Endless Thread on OnlyFans

Journalist Leon Neyfakh — known for the podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Backfired — wanted to know more about the massively popular and sprawling online ecosystem of OnlyFans. What are its nearly 400 million users really getting from it, and what can that tell all of us about relationships forged online? To find out, he teamed up with Gracie Canaan, a stand-up comedian and OnlyFans creator. Ben and Amory sat down with them at the WBUR Festival to hear all about their new podcast for Audible, OnlyFantasy, in which they examine this bustling digital marketplace of sex and emotions, and try to understand the role it plays in the lives and relationships of the buyers and sellers. Show notes: OnlyFantasy (Audible https://www.audible.com/podcast/OnlyFantasy/B0GR1WGGBP?srsltid=AfmBOorWhR-IUyLagqFi9yTZT-2rUsfk5HcglKXVb8m5BQE-xe4a3bKT) This conversation was produced by Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited down by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Speaker 01

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• 1:05Amory Sivertson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:13Speaker 04

  How are you all doing? All right.

• 1:15Amory Sivertson?

  Woo.

• 1:16Speaker 04

  Welcome.

• 1:16Amory Sivertson?

  Thanks for being here.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  Hey, Endless Threaders, that's us at WBUR's City Space a few weeks ago, getting ready to talk about OnlyFans.

• 1:31Amory Sivertson?

  And if you don't know what OnlyFans is, ask your husband. Just kidding. Really, that's a joke made by one of our onstage guests, who is among the 4.5 million creators on OnlyFans, each cultivating their own little online community.

• 1:48Speaker 04

  Or, for some of them, not so little, because OnlyFans has 400 million users.

• 1:55Amory Sivertson?

  And journalist Leon Nafok wanted to know more about this online ecosystem. You may know him as the creator and host of podcasts like Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Backfired. But for this new show, he teamed up with Gracie Canaan, a stand-up comedian and OnlyFans creator, to examine this bustling online marketplace of sex and emotions and try to understand the role it plays in the lives and relationships of the buyers and sellers.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Leon and Gracie's new podcast from Audible is called Only Fantasy, and they told us all about it at the WBUR Festival. Take a listen.

• 2:35Amory Sivertson?

  So for the uninitiated, I figured, Gracie, we would start with you. For people who do not know what OnlyFans is, you are a creator on OnlyFans. How would you describe it?

• 2:45Speaker 05

  You know, it's so funny, because even after making this podcast, I feel like I still don't have a succinct log line of what this is. It is a platform that is really like an all-in-one for digital sex workers, right? So it's something that brings, or digital creators. It doesn't even have to be sex work. It is something that combines selling your videos with chats, with live streams. So it's really a one-stop-shop for creators and subscribers to connect, whatever the content is.

• 3:18Amory Sivertson?

  What sorts of things are OnlyFans subscribers paying for?

• 3:22Speaker 05

  For me specifically, I think, well, there are tiers. So I have, you know, mass PPVs, pay-per-views, which is like, I'll send those out to everyone, and those can be, they're not, honestly, they're not very explicit. I try to make people feel connected and maybe a little bit sexual in a creative way. So it might be me like doing a little dance, or me doing something like pouring water on myself, or I don't know, like, oh, there we go, literally falling apart. What's up, guys? Yeah, Cassio.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  Taking your watch off.

• 3:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That could be a cute thing.

• 4:02Amory Sivertson?

  You got that for free.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is the beginning of a striptease, guys. So I just want you to know. And then I think mostly people do pay for a connection. So if I get like an $100 tip out of nowhere, that's someone who really wants to chat to me. And then there's all, and that's the cool thing, is every creator has their main source of revenue, right? So whether it's, some people rely really heavily on custom videos, right? Where they sell something for $100 plus. Some people...

• 4:35Speaker 06

  Or someone asks you, do this for me.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And then you, you know, that's like a bespoke piece, so to speak. And then some people are like, high volume PPVs, some people are live. So I think for me, people pay really for like any kind of conversation. That's, that's what people feel the most connected to.

• 4:56Speaker 06

  The phrase that I remember clarifying a lot for me was the girlfriend experience, which was a phrase I'd heard from watching the TV show,

• 5:05Speaker 06

  where it's about like a, like a, like a, what's the opposite of a digital sex worker? A real, not a real sex worker. Sorry.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  IRL, flesh and blood sex worker.

• 5:15Speaker 06

  Flesh and blood sex worker.

• 5:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Broadcast sex worker.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 5:19Speaker 06

  But in the OnlyFans, yes, analog, thank you. But in OnlyFans context, it's someone, it's almost like having a long distance relationship with someone, right? You're texting with them, you're saying, good morning, good night. You're sort of telling them about your day. It feels like you have a girlfriend who you have this special access to through your phone.

• 5:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I'll just add to that, like, I do a lot of what I call like connection builders that are free. So I will do a lot of just like good morning voice memos. It's really about like taking intimacy and scaling it to now, you know, five, 6,000 people. So sending a voice memo, sending a good night memo, making someone feel special. And then in all of those free relationship builders, that gets someone invested so that I can take all their money. No, so that, you know, obviously like they want to stick around and they, they want to. So it's, it's really interesting in that way.

• 6:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's interesting too that you talk about it as a connection, that you're building a connection. Cause Lee and I, I feel like in the, in the podcast, you talk about AOL Instant Messenger as a, as a kind of precursor to this in a way. And your experience with someone on, on AIM.

• 6:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I thought of AIM as a reference point after sort of initially being pretty deeply skeptical of why someone would want the thing Gracie is describing. Like, you want to pay someone to pretend to like you through the phone? Like, it made no sense to me. Like, you want to, you're paying to. Sort of have these snatches of communication. You're paying to just almost have a more vivid imagination of this other person out there somewhere. And then I was like, oh, wait, I sort of did that. I didn't pay for it, but I sort of did this when I was a teenager and I used AOL Instant Messenger,

• 7:14Speaker 06

  which was for those who, for those who weren't there, was like, was this, was like a really, I think, undersung advance in the internet where suddenly you could find out the screen name of the girl in your class or the girl you went to summer camp and.

• 7:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  College, I used it a lot in college.

• 7:34Speaker 06

  That's cool.

• 7:37Speaker 06

  I think I used it in college too, though I think I might have moved on to G chat by then.

• 7:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're like, who's around? Waiting for that door opening.

• 7:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so I remembered having quite intense relationships with people I either never met or, you know, met once and never again. And then I was like, okay, I really got a lot out of that. I could imagine someone wanting to pay for it.

• 7:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  At the very beginning of the show, Leon, you talk about kind of how you got into making this podcast series, which might have something to do with an OnlyFans creator named Annie. We hear from Annie at the beginning of this series and Annie explains this kind of key difference between what we think of as traditional pornography and specifically OnlyFans. Let's take a listen to that.

• 8:27Speaker 06

  When I first got curious about this and asked Annie about it, she offered an explanation involving a guy who once paid her 800 bucks to make a video of herself wearing a pair of shoes that he had bought her and smushing a bunch of corn dogs with the high heels.

• 8:41Amory Sivertson?

  I promise you, your favorite porn star is not about to call your name and step on a corn dog for you. So like, yes, you can watch porn, but those porn stars that you watch will never know your name, will never speak to you. These OnlyFans girls are paid to acknowledge your existence.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  I had always pictured OnlyFans as a one-way street, a place to publish exclusive content that your most motivated fans could pay to look at. End of story. Annie told me that I'd been missing the point. Most of the money people made on OnlyFans, she said, came from more than just being looked at. It came from maintaining quasi-personal relationships with subscribers over weeks or months or even longer.

• 9:26Amory Sivertson?

  A lot of the people were just lonely and sad. So they really just genuinely wanted somebody to text them every day, text them good morning in the morning, good night at night, send them a couple of photos. Didn't even have to be like naked photos, just cute photos. Some were literally like me in an oversized hoodie in front of the mirror.

• 9:46Speaker 06

  But not all of them, Annie. You showed me, I remember, I remember you showed me a couple pretty racy things you posted.

• 9:51Amory Sivertson?

  Not all of them, but there were a lot of the times.

• 9:54Speaker 06

  I don't know if that was clear.

• 9:55Amory Sivertson?

  Wanted you in a hoodie, wanted you in a messy bun. They wanted you to not look like you, they were paying for you, basically. Well, you ruined the surprise. I was gonna ask you who Annie was, but surprise.

• 10:06Speaker 06

  Oh, sorry. Did everyone get that? It's his little sister.

• 10:11Amory Sivertson?

  So why, why did you, other than the fact that you're a sister, or maybe your sister was a key component of why you wanted to look into OnlyFans? But what set off you making a whole series about OnlyFans?

• 10:23Speaker 06

  Well, so OnlyFans took off as a platform during the pandemic, when people, you know, for all the obvious reasons. People were at home, people were out of work, people were lonely. And in the five years or so since, which takes us right up to when I think we started working on this, it had exploded to the point where the numbers were just astonishing. Like, and I don't remember where they were exactly then, but now we're talking about more than 400 million people on there as subscribers and 4.5 million, I believe, as creators.

• 11:04Speaker 06

  These are just unfathomable numbers because it suggests that this is, this thing that, you know, one might be tempted to think is a, you know, fringe activity that is like happening on the margins is in fact utterly mainstream.

• 11:25Speaker 06

  And I just had no idea what was going on on there. As I said before, was sort of confused about like, why someone would want this. And because I, you know, I'm not trying to be Pollyannaish. I understand how people look at pornography. But this thing where you're like engaging in a fantasy relationship didn't, it didn't speak to my needs. And so I think I wanted to understand like, what was making this thing so popular? And what were people getting out of it on either side of the equation?

• 11:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  A really surprising thing, I think, that we learn in the show or, you know, is just true about OnlyFans. You know, Leon, you were speaking to just the size of the platform, which is, which is really incredible. But a surprising thing for, for podcasters, I think, is that there's no algorithm. Meaning there really isn't a way for OnlyFans. It is a very modern platform, as we were talking about. But there's no way, for instance, for users to search for specific creators on the platform.

• 12:27Speaker 06

  Or even a specific type.

• 12:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Or even a specific type. There's no, there's like no real sort of like tagging, I guess you could say. And also you don't really have a FYP. You don't really have a sort of feed that's being delivered onto you based off of your behavior, right?

• 12:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, which you would, I would, I would have expected that like any other social media platform in the year 2026, whether it's TikTok or Instagram or Twitter. You log on and you're bombarded with recommendations like, maybe you'll like this person. Maybe you like this person like scroll, scroll, scroll until you find someone you want to pay. And instead it's like a very web 1.0 structure where you sort of have to know that someone is on there whom you want to look at in order to even know where to look. There's no.

• 13:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's not even Ask Jeeves. There's no.

• 13:23Speaker 06

  You have to know their exact screen name. And I think, you know, the, the sort of interesting result of this, and Gracie can speak to this, is.

• 13:32Speaker 06

  Every individual creator is sort of, it's incumbent on them to promote themselves in sort of a hand-to-hand combat kind of way. So you go on, as a creator, you go on Reddit and you post in various message boards to say who you are, what you look like, what you do, what your, kind of person you are. You go on Twitter, you promote yourself in this very like, kind of one person at a time kind of way. And it feels kind of like a throwback. And I, I don't know, we asked a lot of people like, why don't they have a more modern recommendation engine? And the only thing we really heard that felt compelling was that by doing it this way, OnlyFans kind of farms out the promotion

• 14:16Speaker 06

  of the website to individual creators. So if it's, if it's your job to make people aware that you have an account, then you're promoting OnlyFans for free, basically.

• 14:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I'll just add to that. OnlyFans, at the time that we started this, we found out, and this is an exact number, quote, but OnlyFans itself, the company has like fewer than a hundred employees. And that shocks a lot of people. But if you go onto the interface, you'll see, they, they don't even have an app. So you cannot get it in the app store. It is a browser. It is completely bare bones. Because honestly, they don't have an incentive to optimize it.

• 14:53Speaker 06

  They're the most efficient company in the world.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:56Speaker 06

  In terms of, in terms of headcount to revenue.

• 14:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, they are already bringing in billions of dollars just with what they have. So if someone, if it's hard for users on the creator or the subscriber side, they're like, all right, figure it out. So I think that's probably why, mixed with, whether this is intentional or unintentional, on the, on the side of OnlyFans, there is something that makes it feel special by not having an FYP, right? You're like, oh, I heard my coworker has an OnlyFans. Or like, I wonder if this influencer has an OnlyFans. And you actually have to go there. Because in my anecdotal experience, subscribers are not there to just be like, I, I'm gonna follow someone new. They usually have, you know, one to three creators that they really

• 15:44Speaker 05

  like, that they found through another channel, whether it's TikTok, or Instagram, or Reddit, or whatever. And they, that's really what they're there for.

• 15:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is funny to me because I had this realization when, when Emery and I were listening to the show. And we were texting each other about it. I immediately texted Emery, OnlyFans is like podcasts for porn.

• 16:08Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 16:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which is to say that both of these forms.

• 16:11Speaker 06

  Those are also separately podcasts for porn as well.

• 16:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's right.

• 16:15Speaker 06

  We interviewed, we interviewed a guy that's in, sorry to interrupt you, but I can't let, let an opportunity go by without mentioning this. There's a guy who became famous as like a YouTube streamer. His name's Adam22. I don't know if anyone, if that rings a bell for anyone, but he has a podcast with his wife. It's a podcast freely available. You can listen to it anywhere. He and his wife interview a different OnlyFans creator on the podcast every week. They do like a Marc Maron style, inside the actor's studio style interview with her where they talk for an hour, an hour, 20 minutes. And then the conversation ends and they all have sex together. And that part is available as a video for pay, for money on OnlyFans.

• 16:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  On OnlyFans.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  It's an amazing, I mean, it's an amazing idea for a podcast.

• 16:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Great crossover. But both of these forms of media, I think, kind of struggle with discovery. People, you know, finding what they're looking for. Being a podcaster is, is like maybe in some ways being an OnlyFans creator and that you, you don't just need to make the content. You really have to market it.

• 17:17Speaker 06

  You gotta sell it.

• 17:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's what we're talking about. Does any of that ring true for you all as podcasters who made a podcast about OnlyFans?

• 17:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, I think I realized pretty early on that a lot of the work that an OnlyFans creator does is marketing, you know, self-promotion, kind of like all the same things you do if you're a journalist on Substack. It's like.

• 17:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Colabs.

• 17:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You're, you're trying to link, you know, it's, it's, I think it replicates the same mechanism for growing one's audience that you see in any other realm. I think it's just like the structure of this, of the social web, which is that as people become divorced from institutions and become their own personal brands, you are, if you want to.

• 18:04Speaker 06

  Make more money today than you did yesterday, you have to keep selling yourself. And one of our early, like, I don't know, thoughts of what our angle might be here is like, oh, maybe we're all just OnlyFans creators now. Some of us sell blog posts on Substack and others sell racy photos, you know?

• 18:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Corn dog squishing videos.

• 18:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're all OnlyFans creators and we're all whores. And if anyone, as someone who gets called a whore online all the time, like, we are, you are, you are selling your mind and body every day to make money. So I just want you guys to know, everyone in here, unless you're, you know, living off your parents' money, which is a different kind of whore, no.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  But I want to say, as far as the marketing, you know, that's something I was, this is my first podcast project, which I got incredibly lucky about. All of my other podcast friends hated me. But I'm a stand-up comedian, and so I am, for better or worse, very used to that relentless marketing grind. But a lot of creators we talk to kind of look back on their earlier days and realize, oh, my God, so much of this is marketing. It's, it's more than creating the actual content and chatting to people.

• 19:21Speaker 06

  It's going viral.

• 19:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's going viral.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  On Instagram, on TikTok.

• 19:24Speaker 05

  It's posting, you know, I spoke with an agency and they were like, if you're already posting, like, come back and talk to us when you're posting five times a day on TikTok, just on TikTok. So, I know, it's, and I mean, they're little things, they're not, these are not, you know, it's just like, ah, I'm doing a dance, or like cinnamon challenge, or whatever. But, so that is when, and this is something we can get into later, but that is really a huge incentive of why creators work with agencies. It's not that they, they can't, you know, it's not so much the chatting or the creation, it's the constant marketing push across all social media platforms.

• 20:02Amory Sivertson?

  We're going to talk more about agencies, because this is an important part of the business, but I want to hear from, another clip from the podcast, because this also speaks to the marketing aspect. This is a creator named Belle Grace that you talked to. And to your point, Leon, Belle Grace blows up accidentally during the pandemic through the act of marketing herself. She's posting videos on TikTok to try to get people to her OnlyFans page. And in December of 2020, one of those TikTok videos goes viral. The timing is great because she's just quit her day job because she's starting to make more money on OnlyFans. And let's listen to a bit of what happens when the video goes viral.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  I was just like, oh, my God, this is absolutely life-changing. It couldn't have happened at a better time of me leaving work and then going viral. It just kind of topped it all off. I always believed that things are just meant to be. And I just think that was just meant to be.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  According to Belle, the video got 58 million views, which translated into a massive jump in profit on OnlyFans.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I can actually pull up my stats. Just give me a second.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  So September, I did $3,200. In October, $4,900. In November, I did $8,200. December, I did $14,300. And then are you ready for this one? This was my biggest jump. In January 2021, I did $38,945.

• 21:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's Leon at the end, I think.

• 21:37Amory Sivertson?

  I had to hear that just for Leon's gasp because it stopped me in my tracks, too, hearing that number. I think it captures what a lot of us were hearing. And we have a picture of the earnings statement, I believe, that we can show here just to prove these numbers climbing up and up and up. This is monthly income from OnlyFans for Belle Grace. So, Gracie, how unusual is this? And what can you say about, I don't know how many subscribers you have currently, but...

• 22:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do your earnings statements look like this?

• 22:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, way more, double, actually. Drinks on me after this. Well, one of the things that we learned, which makes sense, is, again, I can't remember the exact statistics anymore, but I think I know what you're gonna say.

• 22:22Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, 95%.

• 22:24Amory Sivertson?

  Seventy-five percent.

• 22:25Speaker 05

  Seventy-five percent of creator, yeah, please, thank you.

• 22:27Amory Sivertson?

  Seventy-five percent of creators make three hundred dollars a month or less.

• 22:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this is, this is definitely an exception.

• 22:35Amory Sivertson?

  Also relatable to podcasts where it's like.

• 22:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes. Top twenty-five percent.

• 22:40Amory Sivertson?

  Podcasts make money, the rest do not.

• 22:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. You know, and we, reminder that we hear the success stories and, and not the other ones, which we did look for, but believe it or not, we did not find a lot of guests willing to talk about how little money they make on OnlyFans. You know, Belle, I think with her, and she has, has said this, it was a perfect storm. She worked, I mean, she also worked very hard, she worked consistently, she enjoys the work, but having that happen in COVID was just, you know, and then she, she kept at it, she kept the momentum. So I've definitely seen spikes. I think I'm currently, I have two pages. I think I'm between like four and two percent. So that is.

• 23:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  What is that, I mean, four and two percent? Top four.

• 23:25Speaker 05

  Oh, sorry, top like four and two percent. So someone like Belle is probably like under one percent. She's probably like the top six percent or something.

• 23:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Zero point six or.

• 23:35Speaker 05

  Zero, yeah, zero point, like zero point one is Sophie Rain, you know, who makes

• 23:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Millions.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  Hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

• 23:44Amory Sivertson?

  We all know who that is, right?

• 23:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, she is, she will make, I think that her top subscriber has paid her a total of seven point four million dollars. And most of it is for phone calls.

• 23:54Amory Sivertson?

  One subscriber has paid her seven point four million.

• 23:57Speaker 05

  Subscriber seven point four million. So it's like, and she will say this, it's like, a lot of it is luck. A lot of it is, you know, hard work mixed with luck. But yeah, I think, I think that is a very rare thing. And that is kind of, people see those numbers and they're like, I'm going to get an OnlyFans. And it's like, all right, go, you know, it's not going to be thirty-four thousand dollars right off of that.

• 24:18Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 24:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  So the vast majority of creators are making three hundred dollars or less. The top, you know, one percent, less than one percent are making millions and millions.

• 24:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  OnlyFans is valued at 3.15 billion today. Can you break down a little bit for us, how the company makes money? And also, like, how do you see that, Gracie? Like, how does that work?

• 24:44Amory Sivertson?

  How do you make money?

• 24:45Speaker 05

  How do I make? I don't. I'm a stand-up comedian. No. They take 20% of all earnings, which some people complain about. But for the most part, I'm like, if I didn't have OnlyFans, this would be, it would be four different platforms that I would have to manage. I don't think I would make as much money. So for me, 20% seems like a low lift.

• 25:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Apple takes 30%. Yeah, I was gonna say, it's pretty normal. So like, 20% is actually pretty normal.

• 25:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So I don't have a problem with that. And they're actually quite, like, when you check your weekly, monthly statements, it actually just shows your net automatically. So they're not kind of dangling that. They're like, yeah, here's what you have. So yeah, that's how they make their money. That's it. They just take hours.

• 25:36Amory Sivertson?

  We have more of our conversation with Leon Nafok and Gracie Canon on their new podcast about OnlyFans in a minute.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. There's a part of high performance that drives you, shapes you, and pulls at you too. Rarely spoken, almost never examined. That's the quiet tension. Coming up, psychologist and executive coach Dr. Sharon Turbin with Steve Paliuka on what separates the leaders people follow from the ones they don't. Stay with us for a preview. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:28Speaker 02

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• 26:56Amory Sivertson?

  I want to jump ahead a little bit because time is just flying by as we knew it would happen. And I want to talk, you mentioned agencies. So, you know, the top, really successful creators can be represented by agencies. And Gracie, you talked about how you're offering the girlfriend experience, you're waking up in the morning and messaging your subscribers as if it's like, "Good morning, hun," whatever.

• 27:19Speaker 06

  That was really good.

• 27:21Amory Sivertson?

  Was that good? Do I have a future? I hear I can make a lot of money.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's talk after. You got a future.

• 27:29Amory Sivertson?

  So, one way to make a lot more money is to have people do that talk for you.

• 27:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, in a way, this was kind of the most, to me, intriguing part of this whole world is that people like Gracie, who have, how many subscribers did you say you have?

• 27:46Speaker 05

  I have like a little over 6,000 right now.

• 27:48Speaker 06

  Okay, 6,000 is a lot. And beginning, when Gracie and I first met, I think you had like 80, right? And so you were talking to everyone yourself.

• 27:55Amory Sivertson?

  Wow.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  When you get to thousands, suddenly you like can't really keep up. And you haven't made this jump, but you've thought about it. People can hire a company, essentially. There's a lot of these companies that are sometimes called agencies, sometimes called management companies, some people call them e-pimps for obvious reasons. And what they do is they take over your account. You know, you set up like a Dropbox or whatever where you send, where you submit your content, someone else posts it for you. And crucially, they hire what are called chatters, who will then chat for you with your subscribers. So you can have 100 conversations going at once, because it's 100 different people, some of whom are, you know, men

• 28:40Speaker 06

  in the Philippines, or in India, or in, you know, other parts of the world, who are being paid like $2 an hour, to have these romantic, sexual, sometimes just normal conversations with people who think they're talking to their crush. And so we interviewed a couple of these people who have this job. It's a really weird job, as you can imagine. And, you know, I think there's a, the difficult thing here is like, the user, in many cases, doesn't obviously realize that they're talking to some random person. Right. And they're quite disappointed when they realize it.

• 29:20Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, and this is so complicated, because, as you said, OnlyFans really, it's been around since 2016, but it really blows up during the pandemic. When everyone is at home, everyone is lonely. You know, we start hearing about the loneliness epidemic. And so you have potentially very lonely people, who, yes, they are paying to talk to someone like you, Gracie, or someone like Belle Grace, or whomever. And it's really easy to forget that you're paying for that relationship, and to feel like it's authentic. And, and you also talk to someone who works at an agency in the podcast. And when, you know, when you ask him about, does he feel conflicted about, you know, these customers feeling

• 30:05Amory Sivertson?

  taken advantage of, feeling like their emotions are being manipulated, he just says, well, yeah, but, I mean, they had to have known this was never a real relationship. But it, how do you think about that, Gracie, as a creator? Because these are very lonely people who you're talking to every day, and you have to... Um, you have to balance their real feelings with also, this is how you might pay rent.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, first of all, I want to say I am a huge like advocate for subscribers. I like, I love my boys. Like truly, I, and I will say, yes, there is a stigma and yes, it's correct that a lot of them are lonely, don't have social skills. There definitely are those people, but a lot of my subscribers, they're like pretty happily married or just like on it to support me or on it for fun or whatever. So, um, but I will say, you know, the, the agency, the, the manager of the agency we spoke to, um, he works at a boutique agency. He has, you know, all American really trained chatters. And I didn't judge him for, um, for doing that.

• 31:13Speaker 06

  Oh, I did.

• 31:14Speaker 05

  I know, I know. It was weird. It was because I was like, because he said, you know, this is a business. We do have to pay ourselves. We have to pay the creators, but can we do that while making these people still feel cared for? He goes, I have a lot of people working for me who chat, who care about the subscriber that they are assigned to. Um, and, and so I'm like, it's weird because you are still getting that care. Um, which is, it's, it's so weird for me to say as someone who really likes my subscribers. But then there's the other side of that, which is, you know, we talked to this basically cam girl farm kingpin in, uh, in Romania. And, uh, he's just like, I don't care. I pay my chatters $2.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  Take these guys for all their worth, like you by any means necessary. And I think I have like huge, we all that had huge moral problems with that.

• 32:05Speaker 06

  And I didn't see a big difference between that guy who was like unapologetic about his, uh, you know, the fact that he was taking advantage of specifically American men. He had this whole riff about how American men are specially, specially, uh, uh, easy to manipulate, um, because we have soft hearts.

• 32:23Speaker 05

  They have not seen war.

• 32:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:26Amory Sivertson?

  You could be called worse things than having a soft heart.

• 32:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then this other guy who is this like Los Angeles, you know, agent, basically, was kind of explained to us like, you know, the way I sleep at night is I think to myself, these men are paying for someone to pay attention to them. And guess what? Someone is. It may not be the person that they, that, that, whose name is on the account, but like, someone's doing that and that's what they're paying for.

• 32:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Still a connection.

• 32:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  But I, I feel like I have some subscribers where if I had a friend chat, talk, whoa, chat for me, because apparently I can't, is I, I think I have subscribers who would rather talk to someone than not talk to me at all because I can't get to them. So it's, it's, I don't know. It's, it's confusing. It's a gray area for me. But yeah.

• 33:16Amory Sivertson?

  We have some audience questions. Obviously, everyone wants in on this conversation and we are running out of time and it's so frustrating. By the way, you must listen to the podcast. The first three episodes right now are out. There are six parts. She mentioned that head of a management company in Romania. There are so many great

• 33:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Amazing characters.

• 33:35Amory Sivertson?

  Voices that they heard from in this podcast series. So please, please listen to it. But I do feel like we should ask, I hate asking AI questions, but we have to talk about AI. Because when we talk about chatters and we talk about the future of this, you also talk to someone who has made an AI creator on OnlyFans. So do you personally worry as a creator, Gracie, about AI swooping into the OnlyFans marketplace? And Leon, based on the people that you talk to, is that a direction that you think the sex industry might go in?

• 34:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's even more, it's like a step further than the person in the Philippines

• 34:11Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  in a way.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  I personally don't worry about it. For me, I think that the people who are gravitating towards AI creators are also the people that are gravitating towards creators that are completely run by agencies. So I don't view it as a threat to myself at all. I just think it's more a continuation of this like weird dystopian world, especially when you look at these AI creators on Instagram and you have real human men being like, you are so gorgeous. I want, then it's just like, whoa, where are people's minds? So I think it's more just disturbing, as we all know, than a

• 34:50Speaker 05

  Threat. I think that people will, maybe this is optimistic, but I don't think there is a replacement for human connection.

• 34:58Speaker 06

  I think the chatters are not long for this world because I think, you know,

• 35:03Amory Sivertson?

  The human chatters.

• 35:04Speaker 06

  Correct. Yeah. I think an AI will not make those weird grammatical choices that I, that tipped me off to the fact that I was talking to someone in a foreign country. We talked to a few men who were like, I would rather be duped by an AI than realize that I've been spilling my guts to some random guy who I, you know, who, who actually heard what I was saying, you know, like, I think people, and we've seen this, like, people like talking to their chatbots. They, a lot of people do it. Right, Gracie?

• 35:37Amory Sivertson?

  Yep.

• 35:40Speaker 06

  So I just think, I just think that the chat, the chatting function, I would expect will be taken over by AI. Yeah.

• 35:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  How do you feel about the morals of all of this? And like, sort of on balance, OnlyFans good, OnlyFans bad, somewhere in the middle, just a continuation? How, how, how did you come away from this project feeling about it as a platform?

• 36:02Amory Sivertson?

  Is it doing more harm than good to speaking to the loneliness piece of it?

• 36:07Speaker 05

  I, I honestly came out of this platform or out of this project more confused and less opinionated than I did when I went into it. I feel like, I mean, it is, it's a continuation of sex work. It's, you know, everyone has had the same problems with, whether it's OnlyFans or, you know, old school Victorian era prostitution. It's always been like, this is something shameful. This is something, why are you engaging in this as a consumer when you could be doing something in real life? So for me, it's like, it's, it's like the one ring. It's like all how you use it. Actually, wait, that's a terrible analogy because that was only, that couldn't be used for good.

• 36:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 36:51Amory Sivertson?

  Leon, did you have, yeah, go for it.

• 36:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Good or bad? I, you know, I've seldom like made a show where I knew at the end who like the heroes and who the villains were.

• 37:02Speaker 06

  But I think what I came to appreciate more, having done the reporting for this show, is that there are a lot of people out there who just don't have much of a social life. Like, they don't know anyone. Like, they don't know, they don't have, they don't go out, they don't have romance, they don't have flirtation, they don't have crushes. And the thing, the question we were grappling with is like, does having an outlet for those people reduce the chances that they'll go out and seek that stuff in real life? But at the same time, like, we also talked to plenty of men who genuinely got some fulfillment

• 37:46Speaker 06

  out of these relationships. And so it's hard to be mad at that.

• 37:51Amory Sivertson?

  Only Fantasy is the podcast. Leon Nafok, Gracie Cane, and give it up for them.

• 37:56Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 37:58Amory Sivertson?

  Thank you so much for being here.

• 37:59Speaker 05

  And to these guys as well.

• 38:00Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  Thanks, everyone.

• 38:02Amory Sivertson?

  That was our conversation with Leon Nafok and Gracie Cane at WBUR City Space as part of the WBUR Festival. It was produced and co-hosted by me, Amory Sivertson, and Ben Brock Johnson, and edited down just for you by producer Grace Tatter, with mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikes. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. See you then.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast with Dr. Sharon Churbin, psychologist, executive coach, and a close listener to what lives beneath high performance. Here she is with Steve Paliuka, who built Bain Capital and helped bring a championship back to Boston, on the thing the best leaders do that most don't. The best leaders kind of give credit and take blame. When something goes wrong, they're the first ones to take responsibility for it. And they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever problem there was, what went wrong. You miss the sales target.

• 39:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  On the salesperson, they reflect on themselves and what they could do better. Same thing, you know, what Joe Mazzulla does in basketball. If you see his press conferences and the Celtics don't play well, the first thing he says is, you know, I need to coach better. I made a mistake here. I made a mistake there. Not many coaches do that. But that's why the players, you know, love Joe, and that's why, another reason he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn. There are many, many more things like that I learned from people like Red Auerbach and my classmates from business school and sports and all the rest.

• 39:48Amory Sivertson?

  And really, what an array of leaders, because leadership is both the same and different depending on the environment that you're in.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Listen for more of the quiet tension wherever you get your podcasts.

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