Countering digital labor platforms’ algorithmic management: OnlyFans and the emergence of neo-patronage

Introduction

Creators operating within the online work platforms characteristic of media and entertainment industries are reliant on facilitating and mediating a sustained connection between themselves and their audiences. For media creators, the adaptability and flexibility afforded by the expanded economic structures of platform intermediaries – offering physical and digital services and tasks across a diverse range of industries to workers providing their own means of production – are both freeing and restrictive, as these changing marketplaces necessitate a lot of free labor while offloading financial and regulatory responsibilities onto the content creators themselves. Within these digital environments, thus, laborers are significantly affected by intermediary platforms’ algorithmic management. Within the last decade, direct-to-consumer platforms have emerged as an ‘answer’ to mainstream labor platforms’ algorithmic governance, affording a dual communality between performers and their audiences, and between performers and their peers. Content creators’ embrace of direct-to-consumer platforms exemplifies a conscious counter to the affective influence of the platform economy. As algorithmic management processes affect creators’ continuous, successful participation in their chosen digital labor platform, these counter-movements significantly affect the digital gig-economy by simultaneously amplifying laborers’ precarity and self-articulated perceptions of agency, constituting a hybridized model fundamentally affecting work and workers.

Far from passively or monolithically intermediating, the idiosyncratic variants and translations of individual platforms are essential to the creation and regulation of both product and labor markets. Particularly, patronage platforms – unlike traditional content hosting platforms – allow audiences to directly support the artists and artisans of their choice. This model of crowd-patronage differs from traditional forms of patronage in the scale and scope of support networks, allowing creators to be supported by a diverse, globally dispersed group of supporters contributing small-yet-consistent amounts of money. These patronage platforms, thus, function as plural intermediaries, acting as financial intermediaries between content creators and patrons, as regulatory intermediaries by means of their terms of service, and as cultural intermediaries through curation of their sites’ content. The patrons of direct-to-consumer platforms function as spatially dispersed benefactors, ushering in an era of ‘neo-patronage’ by financially supporting their chosen creators through subscriptions and commissions.

To illustrate the consequences of content creators’ embrace of direct-to-consumer patronage platforms, this manuscript focuses on professionals in one of the largest global media industries: adult entertainment. ¹ Adult entertainers – fundamentally dependent on personal recognizability and community building (Gorissen, 2024) – continuously push back against mainstream labor platforms’ vertically integrated structures to sustain their organizing and building of (collective) voice. In recognition of adult content creators’ widespread use of direct-to-consumer platforms and to contribute to scholarship in the field of critical labor studies, I chronicle and contextualize changes across labor platforms that have led to the diversification of the adult entertainment industry. This study centers the OnlyFans platform, a market leader in direct-to-consumer content hosting and distribution widely adopted by pornographic content creators. I work to answer the primary research question at the heart of this study: How does sex workers’ use of the direct-to-consumer platform OnlyFans help sustain their marginalized professional and personal identities by facilitating the patronage supporting their precarious labor position?

Answering this question helps demonstrate the ways technological change and innovation alter the kinds of labor that are possible, how labor takes place, and how an entire, well-developed media industry can be radically revolutionized in a short period of time, altering the relationships among platform intermediaries, laborers, and patrons in the process. Creators across media and entertainment industries may well take note of the ways in which these adult entertainment professionals work, survive, and thrive at the furthest reaches of marginalization.

Methodology

To account for the fragmented contexts within which contemporary creators produce their (adult) content, as well as facilitate and maintain interactions with their audiences across various social media profiles, scholars should heed the call to see media practices in the context of a wider media environment, rather than sequestering them into isolated events (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010); a media environment in which individuals use, read, consume, produce, and contribute, and in which collectives gather, grow, decline, and disintegrate over the space of time (Gorissen, 2020). Part of a larger project historicizing and contextualizing the adoption of direct-to-consumer platforms by adult content creators, ² I engaged in semi-structured qualitative interviews with North American adult entertainment industry professionals. During these conversations, many of these content creators – operating across the adult entertainment industry, in roles ranging from performer (e.g., veteran performer Vicky Vette and financial dominatrix Princess Mindy), to director (e.g., Bree Mills, the CCO of the studio Adult Time), to producer (e.g., Lily Sparks, founder and CEO of the production company Afterglow), to platform executive (e.g., Dominic Ford, the founder and CEO of the direct-to-consumer platform JustForFans) – expressed their varying experiences with adult direct-to-consumer platform. I subsequently contextualized and expanded upon these testimonials by situating them alongside similar explorations found in relevant adult entertainment industry news outlets: Adult Video News (AVN) and XBIZ, which from July 1, 2021 to December 31, 2024 respectively published approximately 350 and 200 reports, editorials, and opinion pieces that meaningfully concerned direct-to-consumer content creation.

The interpretive analysis started with reading all relevant transcripts and articles and descriptively coding them for recurring patterns and themes. Transcripts and articles were then reread and, using memos, categories were identified (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006). During this process, I searched for keywords and phrases that reflected adult content creators’ relationships with the social media and direct-to-consumer platforms hosting their content and communities. I coded the frames used to describe creators’ relationships with their chosen platforms, providing the basis for the subsequent conversations with research participants.

To come to a closer understanding of these emerging themes, this study is rooted in critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011) and reflexive thematic analysis (Braun et al., 2014). Critical discourse analysis posits the production, consumption, and interpretation of testimonials and texts as a social practice foundational to the creation and understanding of our world (Jørgensen and Phillips, 2002), recognizing the political, bilateral relationship between discourses and social structures in creating, supporting, or subverting power dynamics (Gee, 2011). Analyzing how these creators make sense of the (perceived) affordances and limitations governing their professional and social endeavors amid navigating their ongoing (para)social relationships with their benefactors and communities on direct-to-consumer platforms, this study examines the power relations constituting – and constituted by – these platforms (Van Dijk, 1993). Employing reflexive thematic analysis – a method ‘[emphasizing] the importance of the researcher’s subjectivity as analytic resource, and their reflexive engagement with theory, data and interpretation’ (Braun and Clarke, 2021: 330) – for data engagement, coding, and theme development, I chronicle theorizations of how content creators’ expressions of identity and experiences of power are detrimentally affected by systemic processes of threatened, perceived, or actual deplatforming across mainstream content hosting services, compounding the dissolution of shared identity characteristic of the contemporary capitalist platform economy. The coding process was not overly structured. Rather, in keeping with the qualitative method’s inductive underpinnings, the coding process was ‘open and organic, with no use of any coding framework’ (Braun and Clarke, 2021: 334), beyond the guiding research question. This allows us to start thinking about marginalized laborers’ stilted engagement in networked agency, as well as their troubled participation in the existing power hierarchies of their online environments; hierarchies in which adult content creators exist alongside – or underneath – the heads of studios, platforms, and networks. This study, thus, examines the social, cultural, political, and technological contexts of pornographic and nonpornographic subscription-based content produced in the United States. To come to a closer understanding of the landscape of adult entertainment in the contemporary era of the internet, however, we should first explore the various ways in which contemporary performers find entrance into the industry.

Alternative entry into the adult entertainment industry

While the content produced by the major studios of the adult entertainment industry long commanded the greatest number of consumers, easily measured in purchased hardcopies of films and magazines, the decentralization at the heart of digital distribution problematizes the creation of comprehensive accounts of consumers’ engagement with adult content. The emergence of digital platforms on which adult entertainers could host, monetize, and distribute their works directly to their audiences – without the financial backing or gatekeeping of a traditional adult entertainment studio – allowed those content creators who did not fit neatly into mainstream conceptualizations of pornography due to their subversion of its heteropatriarchal norms an alternative point of entry into the adult entertainment industry by providing a direct-to-consumer model for (alternative) pornographies. ³ Digital media scholars, thus, should recognize the variety and nuances characteristic of the contemporary adult entertainment landscape; should ‘[recognize] the internet as a fertile environment for alternative pornographies’ (Brennan, 2019: 154) that extends far beyond the offerings of major adult entertainment studios. The stars with the biggest following in the era of the internet largely achieve their fame through the careful application of strategies across a variety of intertextual, cross-platform performances; performances that call for social networking and (perceived) approachability and authenticity as much as they call for pornographic excess. ⁴

Whereas adult entertainers’ presence and activity on digital platforms have heretofore been dismissed as tangential and supplemental to their pornographic endeavors (McNair, 2002), or have been conceptualized as either an affordance of ‘new’ media or a construction of changing social circumstances (Senft, 2008), contemporary pornographic performers’ experiences cannot be reduced to such a simplistic trichotomy. Chronicling the labor of these performers operating at the furthest reaches of marginalization, I argue, provides a lens through which we may come to a closer understanding of content creation at its cutting edge, indicating potential future directions for digital media professionals operating across a fragmented (digital) media landscape.

The contemporary field of direct-to-consumer adult content is populated by a range of platforms hosting subscription-based services and performances, including OnlyFans, AVN Stars, and JustForFans. Monetized through pay-walled monthly subscription fees, these direct-to-consumer platforms differ from other pornographic networks and indexed catalogue platforms in their leniency towards explicit adult content (Carman, 2020). Their welcoming of sexually explicit images and videos – combined with their relative ease of use, broad reach, and commitment to paying the majority of the fees collected to content creators – has made these direct-to-consumer platforms particularly appealing as models for alternative adult entertainment producers, allowing them to establish and foster their careers as pornographic content producers within a designated environment and economy. Alternative adult entertainment content creators, thus, should not be reduced to merely hobbyists or part-timers. ⁵ Rather, major performers and brands created outlets for niche content catering to a wide range of sexual interests and predilections, pushing the limits of mainstream taste and acceptability beyond traditional obscenity frameworks.

Within a network structure, niche forms of content are provided a broader audience and a certain security by being packaged as part of a collection of specialized offerings. Consequently, these contents accrue legitimacy and ‘network power’ (Castells, 2011), allowing novel forms of organization and interaction within digital adult information networks. These pornographic networks, thus, should be contextualized in relation to their constituent parts, ‘despite catering to different niche interests and maintaining their own brand identities’ (Brennan, 2019: 142). Websites, platforms, and services captured under the umbrella of a network should not be understood solely as stand-alone fetishistic offerings catering to specialized sexual tastes or predilections, as they exist within the ‘diverse economies of online pornography’ (Wilkinson, 2017), anchored to the other websites and services provided by the branded network and providing a lucrative extension to the shrinking commercial space of the traditional adult entertainment studio system (Scuglia, 2015). Serving as a center towards which creators can direct their audiences with the promise of community in exchange for sustained patronage, the remuneration affordances of these platforms made them immediately attractive to adult entertainment professionals; ‘if I would’ve started as a performer today, I would have made a fan page rather than apply to studios’ (Dominic Ford, 2021, interview with author). Keeping these developments in mind, it is essential to consider the professional production of pornography through the lens of digital labor studies.

Understanding contemporary gig-work in the platform economy

While early interpretations posited the platform economy as a system of technology-enabled markets, breaking down hierarchies into agile one-person firms (Botsman and Rogers, 2011), more recent conceptualizations emphasize the influence of platforms’ internal mechanisms on outcomes to the participants (Mair and Reischauer, 2017). So-called online labor platforms (Zysman and Kenney, 2018) or online gig-platforms (Kässi and Lehdonvirta, 2018) connect individual content creators and service providers with clients around the world. The platform economy, thus, ‘functions as a marketplace for the mediation of both physical as well as digital services and tasks’, comprised of ‘the platform; the labour pool; the employment contract; algorithmic control; and digital trust’ (Howcroft and Bergvall-Kåreborn, 2019: 23). The algorithmic control at the heart of these platforms’ business models – such as GrubHub’s, where the platform serves as an intermediary between eateries without a delivery staff and customers seeking to have their orders delivered – represents a reshaping of consumption and labor within their confines (Veen et al., 2019).

Algorithmic governance has come to refer to the increased use of computerized technologies to automate decision-making processes and control, afforded by the unprecedented speed, scale, and ubiquity of data processing and machine learning (Helles and Flyverbom, 2019). In the wake of heightened scrutiny following highly publicized issues with safeguarding data security and amplifying extremist content, platforms have responded by committing to greater collaboration with national governments (Price, 2021) and competing companies (Facebook, 2019). At the heart of these ongoing efforts to foster safer digital communities lies the development and scaling up of a range of algorithmic tools to curate and moderate the incredible volume of online content these platforms host (Gorwa et al., 2020), suppressing or policing any (perceived) threats to users’ safety and wellbeing (Kellogg et al., 2020).

In practice, platforms’ algorithmic management is operationalized in the form of metrics – ratings, rankings, or other quantifications of ‘success’ – representing a compounded numerical representation of workers’ performance on a platform (Whelan, 2019), wielded as an instrument of surveilling and controlling workers’ productivity (Gandini, 2019). For example, Uber drivers are rated by their customers after each ride completed, and these ratings affect the drivers’ standing within the platform as well as their potential to be hired in the future. Consequently, these metrics can affect worker behavior in a normative manner (Lutz et al., 2018), encouraging worker self-discipline (Lehdonvirta, 2018) and the appeasement of the expectations of clients (Bucher et al., 2021). This arrangement allows platforms to remain relatively invisible managerial figures, working in implicit coalition with the clients (Curchod et al., 2019).

Within this system, those located at the fringes of mainstream content creation are constantly at risk of incurring the wrath of labor algorithms’ technical and bureaucratic moderation: ‘monitoring workers’ data is a form of organizational policing that is not unique to online contexts, but platform policies are opaque and inconsistently enforced. Their actions seem haphazard or even discriminatory, leading to more uncertainty for these unprotected workers’ (Nayar, 2021: 169). Additionally, to enact their roles as intermediaries, platforms do not solely assign gig-workers the role of ‘job creators’; rather, platforms enable a range of other activities, including pay administration (Kuhn and Maleki, 2017), performance management (Rosenblat et al., 2017), and coordination and control (Lee et al., 2015). Intermediary platforms, thus, are working on various fronts to entangle their users and consumers within their vertically integrated structures. Problematically, however, platforms’ proactive suppression of ‘sensitive’ content – such as the moderation of nudity and sexual expression – often results in controversial over-capture; ‘what constitutes such content is contentious because the terms refer to media that does not technically breach platform terms of service or community guidelines, but which platforms consider, through covert and subjective decision-making, to be otherwise undesirable’ (Gillett et al., 2022: 7). Despite contention over their policies and the documented risk of over-capture, the scalability of automated content moderation systems remains a strong motivating factor for technological investment and ‘the productivity of the process is central to rendering this the preferred solution’ (Siapera and Viejo-Otero, 2021: 126). In recognition of these developments, I argue that the influence of online labor platforms’ internal mechanisms on workers’ and employers’ outcomes should not be dismissed.

Platforms’ algorithmic management of their digital marketplaces blurs distinctions between employment, independent contracting, and enterprise, encouraging laborers to embrace the ethos of ‘gig-work’ – a contemporary extension of non-standard, temporary staffing work. Gig-work has traditionally been characterized by project-based compensation, allowing workers some level of flexibility in when, how, and where the work is performed (Watson et al., 2021). Much gig-work is facilitated using a technologically enabled network outsourced by an intermediary person or company to an open crowd on the internet (Schulte et al., 2020), allowing individuals to work from home, in satellite offices, and a variety of other nontraditional settings (Barsness et al., 2005). These forms of online freelancing, further amplified by the move away from in-person interactions following the COVID-19 pandemic, have been bolstered by the rise of digital platforms matching gig-workers with clients (Spreitzer et al., 2017); ideally allowing workers to choose their own projects and organize their own schedule (Donovan et al., 2016), yet inevitably fostering some precarity as employment and a sustained income are rendered uncertain (Selenko et al., 2018).

As most individuals working in this space are considered independent contractors, this classification frees corporations from offering benefits such as minimum wage, health insurance, and retirement benefits (Wiessner, 2018). Platforms’ common focus on ‘bad actors’ and ‘bad content’, however, demonstrates the carceral discourses that inform and reinforce their governance (Hasinoff et al., 2020). Assuming that individuals, rather than institutional forces, produce harmful content allows platforms to position punitive measures as a credible solution to offenses (Schoenebeck et al., 2020); ‘these logics lead platforms to focus on symptoms – like pieces of content – rather than the systemic drivers of online harm’ (Gillett et al., 2022: 5–6). Necessity requires gig-workers to adopt entrepreneurial traits and develop their skills ‘through training, network sociality, flexibility and mobility’ (Büscher, 2014: 228) to walk the tightrope between success and failure. Such carceral surveillance, then, produces particularly harmful consequences for vulnerable populations like sex workers (Stardust et al., 2023). All pressure for success falls to the individual laborer. As direct-to-consumer platforms directly mediate among creators and their audiences, these platforms are positioned as providing a counter to the affective influence of the platform economy on workers and their experiences of labor; ‘within capitalist socio-economic relations, including the gig-economy, the relationship between labour agency and production systems is dialectical’ (Barratt et al., 2020: 1646).

As Sutherland and colleagues (2020) reflect, ‘[gig-workers’] interactions within and with the digital platform create new opportunities and challenges that require new skills and practices’ (459), and I would add, require new theories that account for this epochal shift in the way gig-work communication labor, and gig-work labor generally, is being conducted. As digital adult entertainment operates within this broader digital gig-economy, the algorithmic management of infrastructures warrants closer consideration, to help us come to a clearer understanding of the changing labor realities of direct-to-consumer content creation. The direct-to-consumer platforms of the contemporary adult entertainment industry encourage content creators to curate, create, and market their own content and services across various (social) media platforms, websites, and services; ‘in the face of the complex constraints of these occupations, there are avenues for survival and reimagining the job – avenues which [indicate] potential futures of digital labor in all creative industries, and beyond’ (Gorissen, 2024: 10).

Within a gig-economy governed by platform intermediaries, workers are algorithmically matched with their employers or audiences. All parties are managed through platforms’ proprietary software, fundamentally affecting workers’ (perceived) power and agency. This has tremendous consequences for regulating the power of laborers in relation to consumer markets. As workers entering the labor force are less likely to find lifetime employment with a paternalistic company or government agency (De Ruyter and Brown, 2019), the fostering and maintaining of various disparate income streams across (digital) markets – as characteristic of media and entertainment professionals – is set to become a realistic expectation for an ever-increasing number of laborers. The direct-to-consumer platforms of the contemporary adult entertainment industry encourage content creators to curate, create, and market their own content across various platforms, websites, and services; ‘the contemporary adult entertainer’s persona is multiplicitous in nature, requiring followers’ attention across their various performance sites’ (Gorissen, 2024: 14). As ‘sex work operates according to the logics of the gig-economy, demanding multiple sources of income, independent contractor status, low wages, flexibility, and a premium on creativity’ (Levitt, 2021: 59), the influence of online labor platforms’ internal mechanisms on workers’ and employers’ outcomes should not be dismissed. By means of their digital infrastructures, platforms actively intermediate between workers, end-users, and third parties.

Sex work, thus, warrants scholarship that dignifies and destigmatizes the experiences of its laborers; ‘as some of the most unprotected members of a burgeoning class of precarious workers, sex workers provide experiences, perspectives, imaginaries, and politics that help envision how to make all work more fair, humane, and gratifying’ (Nayar, 2021: 160–161). The study of contemporary adult entertainers’ existence of digital labor platforms does not just provide insights into life and labor at the furthest reaches of digital marginalization, nor does it provide mainstream entertainment industry professionals with strategies for fostering a community of patrons at the cutting edge of algorithmic management; additionally, it illustrates a future of (digital) labor for all workers reliant – to greater or lesser extent – on maintaining a recognizable presence on the internet.

Contingent platform workers cannot be excluded from considerations of the gig-economy (Watson et al., 2021). Algorithmic management and decision-making play a central role throughout these workers’ and content creators’ continuous and successful participation in the digital work platform, affecting their gaining access to the platform, their finding of tasks or audiences, and their crafting of a reputation. As major digital platform corporations – including Meta, Google, and X – have significantly changed their content moderation policies following the second election of President Donald Trump (Thompson and Conger, 2025), underscoring the mercuriality of the guardrails of life and labor in these contested digital spheres, no content creators and their audiences can imagine themselves as entirely exempt from oligarchal platform owners’ whims (Gorissen, 2023). Consequently, to come to a more comprehensive understanding of the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the realities of digital (gig) labor, these forms of algorithmic matching and management warrant further exploration.

Patronage platforms as a move against precarity

While no single authoritative definition of ‘platform economy’ exists, a universal characteristic of various definitions is the emphasis on individuals rather than organizations as the primary economic actors; ‘the supply of capital and labor comes from decentralized crowds of individuals rather than corporate or state aggregates’ (Sundararajan, 2016: 27). This individualized conceptualization of the platform economy is reductive and incomplete, as it neglects the experiences of communality fundamental to digital media and entertainment platforms. Previous definitions are merely descriptive of how things work and of the user-technology interface, but they neglect the relationships that get established along the way, as well as the identities of the users and the many platforms they might use to establish that identity. The transformations wrought by the contemporary prevalence of digital labor platforms should be reflected in scholarly conceptualizations of work and workers, yet existing definitions do not fully capture the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the realities of digital (gig) labor.

Bucher et al. (2021) recognize three types of online work platforms: knowledge-based freelancing platforms, facilitating medium to large-scale tasks requiring high involvement from the worker such as outsourced graphic design; microwork platforms, mediating small granular tasks requiring low involvement from the worker such as surveys; and localized service platforms, facilitating physical services among local actors such as food delivery. I expand upon this triptych with the recognition of the online work platforms characteristic of media and entertainment industries, facilitating a sustained connection between creators and their audiences by mediating the hosting, consumption, and commissioning of content. For media creators, such as filmmakers and musicians, the adaptability and flexibility afforded by the expanded economic structures of the platform economy is, paradoxically, both freeing and restrictive, as these unfixed marketplaces necessitate a lot of free labor while offloading all financial and regulatory responsibilities onto the content creators themselves. To understand the practicality of such algorithmic managerial directives, much may be gained from considering the recent development of direct-to-consumer patronage platforms.

Within the last decade, direct-to-consumer platforms – platforms allowing creators of all kinds to distribute their content directly to their audiences through pay-walled monthly fees – have emerged as an ‘answer’ to the precarity inherent to mainstream labor platforms’ algorithmic governance, affording a dual communality between performers and their audiences, and between performers and their peers. The fact that there is no analogous equation of direct-to-consumer platforms and existing conceptualizations of the platform economy does not indicate that it does not work as a theoretical framework; rather, I argue that direct-to-consumer platforms are a conscious counter to the affective influence of the platform economy.

A contemporary take on the classic concept of patronage, membership-based direct-to-consumer platforms enable a wide audience to finance their preferred artists and creators at affordable monthly rates (Rubenstein, 2014). These patronage platforms function as plural intermediaries, acting as financial intermediaries between content creators and patrons, as regulatory intermediaries by means of their terms of service, and as cultural intermediaries through curation of their sites’ content (Swords, 2017). In their increased vertical integration, governed by human and algorithmic analysis to help improve infrastructures and user experiences (Swords, 2020), these platforms provide their users a comprehensive and autonomous alternative to the uncertainty of content creation across more traditional platforms.

Patronage, here, should not be misconstrued as mere consumption; the patrons of direct-to-consumer platforms are not analogous to those patronizing a restaurant or boutique. Rather, the patrons of direct-to-consumer platforms function as spatially dispersed benefactors, financially supporting their chosen creators in a sustained manner by paying for a subscription to their consistent output and by commissioning bespoke content as they desire. Wherever they may be in the world, the patrons of direct-to-consumer platforms can vote with their wallets to fund the types of content they want to consume. Rather than ordering off a menu, or picking items off a rack in a shop, these patrons are able to pay painters directly to paint the pictures they want to see; are able to pay musicians directly to compose the music they want to hear. ⁶ Consequently, the patrons of direct-to-consumer platforms function as a dispersed and mercurial House Medici to global creators of culture, ushering in an era of ‘neo-patronage’.

By extension, content creators operating within direct-to-consumer patronage platforms do not engage in prototypical ‘gig-work’, characterized by anonymized and individualized labor. As these creators deal in authenticity and experiences of communality, working primarily at the behest of discerning patrons, they are defined by their lack of anonymity and by their fostering of community. To make a profit, many creators seeking to turn their passion into a career work to find an audience willing to support their content, sizeable enough to turn a profit and reliable enough to sustain a living wage. ⁷ As algorithmic management and decision-making affect content creators’ continuous and successful participation in their chosen digital labor platform, these patronage platforms function as conscious counter-movements to the affective influence of the platform economy. To illustrate these counter-movements and learn more about digital content creation at its cutting edge, much may be gained from taking a closer look at one such patronage platform: the OnlyFans platform, on which over 190,000,000 registered users support over 2,100,000 content creators (Geyser, 2024).

Neo-patronage in the adult entertainment industry: The case of OnlyFans

OnlyFans, the long-standing leader in the direct-to-consumer platform space, is a membership-based patronage platform, connecting content creators with fans and prospective patrons. Established in 2016, OnlyFans offers financial tools – including automated billing, creator-valued membership levels, and direct e-commerce purchases – that allow supporters to subscribe to ongoing creative projects, providing creators such as podcasters and musicians with a predictable and scalable income stream. While the OnlyFans platform allows creators of all kinds to distribute their content directly to their followers, its welcoming of sexually explicit images and videos made OnlyFans appealing as a platform for adult entertainment producers and consumers. ⁸ Within 5 years of its launch, the platform reached a gross merchandise value exceeding $12,5 billion, netting an annual net revenue of $2,5 billion (OnlyFans staff, 2022).

To maintain their standing, direct-to-consumer platforms need to make and coordinate a product market and a labor market simultaneously; OnlyFans intermediates between consumers and content creators by facilitating recurring financial support, while matching labor supply with the demand generated by product markets by recommending novel creators to potential patrons. An adult entertainer using OnlyFans will work to drive the audiences they have accrued across various other websites and services toward this direct-to-consumer platform, promising a continuous stream of new pornographic images, videos, and sundry additional content in exchange for sustained financial support. More than just technological vessels on which creators host and distribute their sexually explicit content, these pages serve as essential destinations to which creators direct their audiences with promises of continuity, community, and freedom from moderation:

People want a direct interaction with models, and that’s what makes this business model work. As a studio owner, when OnlyFans came out, my first thought was, ‘Why would someone want to see the same person over and over again, doing kind of the same thing?’ The thought was a little against my understanding of consumer behaviour. To my surprise, the answer is a lot of people! But it is not because of the physicality – it is because of the interaction, and actually getting to learn about somebody. [It] is much more of a relationship than a commoditization of sex. (Dominic Ford 2021, interview with author).

Additionally, OnlyFans will promote the entertainer to patrons supporting similar content creators on the platform, hoping to drive patrons across its platform to create stronger communities of support (and collect percentages from a greater number of monthly recurring transactions). Consequently, direct-to-consumer platforms act as double market makers, matching content creators with consumers while also facilitating the hosting of creators’ content and the subscription fees of the consumers. As Lilly Sparks argues, direct-to-consumer platforms, ‘[like] OnlyFans, in this way, have been like Uber. OnlyFans allows people to get the weird, kooky thing they want directly from content creators. That’s the cool thing about capitalism, I guess’ (2021, interview with author).

The expectations for adult entertainers have changed with the advent of direct-to-consumer content production, as performers are increasingly expected to promote their contents and personae across a range of mainstream and pornographic platforms. ⁹ For many performers, the autonomy and class mobility promised by the ‘hustle’ of pornography are worth the uncertainty of surviving in the gig-economy. Keenly aware of structures of ownership, many laborers in sex work gig-economies leverage their work for others to promote their own websites, direct-to-consumer content, products, and services. ¹⁰ However, these levels of success do not come without an elevated level of effort. Gig-work in the adult entertainment industry’s digital satellites – such as direct-to-consumer content creation – is both easily accessible and relatively low risk, significantly lowering the barriers to internet sex work. As a result, performers must contend with a bloated labor market in which means of nurturing connections with fans have become increasingly specialized and personal as content creators seek to distinguish their products and services from the contents of their competitors and the scenes fans can access for free from pornographic tube sites. ¹¹

As the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered most professional studio productions of pornography over the course of 2020, performers were forced to work from home and diversify their skillsets. Writing their own scripts, designing their own sets, doing their own hair and makeup, and marketing their own content and personas, contemporary adult entertainers seeking to thrive in the direct-to-consumer marketplace become jacks of all trade in their field. ¹² Performers’ responsibilities have grown beyond ‘being the talent’. To sustain their careers, performers engage in cumulative performances of identity; in turn, requiring the continuous allocation of time and resources towards their accumulation and mastery of an increasingly wider set of skills. Consequently, within the realm of digital adult entertainment, characterized by the labor of building community, these developments constitute a hybridized model fundamentally affecting work and workers. Creators are increasingly expected to produce ancillary content for websites and platforms in addition to their regular media content, vulnerable to the constant threats of the competition of scores of prospective performers and the precarity of producing explicit adult entertainment in unwelcoming digital environments – realities which, while distinct due to sex work’s particular legal, social, and technological conditions, are not without bearing on the realities of digital labor at any margin of platform economies.

By extension, adult entertainers’ community building efforts are both encouraged and endangered by their adoption of gig-work strategies to thrive in a platform economy. ¹³ Within the context of adult entertainment, thus, we should resist the romanticization of the creation of content within the satellites of the pornographic gig-economy. The constellations of value-extracting intermediaries and third-party providers help sustain many of the asymmetries characteristic of mainstream studio productions, encouraging content creators to identify as ‘micro-entrepreneurs’, all the while underlining and enforcing an internalized self-sufficiency absolving platforms from workers’ risks and responsibilities. Functioning within intermediary platforms, adult entertainers – fundamentally dependent on personal recognizability and community building – continuously push back against mainstream labor platforms’ vertically integrated structures to sustain their organizing and building of (collective) voice. Dependent on platforms’ organizational infrastructures for their finding of tasks or audiences and their crafting of a reputation, adult entertainers constantly are required to perform the extra work necessitated for pacifying the algorithm. ¹⁴

Micro-entrepreneurialism and the normative influences of reinventive institutions

Beyond promising performers novel sources of income and greater agency in their career, the normative influences of reinventive institutions should not be underestimated. Platforms’ various organizational architectures shape and constrain the forms of agency available to workers, fostering individual expressions of agency. Understanding these shifting self-conceptualizations is instrumental for understanding the direct-to-consumer platforms of the contemporary adult entertainment industry; the information age requires a novel form of micro-entrepreneurialism from performers, extending beyond adult entertainment into finance, marketing, and digital content production. Encouraging independent production and distribution, the contemporary landscape of pornography barters control with personal responsibility and accountability. ¹⁵ Curating, creating, and marketing their own content and services, adult entertainers are emboldened to wield their entrepreneurial agency. ¹⁶ As performer Allie Nicole recognizes, this freedom allows her to ‘take my direction into my own hands and do what I’d like to shoot’ (Miller, 2021c). As micro-entrepreneurs, certain contemporary pornographic content creators forge lasting careers on their own creative terms, ‘because you don’t have to do all these crazy things if that’s not really your branding. Not all porn stars are the same. You have to have your own creative vision’. Nevertheless, it is essential to recognize how these micro-entrepreneurial currents affect content creators’ dispersed and cumulative performances across websites, platforms, and services, encouraging continuous movements of mobilization and migration that jeopardize these performers’ dual community; in turn, affecting the individual recognizability foundational to performers’ professional development. As Dominic Ford notes:

I don’t want to say something callous, like, ‘it’s just a job’, because that is not true. Models’ interactions with their audience are not disingenuous. But they are a means to an end. Most people I know love their fans and they love talking to them, but they also know that it’s part of what their job is. (2021, interview with author)

To keep their heads above water in the contemporary platform economy, adult entertainers increasingly see the lines between their private and professional lives blur.

Operating as intermediaries within multi-sided markets, privatized platform companies’ continued regulatory and normative influences over the contemporary gig-economy encourage asymmetries of information and power, exacerbated by these platforms’ increased vertical integration of labor; workers must serve the dual masters of their chosen platform’s idiosyncratic algorithmic governance and their accrued dispersed audience. Consequently, whereas it is important to come to a closer understanding of these platforms’ infrastructures, we may not neglect content creators’ communications with their audiences within these environments. So, while direct-to-consumer platforms have emerged as an ‘answer’ to mainstream labor platforms’ algorithmic governance, these platforms raise their own questions and concerns; questions and concerns which, heretofore, have remained understudied and undertheorized. Direct-to-consumer platforms function as ‘reinventive institutions’, fundamentally affecting (gig) workers’ labor within the platform economy. Typically characterized as potentially exploitative work preying on unskilled laborers to complete menial tasks (Webster, 2016), gig-work holds a reputation as undermining individuals’ identity formations by disconnecting labor from the derivation of meaning (Mumby, 2019). However, regardless of the perceived importance of work tasks, gig-workers may still derive meaning from their work; ‘more so than being at work, they become their work, or more precisely they become in their work’ (Petriglieri et al., 2019: 160).

Reflecting on a successful career in pornography, Cherrie DeVille notes that ‘I endured, and thrived, through the transitions from Americans buying big porn studios’ $50 DVDs to streaming free porn on tube sites to subscribing to their neighbor and every other random acquaintance’s $10 OnlyFans’ (DeVille, 2020). In recognition of the unfixed nature of adult entertainment, DeVille cautions emerging content creators against consolidating their efforts into the newest, most popular platform of the day; ‘in my decade of experience, the only constant in porn is change. Make sure to diversify into all streaming and camming platforms, so when one platform inevitably crashes, you’ll be secure either way’. Similarly, creators are encouraged to embrace novel platforms and services eagerly and early; ‘you never know what will be the next gravy train, and those who jump on the train first always make the most money. Be first. Sometimes you’ll lose money, but every now and then, you could make a killing’. This imperative to ‘be first’ requires creators to mobilize, migrate, and perform their personas continuously under novel services and circumstance, urging constant (re)definition and crystallization of their (professional) identities. Practically, this necessitates dispersed and cumulative performances across websites, platforms, and services; in turn, jeopardizing content creators’ dual communality, between performers and their audiences, and between performers and their peers. ¹⁷ Consequently, the contemporary adult entertainment industry – characterized as temperamental and everchanging – requires content creators to craft and maintain ‘portable selves’, casting direct-to-consumer platforms as prominent reinventive institutions.

The contemporary workplace – ‘in which working lives frequently unfold across organizational and national boundaries’ (Petriglieri et al., 2017) – is increasingly coming unmoored from rigid lifetime employment, while simultaneously becoming a primary source of self-definition (Gini, 2001). Those individuals in precarious situations due to unreliable workplaces are more likely to surrender to ‘reinventive institutions’ (Scott, 2010), which promise members desired and desirable selves in return for their dedication and discipline; by forging bonds across organizations and institutions, workers navigate the paradox of needing firm attachments to be self-reliant (Kahn, 2002). For contemporary pornographic content creators, this reality materializes in deep entanglements with an inconstant audience, constituted and maintained across constantly in-flux platforms. As consumers are more likely to pay a premium for additional content from – or access to – recognizable performers, content creators work to extend their moment in the spotlight as far as possible. Consequently, performers’ daily labor does not solely safeguard their current livelihood; it functions to build the financial resources and brand recognizability that can sustain them into retirement. The satellite industries orbiting mainstream adult entertainment, thus, are increasingly becoming performers’ main source of income; all mainstream appearances come to function as ‘promotional labor’ (Schieber, 2018). Decrying this change, Lilly Sparks notes, ‘as a young studio, you almost have to launch a Pornhub channel to meet people where they’re at, but a lot of performers take issue with that’ (2021, interview with author). By extension, these satellite industries problematize conceptions of adult entertainment as a monolithic industry, as creators turn to social media platforms, mainstream media outlets, and various outside capitalist ventures to promote their contents. ¹⁸

These elevated levels of effort fundamentally change the labor practices of adult entertainers. Whereas ‘being the talent’ would require performers to spend long, taxing days on the set of studio-produced pornographic feature films, their work would be done with the completion of their scenes. Contemporarily, direct-to-consumer content production is a continuous effort on the part of performers. Due to the pandemic, this continuous effort has often come to permeate all aspects of performers’ lives, ¹⁹ indicating a collapse of performers’ work-life balances. ²⁰ Reflecting on the earliest stages of her career, independent content creator Joey Kim recognizes the erosion of professional boundaries due to gig-work precarity – ‘I was that girl who was working every day, streaming every day for sometimes 12 h. Sometimes more. It was a little bit unhealthy, I’ll admit. […] I was absorbed into this kind of unhealthy, hustle culture’ (Avery, 2021a). ²¹ Reflecting on her experiences moving against such marginalizing precarity, Princess Mindy argues:

I am adamant about reminding people, ‘We used to have our own websites!’ Now, women are giving all their power away to platforms. If those platforms go out, you’re toast. We’re giving all our power away – we’re disempowered by the way business is ran right now. But the explosion has already happened. You cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube, and going back to personal websites would be a lot of work. And who wants extra work? (2021, interview with author).

Problematically, this ‘unhealthy, hustle culture’ encourages performers’ internalization of uncertainty and precarity, further breaking down divisions between creators’ professional and personal lives. Furthermore, while all sex workers are marginalized in the platform economy, those operating at intersectional margins – due to their gender identity, for example, or their race, ability, or nonheteronormative expressions of sexuality – are further sidelined in access, visibility, and labor conditions across platforms foregrounding narrow, heteronormative representations of erotica.

By extension, if ‘one is rarely off the clock from the labors of self-making’ (Berg, 2021: 132–133), labor invariably bleeds into life for adult entertainers wishing to reproduce themselves as workers. Banking on the hopes that self-making and marketing will lead to the exposure required for the prolongation of their freelance careers, content creators are constantly on the lookout for their next opportunity for gig-work; are constantly engaged in cultivating an audience receptive to their products and services. A significant aspect of adult entertainment’s satellite industries is performers’ monetization of the more mundane moments of their lives; many performers sell their used underwear, charge fans for a cell phone chat while waiting in traffic, or ask patrons to reimburse their lunches and drinks. Outlets for self-marketing, such as social media platforms, become sales platforms when performers utilize them to promote access to more direct – and, importantly, paid – forms of audience engagement. Within these environments, performers must account for the ‘legion of microbosses’ (136) presented by the audiences they seek to entice towards patronage. Presenting both a fundamental encroachment of the market into laborers’ most intimate spaces and an illustration of performers’ creative strategies for negotiating precarity, these forms of monetization see adult entertainers weaponize and wield their power.

Conclusion

Gig-workers’ interactions within and with digital labor platforms require new theories that account for the epochal shift in the way gig-work communication labor, and gig-work labor generally, is being conducted. Encouraging laborers to embrace the ethos of ‘gig-work’, these intermediary platforms entangle their users and consumers within their vertically integrated structures, and platforms’ algorithmic management of their digital marketplaces blurs distinctions between employment, independent contracting, and enterprise. The influence of online labor platforms’ internal mechanisms on workers’ and employers’ outcomes should not be dismissed, as platforms’ proactive suppression of ‘sensitive’ content commonly results in over-capture. To keep their heads above water in the contemporary platform economy, laborers increasingly are required to perform the extra work necessitated for pacifying the algorithm. All pressure for success, here, falls to the individual laborer.

Nevertheless, individualized conceptualization of the platform economy is reductive and incomplete, as it neglects the experiences of communality fundamental to digital media and entertainment platforms. Within the last decade, direct-to-consumer platforms have emerged as an ‘answer’ to the precarity inherent to mainstream labor platforms’ algorithmic governance, affording a dual communality between performers and their audiences, and between performers and their peers. Content creators operating within direct-to-consumer patronage platforms do not engage in prototypical ‘gig-work’. Working primarily at the behest of discerning patrons, they are defined by their lack of anonymity and by their fostering of community. Crowd-patronage platforms allow creators to be supported by a diverse, globally dispersed group of supporters, functioning as financial intermediaries between content creators and patrons, as regulatory intermediaries by means of their terms of service, and as cultural intermediaries through curation of their sites’ content. The patrons of direct-to-consumer platforms serve as spatially dispersed benefactors, financially supporting their chosen creators through subscriptions and commissions.

Adult entertainers continuously push back against mainstream labor platforms’ vertically integrated structures to sustain their organizing and building of (collective) voice. A conscious counter to the affective influence of the platform economy, direct-to-consumer platforms like OnlyFans help sustain sex workers’ marginalized professional and personal identities and labor positions, facilitating a sustained connection between creators and their audiences by mediating the hosting, consumption, and commissioning of content. Platforms like OnlyFans – in their initial welcoming of sexually explicit content – promise creators a reprieve from the marginalizing moderation and deplatforming with which they are commonly confronted across the broader platform economy; a marginalizing that sets these sex workers apart from the journalists, influencers, and streamers maintaining an active online presence to source work and solicit patronage from their audiences in industries deemed more palatable and commercially viable. Chronicling the labor of these adult performers operating at the furthest reaches of marginalization provides a lens through which we may come to a closer understanding of content creation at its cutting edge, indicating potential future directions for digital media professionals operating across a fragmented (digital) media landscape; it illustrates a future of (digital) labor for all workers reliant – to greater or lesser extent – on maintaining a recognizable presence on the internet. Fewer and fewer laborers would not fall into that category.