At 4pm most days, as the school run traffic builds and office workers begin readying themselves for the commute home, Megan Rox is just starting her shift.
The 29-year-old from Birmingham works until midnight, sometimes later, although in her case there are no tiresome colleagues or meddlesome managers to worry about.
Instead her only company is a ring light, a wardrobe full of carefully chosen outfits, a laptop – and the understanding that what she is selling is access to herself.
‘I do work during the day as well but it’s mainly later at night, when it’s showtime,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘That’s when the wives and kids have gone to bed.’
And that marks the time when dozens of Megan’s subscribers log on to her OnlyFans page, requesting photos, videos and personalised chats, for which they pay anything from £100 to several hundred pounds at a time. A good month brings in up to £11,000.
It is a long way from her former life as a palliative care worker, pulling 14-hour shifts for modest pay. ‘I did actually love the job,’ she says. ‘But it was exhausting. Suddenly I had all this freedom.’
Not to mention all that cash, which has helped pay for the high-performance Mercedes parked outside.
Freedom and money, of course, being the twin pillars propping up the extraordinary rise of OnlyFans – the subscription platform owned by British parent company Fenix International, which has become one of the country’s top revenue generators.
Last year, it was projected to rake in £5.3billion, fuelled by a straightforward business model that sees the site take 20 per cent commission on all earnings generated through monthly subscriptions, pay-per-view content (known as ‘customs’), direct messages and tips through its ‘content creators’ – a sanitised term for what is, in most cases, online sex work.
And of these there is certainly no shortage, with around 280,000 accounts based in Britain alone – one of the highest concentrations in the world.
Some reports suggest an astonishing four per cent of women aged 18 to 34 in Britain have accounts on the platform, though not all are active.
From the outside, it can look seductively simple: easy money earned from the comfort of your bedroom, if you’re prepared to take off enough clothes.
Megan Rox was a palliative care worker before moving over to OnlyFans full-time
Now, Megan is paid anything from £100 to several hundred pounds for photos, videos and personalised chats
Certainly, scroll through Instagram, and you quickly stumble upon the trappings showcased by its success stories, in the shape of penthouses, designer bags and trips to Dubai – the kind of lifestyle that would once have required a footballer husband or a City bonus. For those stuck in low-paid, high-stress jobs, it’s a seductive sell.
Talk to the creators themselves however, and an unedifying, more complicated, less glossy picture emerges: good money for some and flexibility and autonomy with it, but also relentless self-promotion and unstable income – not to mention the fact that however you dress it up, the ‘adult content’ for which OnlyFans is known is porn by any other name.
Users can submit demeaning requests, prompting performers to question for how much money are they are willing to trade their self-respect.
Relationships, too, suffer, with content creators struggling to find meaningful connections ‘in the real life’ as potential partners either recoil from their chosen job or see the person as little more than a sex object.
And whatever they tell themselves they’re selling, the majority of those on the site make very little money at all.
‘In the grand scheme, 98 per cent of people on OnlyFans don’t make more than minimum wage,’ says Jordan Smith, founder of Rebel, an agency that represents digital content creators. ‘In reality, the average income is about £200 a month. A lot of young people think if they’ve got followers on Instagram, they can just crack on and become a millionaire, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s a business, and like any business, it needs proper infrastructure.’
Jordan, 31, founded Rebel four years ago after previously running a celebrity message platform. He now represents more than 40 of OnlyFan’s highest earners (meaning they bring in more than five figures monthly) helping with promotional marketing and organising ‘content collaboration’ events where creators rent large venues to film social media material.
In return, he takes 30 per cent commission, although some of the burgeoning cottage industry of so-called OnlyFans Management agencies and freelance operators take 60 per cent and beyond.
‘There are bad actors hiding behind laptops overseas, signing UK models to contracts that are very difficult to get out of,’ Jordan says. ‘On occasion they’ll lock people into a contract and then sell that contract to another agency. There are also agents who will try to push creators out of their comfort zones to generate more money, dangling big promises that never come to anything.’
In other words, even in a world marketed as empowerment, the old dynamics of exploitation have hardly disappeared.
Still, paying commission certainly hasn’t dented the take-home of one of Jordan’s biggest signees, 23-year-old Zak Blackman, from Watford, who until the summer of 2023 was earning £1,500 a month as a naval airman aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales.
By anyone’s standards he had a solid career ahead of him – but he was restless. ‘I had friends in Manchester living this amazing lifestyle from influencer stuff,’ he recalls. ‘Penthouses, cars, everything. The freedom they had was unreal. I just wanted a piece of that.’
He started an OnlyFans account ‘on the side’, posting pictures and videos of himself in – and perhaps more pertinently out of – his naval uniform.
‘A lot of young people think if they’ve got followers on Instagram, they can just crack on and become a millionaire, but it’s a lot more complicated than that,’ says Jordan Smith
‘I had friends in Manchester living this amazing lifestyle from influencer stuff,’ recalls Zak Blackman
He started an OnlyFans account ‘on the side’ of his job as a naval airman, posting pictures and videos of himself in – and perhaps more pertinently out of – his uniform
Zack says he ‘went from making about £2,000 on the side in the military to about £15,000 a month’
Within three months, someone reported him (‘snitched’ is the word Zak uses). He was escorted back from shore leave, summarily dismissed for bringing the Navy into disrepute and told to pack his bags.
The story made headlines around the world – and pushed his subscriber numbers ‘through the roof’.
‘I went from making about £2,000 on the side in the military to about £15,000 a month,’ he says. Now, under Jordan’s tenure, that astonishing sum has climbed further still. ‘In the past 30 days, I’ve done almost £50,000,’ he says breezily.
The trappings are plain to see; Zak drives an £80,000 yellow Audi R8 Spyder and lives in a penthouse flat in Manchester – the venue for some of his more explicit content featuring female co-stars.
He has also carved out a niche in the unlikely world of sock fetishism after discovering many of his followers had a thing for his feet. He now makes money selling his socks via his own website, and placing them in random locations around the country for followers to find.
‘I get so many feet requests, it’s crazy,’ he laughs. They’re also happy to pay him for all sorts of things: on the morning we speak, Zak has pocketed £100 to put his phone on the floor and step on it as if he were a giant, as well as £180 for a 20-second video showing him combing his hair – what are known as ‘custom’ requests, and the real money spinners.
‘Some people have to work so hard to earn that, and I’m just putting a comb through my hair. It’s so weird,’ he says.
And arguably demeaning, not that Zak sees it that way: in this world, the reality of flogging porn and catering to fetishes is concealed behind language about ‘marketing’ and ‘algorithms’.
‘It’s a seven-day-a-week thing,’ he insists. ‘It’s not just OnlyFans. It’s creating marketing material, reels, TikTok, going live every single day. If you miss a day, you’re losing out on the algorithm. Consistency builds the audience and a lot of people just don’t get that, or that there is loads of work behind the scenes.’
That sentiment is echoed by Georgia Pridding, a sweet-faced 23-year-old from Manchester who bristles at the idea that OnlyFans work is ‘easy’.
‘People think you put on lingerie and the money comes rolling in. It’s not like that. You’ve got to have self-discipline,’ she insists. ‘You have to post constantly, engage on social media, film custom-made content on demand.’
Georgia used to work in a children’s play centre until she was sacked after a Covid test mix-up. Already earning around £750 a month on OnlyFans as a side hustle, she then put all her energy into the platform and saw her earnings increase to £5,000 a month – a figure that has shot up to five figures since signing with Jordan’s agency.
She cheerfully admits she does ‘pretty much everything’ – lingerie, nude shoots and what she breezily describes as ‘fetish content’ – spending four to five hours a day filming and producing personalised videos, which start at £110 and rise depending on length and content.
One client paid £500 to watch her get into a bath fully clothed and pour buckets of pink and green slime over herself. ‘So it’s not always sexual,’ she says. ‘I think people get lonely. Often they just want someone to talk to.’ Does she not find these requests demeaning? Georgia looks puzzled. ‘I just think people are what they are,’ she tells me.
While her earnings have allowed her to rent her own place, in the early days she filmed from her childhood bedroom, her mother – a caterer – initially blissfully unaware of what her daughter was up to. When the truth came out, it did not go down well. ‘She was upset,’ Georgia says. ‘But now she can see I’m doing well and she’s supportive.’
Doing well financially, certainly. But few parents would place ‘online adult content creator’ at the top of a careers adviser’s list.
Megan, who still lives at home with her mum and dad, reveals they refused to speak to her for two weeks when the truth came out a few years ago. ‘They told me I was going to mess up my life,’ she says. That changed when she cleared her debts, bought a Mercedes. Money, it seems, has a way of softening moral objections.
‘Now their attitude is: “Do what you want to do. We just don’t want to hear about it”,’ she says.
‘People think you put on lingerie and the money comes rolling in. It’s not like that. You’ve got to have self-discipline,’ insists Georgia Pridding
Georgia spends four to five hours a day filming and producing personalised videos that start at £110
Within two months of joining OnlyFans, Ben Wright had quit his job – now he earns between £7,500 and £11,000 a month
Still, the stigma lingers. ‘Once men find out you do OnlyFans, they just want to get into your knickers – they don’t always see you as a real person.’
Zak agrees. ‘Relationships are hard,’ he says. ‘It’s not a normal life.’
Alongside them, 22-year-old Ben Wright is perhaps the starkest illustration of the platform’s pull. Six months ago he was working night shifts in a casino, having previously flipped burgers at McDonald’s for marginally above minimum wage.
Within two months of joining OnlyFans he had quit the restaurant chain. He now earns between £7,500 and £11,000 a month. One client paid £750 for a video of him dressed as a bunny.
‘I got lucky,’ he says. ‘I started an Instagram and it just took off.’
His audience, like Zak’s, is largely gay men – it’s believed around 95 per cent of OnlyFans subscribers are male – many requesting what Ben calls ‘spicy’ content, though he insists he has firm boundaries. ‘Yesterday someone asked me to cover myself in peanut butter. I said no. It would put me off my toast,’ he says. Nor will he meet anyone in the flesh. ‘It’s a total no-no,’ he says.
I am startled to hear that Ben still lives with his 58-year-old grandmother. What on earth does she make of it?
‘I’m fortunate. My family’s very open. My grandma loves seeing the lifestyle it’s given me, and I can help out too. In any case you can’t do this job and be secretive – you have to promote yourself,’ he says.
And that, perhaps, is the crux of it. OnlyFans can offer a fast track out of low-paid, inflexible work and, for some, bring financial security, confidence and control. But it is still sex work, and it relies on constant access to your body. And while a handful of successful creators – such as Zak and Megan – pose beside supercars, the vast majority earn little more than pocket money.
As Jordan puts it: ‘Some people think it’s all glitz and glam, but behind the scenes there’s a lot of graft, and it can take its toll mentally, too.’
It’s one reason he also discusses exit strategies. ‘We see people as doing OnlyFans for two years,’ he says. ‘We try and help them branch out or invest that money into the right places rather than just focus on the disposable income that can disappear very quickly. A lot of people we signed didn’t even realise they had to pay tax.’
Ask his creators where they see themselves in five years, meanwhile, and the answers vary. Zak, who has already done some television work, grins and says he hopes to make music and ‘maybe be a celeb’. Ben hopes to get a place of his own sooner rather than later, and in time buy his parents a new home, while Megan plans to move closer to Manchester to collaborate with other creators for the foreseeable future.
Georgia takes it day by day. ‘There’s a market for everything,’ she shrugs. ‘So I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve got a shelf life.’
So for now, the ring lights remain switched on in bedrooms across Britain. Easy money for some – but at what ultimate cost?
