Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on Playboy.com in 2020 ad was written by Alex Thomas.
When Bella Thorne joined OnlyFans and crashed the site in August, it was the least surprising thing to happen on the platform. OnlyFans had been aimed toward a moment like Thorne’s for a while; similarly, the adult industry had been heading for a moment like the rise of OnlyFans for years.
If you’re not familiar with her work, Thorne achieved C-list mainstream fame first on the Disney Channel sitcom Shake It Up, which ran from 2010 to 2013, and subsequently in Adam Sandler’s 2014 movie Blended and a 2015 Alvin and the Chipmunks sequel. She wasn’t exactly famous, but was notable in that auxiliary sort of way where people recognized her name after you read her IMDb page aloud to them.
In the first week after she joined OnlyFans, Thorne told the Los Angeles Times, she made $2 million by charging a subscription rate of $20 per month. It was a massive payday that had a number of consequences. First, everybody was suddenly talking about OnlyFans and everybody was talking suddenly about Bella Thorne.
But the immediate rise to relevance was not smooth. Some of Thorne’s subscribers claimed she charged $200 for a photo she had allegedly promoted as “nude” but that didn’t fulfill that description. They demanded their money back from OnlyFans and the platform made a number of changes, including reducing the ceiling for tips to $100. OnlyFans has denied that the changes were a result of Thorne’s $2 million haul, but sex workers were unconvinced. In a statement, OnlyFans told Playboy, “All policy changes are thoughtfully implemented with the safety and support for our users and content creators at top of mind. Our objective remains to provide the best platform possible for the OnlyFans community. We can confirm that any changes to transaction limits are not based on any one user.”
The platform also said “verified” creators can receive $200 per tip, explaining, “the new max individual tip a user can give to a creator is limited to $100 initially. After they are verified, it goes up to $200.” But multiple verified creators who spoke to Playboy said the tip ceiling on their accounts is $100, not the $200 figure OnlyFans cited.
Sex workers on the platform have been periodically frustrated with the Kafkaesque nature of OnlyFans for months, and most weren’t surprised when Thorne’s entrance shook the platform. “She’s not the first celebrity to do this,” OnlyFans creator and porn star Joslyn Jane says. “She was the big name that blew it out of the water because she made so much money, but it’s been going on for a while.”
Another glaring reason Thorne’s appearance on OnlyFans infuriated so many sex workers on the platform was her apparent disregard for their community. After she crashed the site and the pay scale was changed, Thorne offered differing explanations. None of them were particularly convincing. Initially, she claimed she was making a movie with filmmaker Sean Baker. But Baker, who did not respond to requests for comment from Playboy, immediately shot down that statement, saying in a tweet, “I’m NOT attached to this project.… Earlier this month, I had a conversation with Ms. Thorne and discussed a possible collaboration in the far future that would focus on her life and the circumstances leading her to joining OnlyFans.”“On that call,” he added, “I advised her team to consult with sex workers and address the way she went about this as to NOT hurt the sex work industry. This has been the extent of my involvement.”
After Baker’s denial, Thorne posted a string of tweets, saying she hoped to “remove the stigma behind sex, sex work, and the negativity that surrounds the word SEX itself by bringing a mainstream face to it. [That’s] what I was trying to do, to help bring more faces to the site to create more revenue for content creators on the site.”
In another tweet, she issued an apology to sex workers on the platform. “I am a mainstream face and when you have a voice, a platform, you try to use [it] in helping others and advocate for something bigger than yourself,” she wrote. “Again in this process I hurt you and for that I’m truly sorry.” Thorne also claimed she was meeting with OnlyFans “about the new restrictions.” OnlyFans has not responded to Playboy’s request for a comment on that dialogue or whether it even materialized.
UNLV gender and sexuality studies professor Lynn Comella, who co-authored the 2015 book New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law, told Playboy, “One of the things this moment reveals to me is a real naivete—and I think it has to be called that—on the part of Bella Thorne, to do whatever it was she thought she was doing. And it’s not even clear what she was doing, because her story has changed. Was it a PR stunt? Was it research, as she said, for some kind of project?”
Comella also said Thorne’s rationale that her mainstream face on OnlyFans would destigmatize sex work was “problematic.”
Mainstream celebrities like Thorne joining OnlyFans brought legitimacy and name recognition to the platform. Cardi B announced on Instagram in August that she was joining OnlyFans, but, unlike Thorne, she said during that announcement that she wouldn’t be nude on the site. The site also enjoyed entrance to the annals of pop culture fame when Beyoncé name-checked it in a remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage.” OnlyFans quickly responded by issuing a statement to Rolling Stone saying, “Beyoncé, and any artist, are welcome to join OnlyFans at any time to foster a deeper connection with their fans.”Recently, OnlyFans has been pushing hard for influencers outside of sex work to join their platform. On Twitter, they constantly draw attention to those new creators. In a September 7 tweet, they wrote, “Calling all influencers! Time to monetise your content and connect with your fans like never before!”
That campaign has led many sex workers on the platform to fear that OnlyFans will someday push them off the platform they helped build. “It’s pretty pervasive,” says Kate Kennedy when asked about that fear. “I don’t know that it’s well-founded. OnlyFans still makes the vast majority of its money off sex workers.”
“I know some people who are now doing a lot more PG stuff and a lot less adult stuff on their OnlyFans,” Jane says. “A lot of people believe that because all these famous people are joining OnlyFans now and OnlyFans is pushing them to join the platform, it’s no longer going to be an adult site. That’s the fear a lot of people have.”
Sex worker advocate Kate D’Adamo echoed those fears. “Everyone should be really conscious about that possibility—sex workers building the profile of a website and then being removed from that website as soon as it becomes more mainstream,” she says. “Look at Tumblr. Sex work and sex literally made it relevant, and then sex workers got kicked off. The platforms that have allowed sex workers to stay have been targeted hardcore. Backpage got a lot of bad press and then [its founders] got charged with facilitating prostitution.”
“The idea that a website is going to take on that liability—I don’t trust any website,” D’Adamo added.
Platforms that mirror OnlyFans have been appearing en masse for the past several months. “I definitely think that now, a lot of companies are going to start to emerge that are going to be competing with OnlyFans,” Jane says.
But sex workers on OnlyFans note that running their profiles on a platform is a full-time job, and branching out to other platforms stretches them thin. “It’s always smart, as a sex worker, to diversify your online presence as much as you are able to,” Kennedy says. “While the spirit of that advice is good, the reality of it is that asking one person to manage 10 different social media platforms is a lot.”
“That impacts your money as well, because they have a tendency to cannibalize each other,” she says. “My advice has always been to make one your focus, but have the rest of them so if one goes down, you can bring the others up really quickly.”
Although Thorne’s entrance to OnlyFans and her massive payout was a very clearly defined moment in the life of the platform, sex workers are now at a much looser moment on OnlyFans. They have been eyeing it suspiciously but hopefully—with few options available to their industry. But the future of the industry and what platforms it functions on is much less obvious.