OnlyFans, JustFor.Fans, and Online Identity

OnlyFans—a subscription service that basically acts as a monetized and explicit-content-friendly version of Instagram—has been a boon to adult performers over the past few years. (A quick search for “OnlyFans” on YNOT will show just how ubiquitous it’s become.) As rates for traditional porn scenes have continued to drop and opportunities for lucrative careers in tried-and-true adult entertainment avenues have kept drying up, OnlyFans and its competition, JustFor.Fans, have stepped in to help performers (and other social media influencers) create their own content on their own terms. It’s one of relatively few safe places for performers to experiment with more explicit content online…and pocket more of the money themselves. 

In a recent article from Wired, Jason Parham wrote, “OnlyFans, launched in July 2016 and took camming to a new realm, melding the internet’s earlier obsession with camming to its current fixation on influencer culture.” The mix of influencers and explicit content caught on, and, Parham reported, “It currently has 70,000 creators uploading content for some 7.5 million registered users; 25,000 new users sign up daily.”

OnlyFans and its younger but possibly hipper rival, JustFor.Fans, cater to the masses’ desire to see the online influencers they’re obsessed with in more personal, more authentic, and more vulnerable situations than their Instagram, their other social media, or their prerecorded porn scenes allow. “We have this need to have an authentic connection with people we admire or who we deem as famous,” Dominic Ford, founder of JustFor.Fans, told Wired. “As long as I’ve been in the [adult] industry, people have always looked to amateur stuff as more authentic and interesting. The thing now, it’s combined with social media, where you can actually connect with these people.”

And, Wired’s Parham also pointed out, these apps are also places where performers and influencers can play with identity. “Who an influencer is, even in moments of performance, is becoming even more muddied,” he wrote. “As OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans demonstrate, people can remake their identities, or be remade by them, in often surprising and unforeseeable ways.” Brooke Erin Duffy, a social media and creative labor professor at Cornell, told Parham, “The selves we portray on major platforms tend to meld into the most watered-down and palatable version of ourselves…But sites like OnlyFans throw open the doors to more daring, less consistent self-branding.”

Adult performers are already pros in the art of creating and utilizing different identities on camera. OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans are offering a cloistered yet profitable way for performers to experiment and build those on-screen identities — and to make bank while doing so.

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