Sex In The Digital World.

Kylee Atkins runs into her living room in Mobile, Alabama, with her phone clenched in her hand. Her mom looks down at the phone in disbelief. Her daughter had just made $2000 in a single night.

Despite her mother’s skepticism of this unfamiliar money-making endeavor, Atkins created a business from the ground up with just her iPhone. Currently, 200 “fans” pay Atkins $15 a month for sexual content online.

Atkins is not alone. Two million people actively create and release content for OnlyFans.com, a subscription-based social media website. These people are referred to as “creators” on the internet, who actively fund the online economy. People who pay to view the creators’ content behind a paywall are referred to as “fans.”

Since its inception in 2016, OnlyFans has continued to interrupt the online sex work space. When using the site, a viewer may come across various kinds of creators, ranging from chefs to fitness trainers. Although not all the content on the platform is erotic, the site is overwhelmingly geared towards adult pornography and lewd content. Other sites like HoneyDrip and Fansly have followed in OnlyFans subscription based model, raking in millions of users.

Aryana Safaee, a researcher at San Diego State University and an expert in who has studied online sex work explained, “Because of their policies regarding nudity being allowed, a lot of sex workers have really flocked to the platform and made pretty successful careers on it.”

Compared to traditional pornography, sex workers on OnlyFans can create content on their own accord and with minimal capital. The site clearly illustrates technology’s direct influence on the pornography industry.

Nickey Huntsman, a popular name in the pornography industry, is one of the many traditional sex workers who has observed the evolution of the industry. Huntsman saw many changes technology has brought to pornography: she witnessed the DVD era, the advent of online porn, and now, the subscription-based adult content platforms like OnlyFans. She credits OnlyFans to be a game changer in the industry.

Huntsman described the shift into the OnlyFans era as significant for beauty standards. “I've noticed that there’s been a huge change that has happened over the years in so many different industries, not just porn because I feel like things were misogynistic back in the day when it comes to appearances and a lot more closed-off and cookie-cutter.”

Huntsman believes on OnlyFan sales are not determined by what she calls “the Barbie look” that appeases the typical pornography viewer.

Huntsman recalled her studio days — long periods on set in exchange for an unsteady income. As she has pivoted towards OnlyFans, she describes the financial dependability of the site, “I have enough steady income to where I'm not reliant upon studios and I don't have to have a normal job.” For her, being an independent contractor using OnlyFans has allowed stability in her earnings.

The technological advancement into sites like OnlyFans has also affected other financial aspects of the porn industry.

OnlyFans uses a paywall function that protects what creators upload, which gives them the ability to set a price for their subscribers. In addition, OnlyFans takes only 20% of a creator's revenue, a staggering difference from the traditional pornography business model where studios would take much more.

It is not only about financial freedom for creators like Atkins. The 23-year-old, finds the advent of subscription-based sex work especially empowering.“You choose what you want to do, you choose when you want to make the content, you choose what you want to wear, you choose what you post, it’s no longer up to anybody else.”

She continues, “In a way, this is a new form of entrepreneurship.”

Her mother, Atkins says, is also super supportive of the methodology of her main source of income.

For Atkins, selecting her pay and work hours gives her the autonomy over her business and income. All she needs to shoot content is her phone, a light and her bedroom. This increases safety also, being able to film without a production team, a director and camera operators.

Putting content production in the hands of the creators is one of the key draws to the OnlyFans platform. “Cause sex work, it can be hit or miss if you don't know what you're doing or who you're talking to, you know? It can be a dangerous industry to get into if you go to the wrong people,” Huntsman said. Control over content is one of the key reasons OnlyFans has become one of the largest platforms for amateur pornography, although not all aspects of technology have affected the industry. OnlyFans struggles in a few areas — piracy and privacy.

With new platforms and more content than ever on the internet, safety concerns are a large worry for both creators and social media sites. Similar to DVD pirates in the early 2000s, users of the platform frequently trade, leak and sell content from creators on other sites like Reddit and Discord despite being prohibited.

Safaee explains how data scrapers can become an invasion of privacy, “Sadly, many people who look down on sex workers dox them by spreading their images to family, friends, and even employers in an effort to humiliate them and harm them in their professional lives,” within her research.

OnlyFans offers a chatting feature that is the secret ingredient for the platform’s financial success. The user model of OnlyFans is designed to create a space for artists to build interpersonal relationships with those that subscribe to view their work. Safaee says, “OnlyFans is really different from traditional pornography. Again, people who are subscribed to these creators do so because they feel like they know them to some extent.”

The protections that Safee speaks about in her research are echoed by actual performers in the industry, the many OnlyFans creators who use fake names on the platform to protect their identity. In addition, most creators employ external agencies to manage their content and chat with their fans for them, adding a third party to act as the middleman between the creator and the consumer. This, although commonly used amongst creators, violates OnlyFans’ terms of service between them and the creator.

Agencies handle mostly everything for the creator: posting, chatting, promotions and other OnlyFans specific marketing tactics. These agencies take a cut of the creators profits. Jonathan Handel, an attorney and expert in entertainment law says “10% is customary for the film and television industry”, a large difference between OnlyFans agencies which take anywhere between 20% to 50%.

These agencies also have been accused of fraud and abuse. Many public lawsuits and abuse allegations have been filed against some of the largest agencies. In addition, these agencies hire third party chat companies that have access to the creators' accounts.

Huntsman, who used to employ an agency, can attest to this experience. She said, “the people from the Philippines who were running my account slipped and gave out my real name at one point.” For an OnlyFans creator, leaked private information on the site can lead to dangers in their personal lives as Safaee has mentioned.

For Atkins, whose agency handles all her chatting for her, there is risk in being a public persona. “You have to remember these things about your fans because they want to feel like you are there for them. You are their girlfriend. You know what time they go to work…you have to know these things because they're your fans,” Atkins said.

Atkins is one of many women on OnlyFans managing their own business. In this modern era, OnlyFans leaves the door open to women with an entrepreneurial spirit to record, direct, edit and produce their adult content. The invention of subscription-based sex work has opened leeways to many different outcomes like safety and financial freedom.

For Atkins however, there is more to it than the money. As she runs her own fashion business and uses OnlyFans to support herself financially, she will keep hailing the platform as “life-changing” and an important “stepping stone” in her entrepreneurial journey.

“I’ve always wanted to be this powerful force to be reckoned with woman. My whole life my grandfather told me never to rely on a man for anything. I feel like OnlyFans is what is setting me up to do what I wanna do, which is run an empire. I dream of the day I am wearing a business suit and I am CEO of my own empire.”