In a new cover article for the Spectator, Louise Perry writes about the dark realities of OnlyFans — a content subscription service largely used for selling pornography. Perry writes:
Britain is host to 280,000 creator accounts, giving us one of the highest concentrations in the world. Eighty-four per cent of those accounts are run by women, and if they are all (give or take) between the ages of 18 and 34, then we can estimate that just shy of 4 per cent of young British women are selling their wares on OnlyFans.
This has inspired a lot of morbid commentary about how “1 in 25 young British women are (at least) virtual prostitutes” and Britain is “experiencing a Russia-in-the-90s style collapse”.
But is it true?
The source appears to be a spreadsheet credited to something called “Enterprise Statistics”. The methodology is unknown. Is it accurate? Perhaps. But in the absence of official data, it is impossible to say.
The source claims that OnlyFans “hosts 3.5 million active creators”. According to official filings by the parent company of the platform, Fenix International, it hosts more than 4 million creators. So, it’s worse than it looks? Well, the filings do not distinguish between creators who are actually posting images and videos and creators who have dormant accounts. Given what we know about the economics of OnlyFans — where most creators make less than £100 a month — it is reasonable to suspect that a lot of people soon give up.
Additionally, it is worth adding that a significant proportion of OnlyFans creators upload non-sexual content. Certainly, most of the media on OnlyFans is pornographic. But at least some is not. For example, the English Harry Potter star Jessica Cave uses her OnlyFans account to post non-sexual content about her hair. British DJ Lily Mercer uses OnlyFans to promote music. One could make a valid argument that the non-sexual content is used by the platform to legitimise its sexual material. But it still exists.
Finally, at least some OnlyFans “creators” are fake — using stolen photographs or artificially generated images. The company prohibits this but of course it happens.
None of this is to encourage complacency. Clearly, many British women are using OnlyFans, seduced by misleading promises of easy money or in desperate need of cash. But the “4 per cent” statistic seems highly dubious and should not be accepted as fact.
