Muse

Hey, 5-4 listeners, it's Leon. I am here to tell you about my new show. It might not be exactly what you're used to from a guy best known for making history podcasts, but it is in its own way scandalous. The series is called Only Fantasy, and it's all about the wide world of OnlyFans, the website that ushered in a revolution in online porn and has radically lowered the barrier to entry for sex work, to the point where there are now more than 4 million people on the platform selling access to their private photos and videos. But as I learned during my reporting, photos and videos are only the beginning. It turns out the main export on OnlyFans is attention. Subscribers are paying not just to look, but to feel. They're on there to have conversations and crushes and semi-imaginary relationships. This confused and surprised me. And to be honest, I was skeptical and more than a little judgmental. All of which led me down a year-long reporting journey alongside my co-host, comedian and OnlyFans creator, Gracie Kanan. Together, Gracie and I did some of the most shocking and personal interviews I've ever been a part of. And we ended up documenting what feels like a genuinely new and genuinely strange phenomenon that has, without a doubt, changed millions of lives in all kinds of unpredictable ways. Only Fantasy is a show about the changing nature of sex work, adult entertainment, and human intimacy itself. You're about to hear a preview of the show. And if you like what you hear, please go find Only Fantasy wherever you get your podcasts. Or you can binge all episodes now, ad-free on Audible. Enjoy. So I know we've like talked about this before, but obviously not in a whole lot of detail so you should feel free to disclose as much or as little as you want obviously yeah i'm your brother it could be awkward but it doesn't have to be i don't think it's awkward

i've had people from only fans message you so you can't get more awkward than that dude i cannot

believe that i forgot that yeah my sister annie just turned 24 which makes her almost 20 years younger than me. She was raised by a different mom in a different household, and she has led

a very different life for me. Mr. Harvard. Mr. I got a diploma. Can't relate, but it's okay.

You're doing great. Over the years, I've mainly heard about Annie's adventures in phone calls like this one. She lives in Chicago and I live in New York, and we talk fairly regularly, often on FaceTime, while I'm walking my dog and she's at work. She's a bartender these days, so she's often telling me about her regulars and sending me photos of the cash she has stacked up at the end of a long night of tips. But there was a time, starting when she was around 19 years old, when Annie was telling me about a different kind of hustle.

Do you remember that one girl that I lived with, the blondie?

No.

She was the OnlyFans creator.

She was the first girl you met who was on there?

Yeah, because she was the one who before was like, since you won't do escorting with me, would you do OnlyFans with me?

Oh, God. Yeah. Okay, I remember.

Yeah, now you're remembering.

At the time, all I knew about OnlyFans was that it was a website where regular people, like my little sister apparently, could make money selling naked pictures of themselves. Knowing that Annie was on OnlyFans made me apprehensive, to say the least. But Annie assured me that it was a safe alternative to real-life sex work, and that her friend, the blondie, was showing her the ropes and keeping her out of trouble.

She would be like, oh yeah, so you could post lingerie photos, this and that, and then if people like what they see, they'll message you, and then you can send them an album that the only way to unlock it is they have to pay a certain amount. They don't know what's on it. It could be bullshit photos, old photos, but they have to pay to unlock it and that money is instantly in your account once they've done it.

And so how much was your friend making?

She was making, I think, 15K a month.

15K a month?

Mm-hmm.

That's a lot of money.

Yeah.

What I remember Annie emphasizing to me back when she first started OnlyFans was that it was as much a marketing job as anything. She wasn't an influencer by any means, but she did have a couple hundred followers across her Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, where she would post free pictures intended to lure in new subscribers. Each account was under the same pseudonym Annie used on OnlyFans. So people who found her and liked what they saw could then sign up for a few bucks a month to see her more exclusive content.

In the early days, having to only show a couple of photos and then making a thousand bucks was great. As an 18, 19 year old, I didn't know what to do with myself.

I really thought I was hot shit.

Annie and her roommate, the blondie, would cross-promote each other on their pages in order to bring in new subscribers. And within a month, Annie said she had 100 paying customers, which sometimes made it hard to keep up with her DMs.

It was very hard being like, oh my God, Jake. Oh, fuck, this isn't Jake. Back, back, back, back, back, back, back. Oh my God. Fuck, gotta scroll up and see whose name this is.

Annie told me that during her best month ever, she brought in $18,000. By that point, it was the COVID pandemic, and OnlyFans had exploded in popularity thanks to subscribers who were looking to escape isolation.

The thing we're all doing to keep ourselves safe can have an adverse health outcome, which is loneliness.

We're talking so much about all the physical illnesses, but I think a lot of people are worried about their mental health right now. Social interaction now is going to be three things. Challenging, creative, and important more than ever before.

In April of 2020 alone, so the month after lockdown started, OnlyFans reported a 75% jump in new subscriber signups. But the growth wasn't just on the subscriber side. There was also a slew of new creators on the site. Anyone stuck at home and unable to work their regular job could now make content with minimal overhead and earn cash fast.

This OnlyFans income, it's very real and it's very quick. That first night, I made about, like, $1,300, and I'm like, this is insane.

Pretty soon, OnlyFans wasn't just a dirty little secret. It was a cultural phenomenon.

According to a piece in BuzzFeed, selling yourself online is the hot new trend. Quote, everybody is making porn at home now. OnlyFans reports that 7,000 or 8,000 new women sign up every day. Our daughters are selling themselves for food and rent, and BuzzFeed is telling us it's cool.

The thing is, it kind of was cool. Even Beyoncé, one of the most famous people in the world, felt moved to name-drop OnlyFans in a song.

Hips, tick-tock, when I dance. On that demon time, she might start her OnlyFans.

Michael B. Jordan went on Jimmy Kimmel and joked that he was making an OnlyFans page for his mustache.

Got an OnlyFans coming soon. Is that an OnlyFans account? So why not? Eating fruit, all types of crazy stuff. It's going to get wild.

Part of what was amazing about OnlyFans' explosive growth was that for more than 20 years, the world of adult entertainment had been starved by the abundance of free online porn.

With free porn available on the internet, is this the porn apocalypse? How do you compete with free?

The situation was akin to that of the music industry after Napster. Stolen content was everywhere, and consumer expectations had shifted to the point where the idea of paying to look at porn seemed utterly irrational. And then came OnlyFans. At the time of this recording, the platform hosts more than 4 million creators, mostly women, and 300 million users, mostly men. The pay structure is simple. Creators keep 80% of what they make, and OnlyFans takes a 20% cut. In 2024, the company took in a $1.4 billion profit. profit. How did OnlyFans convince people to start paying for porn again? What was it offering that users couldn't get for free somewhere else? When I first got curious about this and asked Annie about it, she offered an explanation involving a guy who once paid her 800 bucks to make a video of herself wearing a pair of shoes that he had bought her and smushing a bunch of corn dogs with

the high heels. I promise you your favorite porn star is not about to call your name and step on a corn dog for you. So like, yes, you can watch porn, but those porn stars that you watch will never know your name, will never speak to you. These OnlyFan girls are paid to acknowledge your

existence. I had always pictured OnlyFans as a one-way street, a place to publish exclusive content that your most motivated fans could pay to look at. End of story. Annie told me that I'd been missing the point. Most of the money people made on OnlyFans, she said, came from more than just being looked at. It came from maintaining quasi-personal relationships with subscribers over weeks or months or even longer. A lot of the people were just lonely and sad.

so they really just genuinely wanted somebody to text them every day text them good morning in the morning good night at night send them a couple photos didn't even have to be like naked photos just cute photos some were literally like me in an oversized hoodie in front of the mirror

but not all of them annie you showed me i remember i remember you showed me a couple

pretty racy things you posted not all of them but there were a lot of the times

Stay well.

want you in a hoodie wanted you in a hoodie wanted you in a messy bun they wanted you to not look

like you they were paying for you basically right what i realized talking to annie was that only fans wasn't a porn site it was more like a directory of people who for a price would participate in an extended fantasy in which the two of you were in a relationship according to a study that looked at the transaction histories of more than a million only fan subscribers Messaging drives almost 70% of revenue on the platform. What Annie and her fellow OnlyFans creators were offering was a distinctly 21st century rendition of a staple product from the annals of sex work, the girlfriend experience.

Girlfriend experience, if you paid for that, it's like 72 hours of a fake girlfriend. So she'll call you, she'll text you, she'll FaceTime you, she'll send you photos, she'll basically talk to you as if you're a boyfriend for like two days.

But not meet up in person?

Nope, all over the phone.

I know I sound skeptical here, and I was. But then I remembered something. I myself had once enjoyed the digital girlfriend experience when I was a teenager chatting voraciously with someone I'd never met on AOL Instant Messenger. Her name was Jessica. A friend of mine from summer camp gave me her screen name and encouraged me to send her a message. That's it for this preview of Only Fantasy. Find the show wherever you get your podcasts. Or if you want to binge the whole series now, ad-free, go to Audible.