discourse that motivated them to join (see Celebrity Hype above), they did experience increased earnings compared to other informal or gig work. For example, P2 described "making like 25 dollars for a night of pet-sitting where I had to stay at someone's house vs I can make that amount with 1-2 clip sales." Similarly, P5 felt that work on OnlyFans is "pretty easy... I do it maybe 10 minutes a day, it doesn't feel like a job." Further, OnlyFans creators control the price of the content and services they offer, not the platform. When asked to compare OnlyFans with other gig work, P2 went on to say: "I make more money on OF...And I can control the price more." Some participants also described OnlyFans as being better than other gig work not only in terms of earnings, but in terms of their power in the labor relationship. Prior work [42, 57] describes the additional emotional labor gig workers must expend in order to receive good reviews, which helps their algorithmic performance. However, on OnlyFans, creators are not reviewed. P2 described that because "there isn't a rating system like in so many app based gigs," with OnlyFans it was "easier to draw boundaries". Even in comparison to face-to-face work, P21 explained that OnlyFans offers more autonomy and thus: "allowed for me to establish my boundaries better, unlike the customer service jobs I've worked before where I can't talk back, I can't cut out a customer because it's up to the manager, whereas [on OnlyFans] I have the control to just block someone." P13 agreed, describing that in food service jobs they had been "hit on relentlessly," and that "the biggest difference" with doing OnlyFans compared to other work "has been respect."

Finally, some participants preferred OnlyFans to other forms of gig work or service work because of the literal physical distance it offers from clients. P20 explains: "I definitely make more money on OnlyFans than I did with Uber and Lyft and I don't have to drive around all day and I feel safer because I'm not actually meeting with people. Before, strangers were getting into my car. It was always fine, but now there are no strangers that I'm seeing."

Unique Challenges of OnlyFans. While most of our participants had positive experiences with the platform and found the work to be better than other types of gig work, OnlyFans does create challenges that are unique to the platform. Most notably, because OnlyFans does not match creators to clients like many other gig work platforms nor offer internal creator listing or promotion features, creators must work to draw fans from other platforms. This contributes to the mainstreaming of OnlyFans, but can also be one of the more challenging parts of being a creator. For P9, "promoting is definitely the most time consuming of all of it... people have to know it's out there in order to buy it." P20 said they find themselves doing OnlyFans work "all day every day... I spend hours hours hours, 17 hours on Telegram the past 24 hours, eight hours on Safari, most of that is OnlyFans, five hours on Twitter. Like it's just, it's obscene like it really is." Furthermore, the popularity of OnlyFans meant that much of the sexual content market had moved to the platform. Even participants who want to use platforms other than OnlyFans felt they had no choice if they wanted to be successful. For example, P21 said, "OnlyFans is so big that whether you like it or not, if you do online [sex] work you're gonna have to use that site to be able to live off of your income." P12 shared that they don't like OnlyFans as a company, but stay on the platform because "it is where the audience is."

Prior work suggests that more than 85% of adults create and share sexual content as text messages, images, and videos [71] . Participants in our study were no exception. Prior to joining OnlyFans they were already creating and sharing sexual content; 14 of our participants described a desire to engage in sexual expression as a motivating factor for joining the platform.

For these participants, OnlyFans afforded creators an opportunity to organize and monetize this content in a way that had not been available or interesting to them before. P3 described OnlyFans as a kind of sexual content archive, saying "it's a good way to archive all of my stuff and have it in one place." P3 continued on to explain that the "general paywall" on OnlyFans offered both privacy and an opportunity to financially benefit from content creation they already engaged in, saying, "I've always been comfortable with showing myself off so [OnlyFans] was a good outlet for me to do that but also get a little benefit." P6 similarly described the situation of deciding to paywall their content: "I was giving my nudes away for free and I was like why? Shouldn't I charge for these? So that's how I joined." Finally P2, who enjoyed creating pinup content, said that OnlyFans offered "a way to finally actually monetize it in a feasible way."

OnlyFans also allowed participants to find a community of others who were open in their sexual expression. For example, P16 told us that OnlyFans "was a way for me to explore my sexuality a bit and it seemed like a community that like might be positive for me." P22 went further, saying "I envision a world where people are more comfortable with their bodies and with their own sexual expression, where the taboo of sex has been lifted... there's a part of me that wants to live those values, not just talk about them." Regarding colleagues on OnlyFans, P22 continued; "being in community with other creators has been such a frankly unexpected joy."

16 of our participants were drawn to join OnlyFans because they had existing content, audiences, or skills that they could leverage to quickly develop a profitable OnlyFans page.

As aforementioned, some of our participants were already creating sexual content recreationally. As a result, they had suitable content readily available to monetize and could make money instantly. P8 describes "my first 70 posts that I made were previous and old photos that I had" and that it was possible to "make money off of something that I was already doing." Some of our participants also repurposed their existing digital audiences to promote their OnlyFans. For example, three of our participants were "cosplayers" (those who dress up, typically as characters from works of fiction) who decided to make their OnlyFans content cosplay themed in order to leverage their existing audience. For example, P2 was "low key cosplay famous back in college" and knew that they could exploit this "(horny) fan base" on OnlyFans. P13 had a similar motivation: "I was already doing cosplay and I saw a lot of other cosplayers were having success with [OnlyFans] so I figured I would also try." Intersecting with a desire for sexual expression, P4 decided to use OnlyFans to showcase the "different ideas or things that I had in mind but I couldn't post on other socials" that don't allow "18+ cosplay content." Much like P2, prior to starting their OnlyFans, P4 "had people who showed interest in it [erotic cosplay content]" and therefore felt there could be financial potential of creating this material to sell on OnlyFans. Rouse and Salter note that cosplay was already highly sexualized and that cosplayers use a variety of monetization avenues, including OnlyFans [64] .

Another participant had already written a book about their sex life that had developed their "reputation as someone who had a lot of sex" (P12) and they opened an OnlyFans to give their followers "a look into this thing [their sex life] that they were clearly already interested in."

Beyond repurposing existing digital audiences, some participants described how their prior job experiences offered transferable skills for OnlyFans creative work. For example P9, who had been a waitress, explained that "waitressing is somewhat a show... you have to be very customer service friendly and you have to put on a little bit of an act to always be friendly because no one's always friendly 100 per cent of the time" concluding that "I guess working in the food industry and knowing how to please people is similar." P1, who was doing tutoring and OnlyFans at the same time explained: "there's a subconscious kind of rewiring you do to how you approach the conversation that I do in both." Finally, some participants described an intrinsic sense that they would gain pleasure or be good at "doing" OnlyFans. For example, P14 said simply "I knew that I would be good at it" and P16 similarly explained that OnlyFans: "just kind of seemed like something that I would enjoy doing."

Finally, 12 participants described the COVID-19 pandemic as a motivator to joining OnlyFans. First, the pandemic decreased the appeal of in-person gig work due to the risk of catching COVID-19. For example, P7 explained that they had previously done ride-sharing work and had "stopped because of the pandemic. So I was not going to have people in the car. Even now, I won't go back until we are way past this." Similarly P10 said "I really needed work and I wanted to do something where I could work from home and not be exposed to COVID-19."

Second, some participants lost their jobs due to the pandemic and tried OnlyFans whilst waiting for unemployment benefits. P5 explained that "when COVID-19 struck I had no income for a little while before I started getting unemployment." These factors (risk of catching COVID-19, loss of job, and lack of work available) combined powerfully for P9 who described: " I was on unemployment after I lost my job for a little bit and then the benefits were coming to an end...I was a waitress before and I did DoorDash as well but I wasn't ready to go back to being a waitress...no one was going out to eat yet [because] it was still very not safe, so I need to make money somehow." Third, the "free time" created by quarantines and lock-downs prompted a shift in how people spent their time. For example, P17 described having "nothing but free time" and asked "what's better than being at home in my room getting paid to be at home?" P22 adds that "there was a time around the start of the pandemic where especially a lot of gay men were creating private Twitter accounts to share nude photos. [I decided that] I should be making money for this because my body is valuable and if I can support myself by creating content that is really exciting." Together, boredom, loneliness, time at home and in some cases disposal income redirected from newly unavailable entertainment created a growth in OnlyFans and pornography use in general [84, 45, 31] . P3 summarized this effect, saying, "once the pandemic started and everyone was home [OnlyFans] definitely blew up."

Motivations for joining OnlyFans were similar to those of the gig workers we discussed in the related work section. For example, flexibility allowed disabled participants and those caring for dependents to build schedules that suited them better than those imposed by regular work. Our participants also shared motivations with other content creators such as a desire for (sexual) self expression. However, our participants were also attracted to join OnlyFans for a unique set of reasons specific to the platform, namely the brand notoriety and market share directly caused by two factors: 1) the celebrity hype and general public discourse surrounding the platform and 2) the lack of internal discoverability, which forces external discovery. We posit that these factors also drove an increase in mainstream general acceptance of OnlyFans as a platform, and reduced stigma of participating in it as a creator, despite its proximity to other-more stigmatized-forms of sex work such as webcamming and traditional pornography.

As compared to other forms of gig work, the design of the OnlyFans platform offered multiple factors that participants found preferable to other forms of gig work. First, whilst there is a black-box ranking system for creators to help convey how popular they are, on OnlyFans there is no direct rating system per se, which is a distinction our participants found preferable to other kinds of gig work that may be algorithmically dictated according to client rating.

Second, OnlyFans allows for passive income opportunities (where the same piece of content may be sold multiple times). There is a ceiling to the number of pieces of work (and therefore income) one may physically complete on Uber, UberEats, Upwork, TaskRabbit, and so on. Thus OnlyFans has the potential for greater financial return on the time/energy invested into it by the creator. The financial possibilities of OnlyFans over other types of gig work were a motivating factor for most of our participants despite the fact that we found that many participants did not make the amount of income they hoped. We note that we interviewed more than one creator who had genuinely reached the level where content sales were steady enough to self-generate more than adequate income, but this had taken enormous amounts of steady, creative, driven labor over many months. There are several reasons why it is complex to study the actual per hour return on work on OnlyFans: creators do many different kinds of work for their wage, including networking, promotion off platform and content creation itself-however further research should strive to investigate this in order to better support creators.

Third, due to the very nature of the work itself, some of our participants found OnlyFans preferable to other work. Whilst workers in the gig economy might find it preferable to regular work, finding the work pleasurable is relatively unusual. More than one of our participants described a sense of enjoyment in the work, in addition to those looking to fulfill their sexual expression needs by sharing erotic content. In Porn Work, Heather Berg calls the participation in studio porn "pleasurable resistance" against the kinds of poor labor conditions found in regular jobs [4] . Whilst some of our participants may not have joined OnlyFans if they had not needed the income, their work there was a pleasurable resistance against unemployment. Our participants are in many ways similar to other social media influencers [28, 51] , using sexual expression as a kind of authentic self-expression and a vehicle for creativity. This is most similar to the concept of "playbour" [75] where enjoyable or pleasurable activities become professionalized and future research could similarly apply self-determination theory to study OnlyFans creators. OnlyFans also offers an unusual opportunity to monetize pleasurable activities that our participants were already doing: they could quickly repurpose their existing digital audiences or sexual content that they had initially developed for recreation (e.g., while doing hobbies like cosplay or in romantic relationships).

Thus, we find two groups of people making content on OnlyFans, with significant overlap: those who desired to sexually express themselves, and those who needed money. Further research should examine both financial potentiality of other kinds of content creation vs. gig work, and also more closely investigate how OnlyFans or similar platforms afford space for personal fulfillment.

As aforementioned, a vast majority of adults make and share sexual content [71] . However, a great deal of literature (see e.g., [33, 71, 22, 27] ) discusses the risks of creating and sharing sexual content. While Angela Jones, in her book Camming [38] , describes her webcamming participants as fulfilling their exhibitionist natures, the participants in our study were distinct from this in that they wanted to share in a more boundaried and discreet way. Our participants found a sense of control and autonomy over their content by using OnlyFans to share it. OnlyFans requires its creators to identify themselves with both government ID and biometric identification. Content created with another person must be accompanied by the required paperwork (identification and written consent). Thus, OnlyFans' terms and conditions allow certain kinds of sexual content while requiring performer identification to inhibit illegal material. The performer identification to a certain extent immunizes the platform against the claim that there is illegal material on it, whilst the terms and conditions enable content that would likely get the creators deplatformed elsewhere. P21 described deplatforming thus: "everything you worked for is just gone and then you have to rebuild and try and get in contact with customers different ways and yeah. If you don't have a website it's just horrible." Deplatforming is the major income risk to adult content creators. The affordances, business practices and terms of conditions of OnlyFans therefore combine to enable less personal and structural risk of deplatforming.

Whilst 18 of our participants were motivated to join OnlyFans by the opportunity to monetize their content, others may have been willing to use the platform even if they did not earn income from it, because they sought a minimally stigmatized, convenient, discreet platform that permitted them to warehouse and socially share their erotic content. Future work may seek to explore which precise features of OnlyFans led creators to be comfortable sharing their intimate content on the platform: affordances for member verification, monetization itself, platform features such as the ability to moderate subscribers and the lack of searchability which affords the perception of privacy, etc. By understanding what precisely about the platform affords creators feelings of control and autonomy we can better understand how to design social media platforms, particularly those on which people may wish to share intimate content.

Lastly, we propose that in addition to the aforementioned affordances and motivating factors for creators, OnlyFans uniquely profited off the simultaneous events of celebrity hype and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unclear (and may be difficult to definitively determine) if the platform could have reached such saturation without either factor.

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