Programs or People? OnlyFans Analysis Raises Questions About AI’s Potential Impact on the Industry
Who’ll win the adult entertainment race—or will they cross the finish together?
Matthew Ball, the current head of the investment company Epyllion and author of numerous finance-related articles for The Economist, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Time Magazine, recently posted an informative breakdown on OnlyFans, the massively popular adult live-streaming platform, which has a current revenue stream of 6.3 billion dollars.
Fascinating to be true, but more so is Ball’s concluding thoughts on the role AI-created content might play in the future, specifically if they’ll make human entertainers obsolete or prove—no matter how sophisticated their programming becomes—the industry will always need flesh-and-blood performers.
Dedicated, successful, significant
With quite a financial bang, Ball begins by stating OnlyFans hasn’t only surpassed 2010’s DeepMind or TikTok in 2014 but is without a doubt the most “dedicated creator economy platform … ever.”
Explaining its monumental prosperity, he continues:
“In 2024, OnlyFans generated $6.3 billion in gross revenues, up from $300 million five years earlier. Though the company is unlikely to ever match its pandemic growth rates given its current scale, revenues in FY 2023 grew 19% (or $1.1 billion) year-over-year, three percentage points greater than 2022 (which grew $754 million).”
As for how OnlyFans has been earning its profits, Ball points to several contributing factors, including a bevy of high-profile adult and non-explicit entertainers like Denise Richards, DJ Khaled, Cardi B, Carmen Electa, and Larsa Pippen.
A supplementary driving force was whensocial media platforms such as Reddit and Tumblr banned sexualized content, which rapidly made OnlyFans the net’s go-to-spot for what people couldn’t find—or enjoy—elsewhere.
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Then there’s OnlyFans’ financial enticements, as Ball explains: “Another reason for OnlyFans success is its high revenue share rate–80%–which far exceeds that which a creator might get as a performer working for a production company or other agency.”
Ball says it certainly appears like OnlyFans is “Slowly consuming the entire porn industry because creators and pornstars alike can make more money, in a safer way, while having greater autonomy and offering audiences experiences that feel more authentic, differentiated, and valuable.”
Where to go from here?
However, dark clouds may lie beyond OnlyFans’ otherwise brightly shining financial horizon.
The first might be Elon Musk lifting X’s (formerly Twitter) ban on explicit imagery, which might ultimately threaten OnlyFans’ near-monopoly on uncensored sexual content.
The second is the proliferation of artificial intelligence-generated media, which Ball reminds us has a lot going for it, not least of which is its ability to converse in multiple languages and thus reach far wider audiences, perhaps eventually offering hyper-realistic and fully interactive erotic experiences as well.
The competition between inorganic and organic creators may worsen further should the lines separating the two grow increasingly blurry. For example, it’s already fairly common for performers to use automatic, AI-generated responses when communicating with their fans.
Working together, not apart
Yet, this same near-merging of artificial and natural intelligence in the adult entertainment industry might demonstrate why both may end up working with and complimenting the other.
Though concluding his OnlyFans financial examination with a question mark, Ball’s AI concerns raise some intriguing possibilities, as contemporary OnlyFans creators already employ AI-assistants.
In the future, they might also be used to modify their videos or photos as well, reducing the time, energy, and money to make more.
Messages may not be the only part of running an OnlyFan business that is potentially manageable by AI. Why not turn the boring side of things over to them, from posting content to booking appointments? The same goes for shipping out personalized products or following through with marketing or PR leads.
Even if AI-generated content reaches a point where it becomes virtually indistinguishable from human creations, that doesn’t necessarily mean the people doing the creating will end up unemployed.
Instead, sites like OnlyFans might provide us with a choice: one would offer the myriad benefits of an AI-generated entertainer, while the second, possibly costing slightly more, would offer all the delights only a human performer can offer.
As with OnlyFans, what’s around the bend is anyone’s guess. But also, like OnlyFans, what’ll never, ever change are our multitudinous desires—and whatever we feel will excite us the most.
Image Sources: Depositphotos
