Why some athletes and musicians are using OnlyFans as a side hustle
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Selling pictures of yourself online probably isn't the first thing you think of when it comes to side hustles. But Kurt Adams Rosenthal, he's a British canoeist, says that he did it because he needed the money to fund his training to compete in the Olympics. So he started posting spicy pics on OnlyFans, a site where people share content, sometimes quite explicit content, for cash.

And he's not the only one. Last year, singer Kate Nash said that she sold photos of her bum on OnlyFans to cover the costs of touring. Lily Allen says pics of her feet make more than her Spotify streams. So today you're going to hear how OnlyFans works, why more people are using it and what are some of the stigmas that come with it. I'm Hannah Gelbart. This is What In The World from the BBC World Service. And no, you won't find pictures of my feet on there.

Here with me in the studio is BBC Business Reporter Charlotte Edwards. Hi, welcome back. Hello, thank you for having me. Talk me through the type of content that people are posting on OnlyFans. Is it just porn? So no, it's not just porn on OnlyFans, which I think surprises a lot of people. People associate it with porn and that's it. But there's so many different things you can get from OnlyFans. For

For example, you can get fitness content on there. A lot of trainers post fitness videos and the subscription platform really works for them because you can pay for their content quite easily. Musicians post on there, artists, lots of different creative people post content that they think their fans want to see and pay a bit extra for. But to be clear, the majority of content is definitely porn based and porn related.

And who owns the site? It's owned by a man called Leonard Ravinsky, who is a UK-based Ukrainian-American billionaire. He's a very elusive man. It can be hard to track down where he is, but he owns the majority of OnlyFans and he bought it from the founders, a pair of brothers, Guy and Tim Stokely, and they sold OnlyFans in 2018. They founded the platform in 2016 and they had previously created other porn-related websites.

So it does come from a porn background. Yes. You can't separate it from its past. You mentioned subscription, right? That's the key part of the business model. Talk me through how it works, how OnlyFans make money and how much of that goes to creators. Okay, so OnlyFans makes money through something called a revenue sharing model.

which essentially for OnlyFans means that they take 20% of what the creators are earning. So whether that's the subscription fee that they're charging, the tips that they get, 20% from every amount that they're being paid gets sent to OnlyFans and then the creators keep 80%. We've talked a little bit about the more adult side of OnlyFans. Are there any countries that have banned the platform altogether?

Yes, there are quite a few. It's obviously quite controversial. So conservative countries, there's countries in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, it's banned there. Other countries as well have banned it just because sometimes it's deemed socially immoral. So if you are posting on OnlyFans and you're in one of those countries, you could get yourself in legal trouble.

Of course, it's not banned here in the UK and that's one of the reasons we are talking about it. I mentioned the British canoeist Kurt Adams Rosenthal. Tell me a bit about his story. Kurt started posting on OnlyFans at the start of this year to help fund his Olympic dream. And so far he's earned...

about £100,000, which is about US$135,000. So that's a lot of money. It's got him in hot water with a governing body called Paddle UK. They were also giving him funding of about £16,000 a year, which is around US$22,000.

Kurtz has made all this money from OnlyFans, but now the additional funding from Paddle UK has been taken away. He said he got a call from Paddle UK and they told him he was suspended from competing. Has he broken any rules?

So when Paddle UK decided that they were going to remove Kurtz, they said it was due to posts that he'd been putting on social media, but they didn't provide any more context. So they've not come out and said it's definitely due to posting spicy content on OnlyFans, which Kurtz obviously believes that it is. Pending the investigation, I guess we'll see what they decide and whether they do reveal the specific reason of why they've done this.

And Kurtz actually spoke to the BBC about his motivations for posting on OnlyFans. I have been posting videos that are consciously made to be edgy in order to drive conversions to my spicy content page in order to fund this campaign.

ultimate dream of going to the Olympics. It's unconventional, sure, but I've always been raised with a whatever it takes mentality by a single mom. And so that's what I did. And here's how he reacted when he was told he's losing his funding. I kind of froze. I couldn't believe the words I was hearing because this is what I put my life into. This is everything I do. My

My personality at this point, my identity is sport and wanting to be a professional athlete chasing the Olympic dream. Charlotte, let's step away from sports now and go into the world of music.

There are a number of musicians who've talked about using OnlyFans. I mentioned Kate Nash, Lily Allen. Yes, Cardi B as well. She was a big name when she joined the platform. There was a lot of hype around that. I remember I covered it at the time. And she actually got a lot of controversy for a different reason because she wasn't posting spicy content. She was posting content that her fans wouldn't normally see, say screenshots of text messages and really an inside look at her life. And she wanted to give fans this chance

to pay for content that you can't just buy in, say, a record store. And does that content stay on the platform or is it leaked elsewhere? It does get leaked, especially some of this more spicy content. If you scroll on Twitter, which is famously one of the social media platforms where you can still see pornography on there and it's not taken down,

A lot of OnlyFans content does get leaked on there and creators get very upset about this because they need this subscription model and they need to hide their content and get people to pay for it to earn a living. So it is quite upsetting for them when their content ends up on social media for free. The musicians we've mentioned, I was quite surprised to find out that they needed the extra funding.

Yeah, I think the music industry as a whole is struggling a bit, especially for, say, if you're not one of the main artists. Kate Nash was huge back in her day when she first was releasing songs. But now she's finding that she earns more money from posting photos on OnlyFans. A lot of her fans have been upset about this and think she should just

stick with the music but she's saying that in order to fund things like creating your music going on tour it's important for her to be able to make money in other ways as well and Lily Allen sells pictures of her feet

Yes, and I feel she enjoys talking about that. And it's such an interesting topic in itself that she can make so much money from selling her feet in comparison to the money she gets from streaming platforms. And a lot of artists complain in general about not receiving enough money from streaming platforms. But the people who post on this do also face stigma. Kurtz has lost his funding.

What other criticism have creators faced? I think people suddenly associate you with porn if you post on OnlyFans. And as we've discussed, that's not necessarily the case. If their fans just like them for the music and they don't like the porn association, they may stop listening to them if they're an artist. Or it's quite complicated because there is such a stigma attached to OnlyFans still. So it's reputationally damaging potentially. Yeah.

Yes, and OnlyFans did actually try and step away from adult content in general in 2021. There was a five-day period where a lot of sex workers were very upset because they thought that OnlyFans would no longer be a place where they could post content and it would purely be, they say, cooking videos, fitness, music videos. OnlyFans said that they had to consider

consider doing this because they were struggling to get funding from banks. So it's not just stigma from fans, but it's also stigma from the financial world. And they ended up finding a solution and they stuck with adult content as well as other content.

And OnlyFans is also now up for sale. Why is that? Reportedly, yes. We don't know very much about this quite secretive deal that's going on behind the scenes. OnlyFans have refused to comment on it previously. They're not saying much. But it has been reported that they are trying to sell to an investors group for around US$8 billion. For context, gross revenue of OnlyFans in 2020, when it really took off because of the pandemic...

was just over $300 million. Five years later, and you're selling for $8 billion. That's huge. Charlotte, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

It's not just the UK and the US where OnlyFans has gained popularity. This business model has spread to different continents and it's even led to the development of a similar app in Nigeria called All Access Fans. It describes itself as a platform where the mantra is to explore, enjoy and elevate your fan experience. Here's a tech reporter from Nigeria to explain more.

Hi, I'm Chimgoziru Mokoma, senior reporter at TechPoint Africa and a journalist covering Africa's tech scene. Generally, I'd say these platforms like OnlyFans and All Access fans have experienced steady growth over the past few years. In Africa, for instance, platforms such as All Access fans have begun to gain traction. OnlyFans remains the most dominant. It has over 3 million creators and more than 300 million subscribers.

registered users globally. But just to give you a sense of the scale that the ones in Africa, for example, have all access funds in just one year has already attracted over 100,000 users. The laws around it, they're largely vague because these platforms are relatively new territory for most policies and

And so we don't really have legal frameworks that capture the scale or the breadth of what they currently cover. In many countries, the regulations around online content, particularly adult material, is either vague or inconsistently enforced. Governments have typically placed some scrutiny on payment flows on these platforms. So pornographic sites, they've typically had much more regulatory scrutiny. So especially because of the money laundering risk. They are also...

illegally obligated to remove illegal content, that's material that includes child exploitation, human trafficking, or non-consensual acts. Stigmas play a huge role because platforms like OnlyFans and All Access Fans, growth has primarily been driven by adult content creators, right? And that often influences the way they are perceived. Now,

Now, in many African countries, cultural norms around sexuality and public expression are still deeply traditional, and so creators in this category typically face the same stigma that sex workers will or do face.

Some things are changing. One is that visibility is growing. More creators are speaking openly about their work on these platforms, but that's partially because of the business model that they operate. Now, OnlyFans and All Access fans only monetize an audience. Creators can't build an audience on these platforms, so they need an existing audience, typically online.

on another social media platform. So as a result of that, they are dependent on mainstream social media platforms. So you have the likes of Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat that helped them build that following media now transfer to these platforms. Occasionally we see this visibility push them into public conversations and that's either because of controversial things or because they are getting support or maybe just viral posts.

Now, if you've enjoyed this episode, we've done another one explaining how musicians make their money from royalties, touring and streaming. It's not just OnlyFans. And you can watch or listen to that one on YouTube, on the BBC World Service's YouTube channel or your favourite podcast platform. I'm Hannah Gelbart. That is it for today. Thank you for joining us. This is What In The World from the BBC World Service.