In 2023 alone, creators on OnlyFans reached an earnings milestone that outran even the top compensation packages of the world’s highest-paid professional athletes. Content creators on OnlyFans collectively earned $6.6 billion, compared with the combined outlay to all NBA players that year of $4.9 billion. The surprising comparison speaks volumes to the growth in power of the creator economy and ways available in this digital age for individuals to monetize their talents.
Part of this earnings surge has to do with the structure in place at OnlyFans. While most other entertainment industries retain most of the profit and talents get a lesser share, OnlyFans pays creators 80% of what they make on the platform. This lens of being creator-friendly has found it very attractive, especially in comparison to film and adult entertainment industries, which mostly have distribution channels that take higher cuts. OnlyFans is pacing a revenue growth outpacing most professional sports leagues, with a count of over 305 million registered fan accounts at the end of 2023.
While the NBA is a population of about 500 relatively small, highly earning group of players, OnlyFans opens avenues of income for millions of creators-more than 4.1 million, to be exact.
This broad reach means that, though a few stars in both fields can make extraordinary amounts, there is great variation in the distribution of earnings. At the very top, OnlyFans’ creators are using a range of monetization tools, from tiers of subscription to pay-per-view content and personalized interactions, to earn huge incomes. The biggest names on the platform pull millions in annually, way outpacing even the highest-paid athletes.
But the average OnlyFans creator’s earnings tell a whole different story. Considering how well the top 0.1% of creators are doing, who earn more than 100 times their equivalents ranking in the top 10%, the average payout per creator was gained at just about $1,300 annually. That is huge income inequality on the platform, against the NBA’s relatively evenly dispersed salary scale, where even the players at the bottom get six-figure contracts.
In 2023, the growth of every aspect for OnlyFans was astonishingly remarkable. The user base on the platform increased by 28%, and net revenue increased by 20% to $1.31 billion. Besides this, the pre-tax profit of the platform jumped 25% to $658 million. These numbers are an indicator of the thriving dominance of online platforms that give power to the creators themselves against the traditional industries of entertainment and sports.
The rise of the creator economy brings a dynamic change in modern entrepreneurship, and that could be exemplified by OnlyFans: an industry previously at the whims of a few high-profile stars and massive corporate entities democratizes and allows millions to find financial success directly through their fans. It may reach a point whereby this new breed of digital entrepreneurship will be hard for traditional industries, as in professional sports, to catch up with.
