Endless Thread on OnlyFans

Summary

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Endless Thread on OnlyFans

Podcast: Endless Thread by WBUR
Episode Date: June 11, 2026
Guests: Leon Nayfak (journalist, podcaster), Gracie Kanan (stand-up comedian, OnlyFans creator)
Hosts: Ben Brock Johnson, Amory Sivertson

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Overview

This episode dives into the world of OnlyFans, exploring its unique blend of commerce, sex work, and digital intimacy. Hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson sit down live at WBUR City Space with Leon Nayfak and Gracie Kanan to discuss their Audible podcast "Only Fantasy," which probes not just the economics of OnlyFans, but its emotional and cultural impact on creators and subscribers. The discussion reveals the untold mechanics, personal stories, and moral complexity behind this now-mainstream digital platform.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is OnlyFans?

• Gracie Kanan's Perspective:
  • OnlyFans is “an all-in-one for digital sex workers, right? …But it doesn’t even have to be sex work. It’s selling your videos, chatting, live streams — a one-stop shop for creators and subscribers.” (02:30)
  • Content is both explicit and non-explicit, and connection is often the main product: “Mostly people pay for connection… any kind of conversation. That’s what people feel the most connected to.” (04:23)
• “Girlfriend Experience”
  • Ben explains, "It's almost like having a long-distance relationship...texting with them, saying good morning, good night..." (05:01)
  • Gracie scales intimacy: “Taking intimacy and scaling it to now 5,6000 people …free relationship builders get someone invested so that I can take all their money. No, I want them to stick around.” (05:26)

2. Psychology of Digital Intimacy

• Loneliness and Connection:
  • Many subscribers are seeking personal attention, not just sexual content:
    “A lot of the people were just lonely and sad, so they really just genuinely wanted somebody to text them every day…” – Annie (Ben’s little sister, OnlyFans creator) (09:11, 09:16)
  • “These OnlyFans girls are paid to acknowledge your existence.” – Gracie (08:33)

3. How is OnlyFans Different From Traditional Porn?

• Customization is Key:
  • Custom requests dominate income:
    “A guy… paid her $800 to make a video of herself… smushing a bunch of corn dogs with the high heels.” (08:12)
  • “Most of the money people made on OnlyFans… came from maintaining quasi personal relationships with subscribers over weeks or months or even longer.” – Ben (08:44)

4. Platform Mechanics: Discovery and Promotion

• No Recommendation Algorithm:
  • “There’s no algorithm… no real sort of tagging… you don’t really have a feed.” – Leon (11:41, 12:13)
  • Creators must self-promote: “You go on Reddit… Twitter… it’s a very hand-to-hand combat kind of way.” – Ben (13:07)
• Efficiency & Company Structure:
  • Fewer than 100 employees; no native app: “If it’s hard… they’re like, alright, figure it out.” – Gracie (14:12, 14:44)

5. Parallels with Podcasting & Creator Economy

• Marketing = Survival:
  • “Being a podcaster is like maybe in some ways being an OnlyFans creator…you don’t just need to make the content, you really have to market it, you gotta sell it.” – Leon (15:53, 17:10)
  • “We're all OnlyFans creators now. Some of us sell blog posts on Substack and others sell racy photos…” – Ben (18:10)
  • Gracie: “So much of this is marketing… it’s more than creating the actual content and chatting to people.” (18:12)

6. What Does Success Look Like?

• Viral Growth Stories:
  • TikTok as a marketing funnel: Creator Belle Grace went from $3,200/month to $38,945/month after a viral TikTok:
    “In January 2021, I did 38,945.” – Belle Grace (20:49)
  • But most creators do not see big money:
    • “75% of creators make $300 a month or less.” – Amerie (22:12)
    • “People see those numbers and they're like, I'm going to get on OnlyFans and it's like, all right, go... It’s not going to be $34,000 right off the bat.” – Gracie (23:30)
• Platform's Business Model:
  • “They take 20% of all earnings … for me, 20% seems like a low lift.” – Gracie (24:30)

7. Agency Model & “Chatters”

• As creators grow, many hire agencies that run their accounts, post content, and chat with subscribers (sometimes called "epimps").
• “Crucially, they hire what are called ‘chatters’ who will then chat for you with your subscribers. Some of whom are men in the Philippines or in India or in other parts of the world, who are being paid $2 an hour…” – Ben (28:14)
• Subscriber Deception:
  • Emotional and ethical quandaries: “It's a gray area… 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.” – Gracie (33:12)

8. Artificial Intelligence in Sex Work

• Will AI Replace Human Chatters?
  • “I think the chatters are not long for this world… an AI will not make those weird grammatical choices that tip me off…” – Ben (35:16)
  • Gracie is less worried, believing the human connection can’t be replaced:
    “Maybe this is optimistic, but I don’t think there is a replacement for human connection.” (35:16)

9. Morality and Social Impact

• Ambivalence & Reflection:
  • “I came out of this… more confused and less opinionated than I did when I went into it.” – Gracie (36:26)
  • “There are a lot of people out there who just don’t have much of a social life... Does having an outlet… reduce the chances that they’ll go out and seek that stuff in real life? …But… plenty of men… got some fulfillment out of these relationships and so it’s hard to be mad at that.” – Ben (37:11)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “OnlyFans is like podcasts for porn.” – Leon Nayfak (15:46)
• “You want to pay someone to pretend to like you through the phone. It made no sense… and then I was like, oh wait, I sort of did that…with AOL Instant Messenger…I could imagine someone wanting to pay for it.” – Ben (06:17, 07:28)
• “These OnlyFans girls are paid to acknowledge your existence.” – Annie (08:33)
• “I am a huge, like, advocate for subscribers. I love my boys, like, truly.” – Gracie (30:50)
• “We are all onlyfans creators. And we're all whores.” – Gracie (18:12)
• “OnlyFans is valued at $3.15 billion today.” – Amerie (24:03)
• “Maybe this is optimistic, but I don’t think there is a replacement for human connection.” – Gracie (35:16)

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• [01:01] - Introduction to OnlyFans conversation, live event setting
• [02:30] - Gracie defines OnlyFans for the uninitiated
• [04:23] - What people pay for: connection, custom content
• [05:01] - The “girlfriend experience” – intimacy at scale
• [08:12] - Key difference between OnlyFans and traditional porn (custom content, personal attention)
• [11:41] - Platform structure: no algorithm, self-promotion
• [14:12] - Company background: “fewer than 100 employees,” no native app
• [15:46] - The podcasting analogy, discovery problems for both media
• [18:10] - “We’re all OnlyFans creators now”
• [20:49] - Belle Grace’s earnings spike after going viral
• [22:12] - Reality check: most creators make $300/month or less
• [24:30] - How OnlyFans and creators make money
• [28:05] - The rise of agencies and “chatters”
• [32:24] - Moral ambiguity: differences in agency practices
• [35:16] - AI chatters and the future of digital connection
• [36:26] - Final reflections: confusion, morality, fulfillment

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Conclusion

This episode offers a nuanced window into OnlyFans—a digital ecosystem where money, intimacy, loneliness, and technology intersect. Its creators and users are redefining not just sex work, but also what it means to seek and sell connection online. The line between audience, customer, and partner blurs, as does the very meaning of authenticity and agency in an increasingly digital age.

Listeners interested in the human and business aspects of the creator economy, digital sex work, and the ethics of paid digital intimacy will find "Only Fantasy" and this discussion both thought-provoking and deeply relevant.

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For more stories and full context, listen to “Only Fantasy” on Audible and follow Endless Thread for additional episodes.

Transcript

[Gracie Kanan]

You have one new message translating Disney and Pixar's Hoppers is now available on Disney.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

You could say that again.

[Gracie Kanan]

Critics are calling it Pixar's funniest movie ever and a wildly entertaining ride. Blizzard Potato.

[Amerie Sivertson]

It's certified fresh and verified hot.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Now we party.

[Amerie Sivertson]

This is incredible.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Wow. I am clearing the rest of the day.

[Gracie Kanan]

Disney and Pixar's Hoppers now available on Disney.

[Amerie Sivertson]

Rated pg. Support for WBUR comes this comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Mehrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And of course, is Business Broken? Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[Gracie Kanan]

WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

[Leon Nayfak]

How y' all doing? All right, welcome.

[Gracie Kanan]

Thanks for being here.

[Leon Nayfak]

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

[Amerie Sivertson]

And if you don't know what OnlyFans is, ask your husband. Just kidding.

[Gracie Kanan]

Really?

[Amerie Sivertson]

That's a joke made by one of our onstage guests who is among the 4 1/2 million creators on OnlyFans, each cultivating their own little online community.

[Leon Nayfak]

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

[Amerie Sivertson]

and journalist Leon Nayfak 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 Kanan, a stand up comedian and OnlyFans creator, and 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.

[Leon Nayfak]

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.

[Amerie 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?

[Gracie Kanan]

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

[Amerie Sivertson]

the content is, what sorts of things are OnlyFans subscribers paying for.

[Gracie Kanan]

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 D, 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, Casio taking your watch off? Yeah. Yeah. That could be the cute thing, right?

[Amerie Sivertson]

You got that for free?

[Gracie Kanan]

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 a hundred dollar 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 a hundred dollars. Plus some people do.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Where someone asks, you do this for me?

[Gracie Kanan]

Yeah, exactly. And then you chart, 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 what people feel the most connected to.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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 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. Whoa, sorry.

[Gracie Kanan]

Irl. Flesh and blood sex worker.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Flesh and blood sex worker.

[Leon Nayfak]

A broadcast sex workers.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

But in the OnlyFans. Yes. Analog. Thank you. But in the 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.

[Gracie Kanan]

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 taking intimacy and scaling it to now 5,6000 people. So sending a voice memo, sending A goodnight 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 obviously they want to stick around and they want to. So it's really interesting in that way.

[Leon Nayfak]

It's interesting too, that you talk about it as a connection, that you're building a connection. Because, Leon, I feel like in the podcast you talk about AOLA Instant messenger as a kind of precursor to this, in a way. And your experience with someone on aim.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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. You want to pay someone to pretend to like you through the phone. It made no sense to me. 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, which was for those who,

[Leon Nayfak]

for

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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 college.

[Leon Nayfak]

I used it a lot in college. That's cool.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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

[Leon Nayfak]

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

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Yeah. And so I remembered having quite intense relationships with people I either never met or 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

[Leon Nayfak]

for it 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 only fans 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.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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.

[Amerie Sivertson]

I promise you, your favorite porn star

[Gracie Kanan]

is not about to call your name

[Amerie Sivertson]

and step on a corn dog for

[Gracie Kanan]

you so, like, yes, you can watch

[Amerie Sivertson]

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.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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.

[Gracie Kanan]

A lot of the people were just lonely and sad, so they really just

[Amerie Sivertson]

genuinely wanted somebody to text them every day, text them good morning in the morning, good night at night, send them a couple photos. Didn't even have to be like naked

[Gracie Kanan]

photos, just cute photos. Some were literally like me in an oversized hoodie in front of the mirror.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

But not all of them. Annie, you showed me. I remember it. I remember you showed me a couple pretty racy things you posted. This is my little sister, by the way.

[Gracie Kanan]

There were a lot of the times,

[Ben Brock Johnson]

I don't know if that was.

[Gracie Kanan]

Wanted you in a hoodie, wanted you

[Amerie Sivertson]

in a messy bun.

[Gracie Kanan]

They wanted you to not look like you. They were paying for you, basically.

[Amerie Sivertson]

Well, you ruined the surprise. I was going to ask you who Annie was, but surprise.

[Leon Nayfak]

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

[Amerie Sivertson]

So why did you, Other than the fact that your 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?

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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 took. 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, 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. These are just unfathomable numbers because it suggests that this is this thing that one might be tempted to think is a fringe activity that is happening on the margins, is in fact utterly mainstream. 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, you know, I'm not trying to be Pollyanna here, Like, I understand why people look at pornography, but this thing where you're like engaging in a fantasy relationship, 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.

[Leon Nayfak]

A really surprising thing, I think, that we learn in the show or is just true about OnlyFans. Leon, you were speaking to just the size of the platform, which is really incredible. But a surprising thing 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 or

[Ben Brock Johnson]

even a specific type.

[Leon Nayfak]

Or even a specific type. There's no real sort of 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 unto you based off of your behavior.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Right, 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 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.

[Leon Nayfak]

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

[Ben Brock Johnson]

There's no, you have to know their exact screen name. And I think, you know, the sort of interesting result of this, and Gracie can speak to this, is 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 kind of person you are. You go on Twitter, you promote yourself in this very kind of one person at a time kind of way. And it feels kind of like a throwback. And I don't know, we asked a lot of people, why don't they have the 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 of the website to individual creators. So if it's your job to make people aware that you have an account, then you're promoting OnlyFans for free. Basically, yeah.

[Gracie Kanan]

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 Only Fans itself, the company has like fewer than 100 employees. And that shocks a lot of people. But if you go onto the interface, you'll see 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.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

They're the most efficient company in the world.

[Gracie Kanan]

Yeah.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

In terms of. In terms of headcount to revenue.

[Gracie Kanan]

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 side of OnlyFans, there is something that makes it feel special by not having an fyp. Right. You're like, oh, I heard my co worker has an OnlyFans. Or 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'm going to follow someone new. They usually have, you know, one to three creators that they really 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.

[Leon Nayfak]

This is funny to me because I had this realization when Amory and I were listening to the show

[Ben Brock Johnson]

and we

[Leon Nayfak]

were texting each other about it. I immediately texted amrie, Only fans is like podcasts for porn.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Yep.

[Leon Nayfak]

Which is to say that both of these forms.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

So there are also separately podcasts for porn as well.

[Leon Nayfak]

That's right.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

We interviewed a guy. Sorry to interrupt you, but I can't let an opportunity go by without mentioning this. There's a guy who became famous as, like, a YouTube streamer. His name is Adam22. I don't know if anyone 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 Actors 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. On OnlyFans, it's an amazing. I mean, it's an amazing idea for a podcast.

[Leon Nayfak]

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, you got to sell it. What we're talking about. Does any of that ring true for you all as podcasters who made a podcast about OnlyFans?

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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

[Leon Nayfak]

It's like collabs.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You're trying to link. 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 the social web is that as people become divorced from institutions and become their own personal brands. If you want to make more money today than you did yesterday, you have to keep selling yourself. And one of our early, 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

[Leon Nayfak]

know, corn dog squishing videos.

[Gracie Kanan]

Yeah, we're all onlyfans creators. And, 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 horror. No, 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.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

It's going viral.

[Gracie Kanan]

It's like trying to go viral on Instagram. On TikTok, 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, I'm doing a dance or like, cinnamon challenge or whatever, but that. 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.

[Amerie 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 Bel 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.

[Gracie Kanan]

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

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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

[Gracie Kanan]

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

[Leon Nayfak]

That's Leon at the end.

[Amerie Sivertson]

I think I had to hear that just for Leon's gasp, because it. 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. The earnings statement, I believe that we can show here just to prove these numbers climbing up and up and up. These. This is monthly income from only fans for Belgrace. So, Gracie, how unusual is this? And what. What can you say about. I don't know how many subscribers you

[Leon Nayfak]

have currently, but do your earning statements look like this?

[Gracie Kanan]

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 even remember the exact statistics anymore,

[Amerie Sivertson]

but I think I know what you're gonna say.

[Gracie Kanan]

Yeah, 95%. 75%. 75% of creators. Yeah, please. Thank you.

[Amerie Sivertson]

75% of creators make 300amonth or less.

[Gracie Kanan]

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

[Amerie Sivertson]

Also relatable to podcasts, where it's like, top 25% of podcasts make money. The rest do not.

[Gracie Kanan]

Yeah, yeah, go on. You know, and we remind her that we hear the success stories 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, Bel, 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 4 and 2%. So that is.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

What is that for? I mean, 4 and 2%.

[Leon Nayfak]

Top four.

[Gracie Kanan]

Oh, sorry. Top, like 4 and 2%. So someone like Belle is probably like under 1%. She's probably like the top 6% or something.

[Leon Nayfak]

0.6 or 0.6.

[Gracie Kanan]

Yeah, 0.6. Like, 0.1 is Sophie Rain, you know, who makes millions, hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

[Amerie Sivertson]

We all know who that is, right?

[Gracie Kanan]

Yeah, she is. She will make. I think that her top subscriber has paid her a total of $7.4 million. And most of it is for phone calls. One subscriber, one subscriber, 7.4 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 on only Fans and it's like, all right, go. You know, it's not going to be $34,000 right off the bat.

[Amerie Sivertson]

Yeah.

[Leon Nayfak]

So the vast majority of creators are making $300 or less. The top, you know, 1%, less than 1% are making millions and millions. OnlyFans is valued at 3.15 billion today. Can you break down a little bit for us? How does, how the company makes money and also, like, how, like, how do you see that, Gracie? Like, how does that work?

[Amerie Sivertson]

How do you make money?

[Gracie Kanan]

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 only fans, 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.

[Leon Nayfak]

And Apple takes 30%.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Yeah, it's pretty normal.

[Leon Nayfak]

Yeah. So like 20% is actually pretty normal.

[Gracie Kanan]

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, here's what you have. So yeah, that's how they make their money. That's it. They just take hours.

[Amerie Sivertson]

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

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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[Gracie Kanan]

I

[Amerie Sivertson]

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, and awakening.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

That was really good.

[Gracie Kanan]

Was that good?

[Amerie Sivertson]

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

[Gracie Kanan]

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

[Amerie Sivertson]

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

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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?

[Gracie Kanan]

I have a little over 6,000 right now.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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.

[Leon Nayfak]

Wow.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

When you get to thousands, suddenly you 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 epimps for obvious reasons. And what they do is they take over your account, you set up a Dropbox or whatever 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 men in the Philippines or in India or in other parts of the world, who are being paid $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 I think the difficult thing here is the user in many cases doesn't obviously realize that they're talking to some random person. And they're quite disappointed when they realize it.

[Gracie Kanan]

Yeah.

[Amerie Sivertson]

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 taken advantage of, feeling like their emotion, 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 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. You have to balance their real feelings with. Also, this is how you might pay rent.

[Gracie Kanan]

Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to say I am a huge, like, advocate for subscribers. 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 or 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. But I will say, you know, the agency, the manager of the agency we spoke to, he works at a boutique agency. He has, you know, all American really trained chatters. And I didn't judge him for. For doing that.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Oh, I did.

[Gracie Kanan]

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. And so I'm like, it's weird because you are still getting that care, 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 talk to this basically Cam Girl farm kingpin in. In Romania, and he's just like, I don't care. I pay my chatters $2, take these guys for all they're worth, like you, by any means necessary. And I think I have, like, huge. But all that had huge moral problems with that.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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

[Gracie Kanan]

They have not seen war.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Yeah,

[Amerie Sivertson]

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

[Ben Brock Johnson]

And then this other guy, who is this Los Angeles agent, basically kind of explained to us, 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 whose name is on the account, but someone's doing that, and that's what they're paying for.

[Leon Nayfak]

Still a connection.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Yeah.

[Gracie Kanan]

But I feel like I have some subscribers where if I had a friend. Friend. Chalk, tack, chalk. Whoa. Chat for me. Because apparently I can't. Is 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.

[Amerie Sivertson]

But, yeah, 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.

[Leon Nayfak]

There are so many great, amazing characters,

[Amerie 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 Only Fans Marketplace? And Leon, based on the people that you talk to, is that a direction that you think the sex industry might go in?

[Leon Nayfak]

It's even more. It's like a step further than the person in the Philippines. Yeah, in a way.

[Gracie Kanan]

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

[Ben Brock Johnson]

I think the chatters are not long for this world because I think the human chatters. Correct. Yeah. I think an AI will not make those weird grammatical choices that tip 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 actually heard what I was saying. And we've seen this. People like talking to their chatbots. A lot of people do it. Right, Gracie?

[Gracie Kanan]

Yep.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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

[Leon Nayfak]

How do you feel about the morals of all of this? And like, sort of on balance, only fans good, Only fans bad. Somewhere in the middle. Just a continuation. How did you come away from this project, feeling about it as a platform?

[Amerie Sivertson]

Is it doing more harm than good, too? Speaking to the loneliness piece of it,

[Gracie Kanan]

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 only fans 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.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Yeah.

[Gracie Kanan]

Okay.

[Amerie Sivertson]

Leon did. You haven't. Yeah, go for it.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Good or bad. I, you know, I've seldom made a show where I knew at the end who the heroes and who the villains were. 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. 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 talk to plenty of men who genuinely got some fulfillment out of these relationships and so it's hard to be mad at that.

[Amerie Sivertson]

Only fantasy is the podcast. Leon Nayfak, Gracie Kanan, give it up for them.

[Gracie Kanan]

Thank you. And thank you so much to these guys as well.

[Ben Brock Johnson]

Yeah, thanks everyone.

[Amerie Sivertson]

That was our conversation with Leon Nayfak and Gracie Kanan at WBR City Space as part of the WBUR Festival. It was produced and co hosted by me, Amerie 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 Vikas. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. See you then.

[Gracie Kanan]

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[Amerie Sivertson]

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[Gracie Kanan]

Oh, these just the most perfect fitting

[Leon Nayfak]

jeans my stylist sent me.

[Gracie Kanan]

Oh hello you who didn't set one

[Ben Brock Johnson]

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[Amerie Sivertson]

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[Gracie Kanan]

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