Published March 26, 2025
Dirty deeds really are done dirt cheap. The refrain from AC/DC’s song about an affordable hitman applies to other sordid endeavors, such as online sex work.
Recent reports reveal that OnlyFans—largely driven by pornography—is booming, but that most of its “content creators” are not sharing in the bounty. The new numbers show that content producers make, on average, about $108 a month—and that is misleadingly high, because the distribution is extremely top-heavy. The top 1% of content producers reportedly earn about $50,000 a year, while the top 0.1% rake in about 15 times that—around $750,000. Meanwhile one (very pro-porn and prostitution) outlet reported that earning only “about $20 a month” is still enough to put someone “in the top 29% of creators.”
This reporting confirms a 2021 New York Times finding that on OnlyFans “90 percent of creators take home less than $12,000 a year for what can amount to a full-time job.” The paper’s reporting on webcam sites suggests a similar dynamic, with a few models earning substantial sums from livestreaming strip shows and sex acts, but most earning very little.
Click here to continue reading.
Nathanael Blake, Ph.D. is a Fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His research interests include American political theory, Christian political thought, and the intersection of natural law and philosophical hermeneutics. His published scholarship has included work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Russell Kirk and J.R.R. Tolkien.
