This was published 10 months ago
From inner-city squalor to ocean views: The Aussies making it big on OnlyFans
From everyday people to household names, a lucky few on the social platform OnlyFans are amassing considerable wealth selling tailored, adult content of themselves – but their subscribers may not be the only ones who pay a price.
“We are sex workers,” says one OnlyFans creator. “Anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves, we are just doing it in an entirely new way.” Credit: Alamy
The ocean views from abstract painter Lora Carmichael’s ninth-floor apartment overlooking one of Sydney’s “millionaires’ rows” in Dover Heights are undeniably spectacular, and seemingly far beyond an archetypal struggling artist’s budget. But, as the softly spoken 40-year-old explains, after years eking out a living taking on “crappy retail jobs” to supplement her art, it’s only recently that her financial struggles have ended and she can indulge in a little luxury.
“And for that, I can thank my fat arse,” she jokes. Carmichael is sardonically referring to her work as an OnlyFans “plus-size” online sex worker. OnlyFans is the online content-sharing site where subscribers pay a monthly fee to follow and engage predominantly with X-rated performers. There is also non-sexual content, albeit comparatively little, ranging from yoga videos to celebrity trainer Jono Castano working out in bikini bottoms. When tennis star Nick Kyrgios joined, he made it clear there would be no sex.
But it is the X-rated content that is now increasingly spilling over into the wider social media realm. On Carmichael’s G-rated Instagram feed, she suggestively wiggles and jiggles her coveted derrière to 186,000 followers, hoping some will click on her OnlyFans link to pay for racier content. “Yes, that is what we do,” she says. “We are sex workers … anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves, we are just doing it in an entirely new way because we never physically meet our clients.”
Today, Carmichael can make $300 in a 10-minute live video call with some of her biggest-paying fans. Tonight she will earn 10 times that, glued to her
phone for hours responding to her fans’ lustful direct messages. She will role-play fantasies and act out the most intimate of scenes – either solo or with someone else – the precise details of which are too explicit to describe here. All from the security of her living room with the aid of two mobile phones, a tripod and a selfie ring light.
Lora Carmichael, which is her stage name, is one of thousands of Australians who have joined more than three million people globally willing to strip, fornicate, fondle, pose and “talk dirty” across the internet for the sexual gratification of the paying public. They are fishing in the vast ocean of OnlyFans, which boasts almost a quarter of a billion site visits a month. Capturing just a tiny portion of that traffic makes the chances of significant financial success seductively high.
Some of them are well-known names, like American model and rap musician Blac Chyna. However, late last year she deactivated her OnlyFans account, telling the US showbiz press it was a “dead end” for her. She also wanted to set an example for her two kids. Chyna ranked among the site’s biggest earners in 2023, raking in millions of dollars a month dishing up X-rated content, including “Foot Freek Mondays”.
Closer to home, former Australian Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham says he only posts “tasteful nudes” on his OnlyFans account, which he started after his masseur husband, Luke Rutherford, had generated healthy returns sharing content on the platform. “There are no full-frontals,” he says from his London home, revealing he is making about $4000 a month to supplement his income from sporadic work in IT sales. “There’s only so much you can make as a former diving champion.
“I have a very open attitude towards sex and nudity,” Mitcham continues, “but I don’t want to do anything which is going to jeopardise any possibility of a gig with mainstream media, like hosting an Olympics telecast. There is still a stigma; if I had hardcore porn out there, it would kill any chances of that.”
Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham posts only “tasteful nudes” on his OnlyFans account.Credit: @pauldedonaphotography/@matthewmitcham88/Instagram
While celebrity OnlyFans accounts and the huge sums being generated have garnered fawning media attention, the true barometer of the platform’s broader impact – both positive and negative – is in the millions of everyday people creating content for the site, and the millions more using it for sexual gratification in the online age.
Over the course of two months, Good Weekend spoke to more than a dozen OnlyFans content creators and their fans, only to discover a parallel digital universe of seemingly limitless sexual encounters and supposed sexual
empowerment, but also deeply questionable ethics and morality. With every upload, content creators risk their explicit imagery living on indefinitely – frequently on other porn sites – in the ever-evolving, untameable and all-consuming cyberverse, without their consent or control.
They must also contend with dangerously obsessive fans, stalkers and some subscribers who wrongfully believe they have paid for the right to be abusive and demeaning, all common realities of a platform that constantly demands new content to satisfy paying subscribers’ unrelenting carnal whims and desires.
OnlyFans is bespoke, customised, viewer-curated DIY online pornography with a twist: a new frontier in the gig economy, as familiar to a generation of Millennials as booking a beach house on Airbnb or ordering a curry on Menulog. Content creators depend on a plethora of social-media channels to feed their adults-only, OnlyFans accounts, requiring them to navigate the ever-evolving rules and regulations of what mainstream sites like Instagram or Snapchat will allow.
Instead of flogging products and brands for profit like their social “influencer” cousins, OnlyFans creators are selling just one product: themselves.
For the likes of Lora Carmichael in her smart Dover Heights apartment, the rewards for those willing to do “almost anything” for complete strangers on the other end of their phone can be life-changing. “When I started making good money on OnlyFans, I searched ‘breathtaking and spectacular views’ on real estate sites; I think it fits the bill,” says the curvaceous, articulate, smiling blonde, who is wearing figure-hugging black tights, red leather mules and a tight, white tank top as we tour her apartment.
Outside her window, the azure ocean blurs seamlessly into the cloudless sky; the horizon delineated only by a single yacht, its spinnaker in full sail. I describe the scene as “Streeton blue”, to which Carmichael, the artist, nods in silent affirmation.
‘I thought pornography was all about women with fake boobs, big hair and tiny waists … that’s not me.’
OnlyFans creator Lora Carmichael
Four years ago, Carmichael, a self-described “free-spirited” fine arts graduate, was 36, “living in a series of dumps” and coming to terms with a potentially debilitating health diagnosis: dilated cardiomyopathy, a chronic condition in which her heart chambers have enlarged, impacting their ability to contract. Her smile drops when she points out her condition often results in “heart failure and premature death”.
The week before we met, Carmichael spent a night in the emergency department at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital following a heart scare. She has recovered for our chat and appears in good health, but admits her diagnosis has altered her attitude to life. “I may not have a long life,” she says, as if to partly explain – or perhaps justify – why she is now making and selling explicit content online, though she later tells me she feels no shame about it.
For years, she did mundane jobs to support her artistic vocation, living in a series of “mouldy, asbestos-riddled” flats dotted around the grimy inner city. When the pandemic hit and her retail shifts dried up overnight, Carmichael weighed up her limited options. “I was noticing a lot of plus-size glamour models on social media who were promoting their OnlyFans accounts,” she says. “I was intrigued.”
Carmichael started looking into it, speaking to friends who were already on OnlyFans. “I could see there was a demand for women who looked a lot like me: big girls. I had grown up with a pretty healthy attitude about sex anyway, but I thought pornography was all about women with fake boobs, big hair and tiny waists … that’s not me.”
She tells me during her best month she made more than $50,000, and now plans to buy her own home, hopefully on par with the place she is currently renting for $2000 a week. A neighbouring apartment recently sold for more than $3 million. “I am in no physical danger, this is all done from my living room … I am in control, no one is exploiting me but me.”
Lora Carmichael plans to buy her own home with money she has earned from the site.Credit: Courtesy of Lora Carmichael
Unlike porn sites Pornhub and XVideos, which stream content and generate revenue through advertising, OnlyFans’ business model is based on subscribers – or fans – who must be 18 or older paying each month for a direct line of contact to a performer they develop a virtual rapport with. Launched in 2016, it has spurned countless copycat platforms, but today, OnlyFans is the juggernaut of the online adult entertainment space, largely thanks to the much-vaunted transparency of its commission structure, which has made it the go-to platform for formerly amateur adult content creators. They get to keep 80 per cent of what they make; OnlyFans takes the remaining 20 per cent.
Last year, research found that, on average, 63 per cent of subscribers were male, 68 per cent were white, and 89 per cent were married. Fifty-nine per cent identified as heterosexual and 37 per cent identified as bi or pansexual. Subscribers pay anything from a few dollars to $US30 or more a month to follow OnlyFans content creators, who are predominantly female and usually have stage names. Fans can request and pay extra for specifically tailored content sent via direct messages, video catalogue access and live video streams. On OnlyFans, upselling is common practice.
While OnlyFans does not facilitate one-on-one live video calls, it is commonly the catalyst for them, with the sessions carried out on other platforms such as Zoom, FaceTime, Google Meet and Snapchat. Selling real-life prostitution services is banned, along with underage models, bestiality, violence, hate speech, guns and drugs.
“OnlyFans sells more than just sexual gratification, it is marketing social connections in a world of increasing screen time,” explains Dr Emily van der Nagel, a lecturer in social media at Monash University and the author of Sex and Social Media. “This idea that an account is set up and run by the person in the images is a real drawcard. Subscribers feel they are getting an authentic interaction with the creator they are paying to communicate with. OnlyFans has become accepted as another layer of social media; it gives someone a way of having a more intimate, explicit connection and direct dialogue with someone they follow, albeit through an online experience.”
Fellow academic Dr Tegan Larin, who has analysed Australian media coverage of OnlyFans, argues the business model is clearly profitable for the company, but in reality only a handful of creators ever make the sort of money the site has become renowned for. “I’m all for women being empowered and making money, but that is a false perception,” Larin says. “For the majority of creators, who give all this content to the platform to generate their profits, they are not going to get the sort of financial rewards being reported. That’s where the exploitation comes in.”
She adds that there is also a question around whether OnlyFans, and the increased “pornification” of other social media platforms attached to it, reinforce outdated views of what a woman is, what they should look like and what their value is. “I’m happy for the women making good money, but they are an anomaly,” she says. “It’s when the subscription ends and the money disappears – that’s when the real problems start, but that is never reported about.”
Instead, media attention has been squarely focused on the overlords of OnlyFans’ booming business. In November 2022, its parent company, Fenix International – which in 2021 was on Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential Companies list – paid its owner, Leonid Radvinsky, a staggering $US338 million in dividends.The Ukrainian-American, 41, bought OnlyFans in 2018. Despite becoming one of the internet’s biggest players, surprisingly little is known about Radvinsky, who started his career at 17 by trading domain names that marketed free porn sites. In the early 2000s, he set up MyFreeCams, a porn site that features “models” who offer sex shows on webcams.
Radvinsky paid an undisclosed amount, said to be in the millions of pounds (the site is reportedly valued well into the billions today), for OnlyFans, taking control from its founders, British entrepreneur Timothy Stokely, his brother Thomas and their retired banker father, Guy. Since Radvinsky bought OnlyFans, its business has skyrocketed, especially during the pandemic. Radvinsky’s total dividends over three years have now reached a staggering $US889 million.
‘It’s when the subscription ends and the money disappears – that’s when the real problems start, but that is never reported about.’
Dr Tegan Larin, Monash University
According to Fenix International’s most recent figures, for the year to November 2022, OnlyFans had 3.2 million registered creators, up from 2.1 million a year earlier – a 47 per cent rise. The number of registered paying subscribers reached 239 million a month, up from 188 million a month in 2021.
Subscribers spent $US5.55 billion a year buying adult content and experiences, up 16 per cent on the year prior. Creators took home nearly $US4.5 billion of that. OnlyFans declined to provide any data on how many subscribers or content creators it has in Australia, though some online marketing analysts have suggested a combined total of up to 19,000. Anecdotal evidence also suggests the number is well into the thousands.
Last year, at the Web Summit in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, OnlyFans’ then CEO Amrapali Gan singled out Australia, along with Latin America, as major growth markets for the platform. (Gan stepped down in July 2023, to be replaced by Keily Blair.)
On OnlyFans, what we once called celebrity sex tapes are highly orchestrated marketing opportunities, billed as “collabs” between popular creators and downloaded by their respective subscribers on a pay-per-view basis, just like a big-name, prize-fight boxing match. These collabs are set up not according to the laws of physical attraction, but almost entirely on the basis of subscriber data and potential revenue.
OnlyFans creator Adam Manikis with porn actress Ivy Lebelle.Credit: Courtesy of Adam Manikis
For 12 years, Gold Coast-based Adam Manikis was a personal trainer. When the pandemic hit, he pivoted to OnlyFans, launching his alter ego, Apollo. He is now one of the few heterosexual men who has turned the platform into a lucrative revenue stream by having sex with women.
When we speak, Manikis, who sports a chiselled physique and long, flowing curls, looks like he just stepped off the cover of a romance novel. He has recently returned from a collab tour of the United States, where he “got to work with some really big OnlyFans women”. He rattles off a list of unlikely sounding names: Sinatra Monroe, Kayla East, Eden Lux, Blair Williams, Isabella Torres, Cubbi Thompson.
I confess that to an outsider these names are meaningless and sound more like designer scented candles than legitimate celebrities. Manikis, 35, assures me on OnlyFans they command “star” status and account for millions of subscribers and potentially millions more dollars in fees. “I actually overbooked myself on that last trip,” he says. “I shot 23 scenes in 24 days. That is a lot of sex. Sometimes the chemistry is great, sometimes you have to really work at it, but knowing they have a huge subscriber base is a great motivator.
“Sex is only part of it. I have to be disciplined, eat well and train every day. I’m not out partying. You have to be strategic about the content, too, how you create it, how you edit it, where you promote it and when you upload it … this is all about an e-marketing strategy.”
Manikis says his family and friends have given him nothing but praise for his OnlyFans success, which he claims is earning him tens of thousands of dollars each month. He is happy for his real identity to be revealed. “Yeah, there is a bit of a double standard between men and women doing this. I’ve not had any real negativity.”
A former personal trainer, Gold Coast-based Adam Manikis switched to OnlyFans when the pandemic hit, launching his alter ego, Apollo. “Sex is only part of it,” he says. “I have to be disciplined.”Credit: @the.apollo.show/Instagram
Similarly, baby-faced 24-year-old Philip Ivanov, who employs a manager to help with his exclusively same-sex content distribution, says he is unfazed
if people find out about his OnlyFans career, either now or in the future. “My generation has grown up with the internet; pornography is everywhere, we’re all on the hook-up apps. It’s really not such a big deal, especially in the gay world: everyone’s got a dick pic online somewhere, right?”
When we meet in Sydney’s “gay ghetto” of Darlinghurst, Ivanov says, “I know I look younger than my age, but isn’t that a good thing? My brother and father both know about it … I bought Dad Versace jeans for Christmas, so he’s pretty happy.”
Ivanov has big blue eyes and a cherubic face. He still lives with his single father and siblings in their public-housing home, a 45-minute drive away in suburbia. “When I come to Darlinghurst I do get recognised, but it’s not anything bad,” he says. “OnlyFans is my golden ticket out of housing commission, to be able to travel the world, to wear nice clothes and live the kind of life I want.”
Given his boyish looks, I ask Ivanov if he worries about who’s watching his videos, or about sexual taboos he could be inadvertently normalising or
encouraging. “I’m not doing anything illegal … it’s not up to me to monitor who is watching,” he says, though such issues as underage models appearing on the platform have plagued OnlyFans in its relatively short life.
In 2021, OnlyFans generated outrage among its creators when it announced a decision to start banning sexually explicit content. A week later the ill-fated ban was reversed, tacit confirmation OnlyFans is predominantly a sex-content sharing site. The ban was sparked after a BBC investigation that revealed OnlyFans was failing to prevent under-18s from selling and appearing in sex videos, and that underage girls falsified identity documents to start OnlyFans accounts. The controversy risked the site’s online credit-card support from Visa and Mastercard, which had withdrawn from Pornhub after it was accused of publishing illegal content.
Subsequently, OnlyFans claimed that its improved software systems verified the ages of all subscribers and creators; those thrown up as suspicious would
then be investigated by a team of humans. Both Visa and Mastercard remain payment options on the multibillion-dollar platform.
The holy grail for creators is to reach the magical “top earner” percentiles provided by OnlyFans. Such successful creators routinely share this status across social media channels to promote their popularity.
The most elite, in the top 0.1 percentile, make more than $US100,000 a month; the rarefied former territory of Blac Chyna. For non-celebrities, going “viral” is when the big returns arrive, as 25-year-old former retail assistant Taila Maddison from Newcastle, one of the few women using her real name on OnlyFans, discovered last year.
Taila Maddison discovered her stepfather was among her biggest-spending subscribers.Credit: @tailamaddison/Instagram
She went public after discovering her stepfather was among her biggest-spending OnlyFans subscribers. The revelation ended her mother’s 13-year marriage and guaranteed endless coverage on The Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame, FM breakfast radio across the country and SBS’s Insight program. Today she sells a “stepdad bundle” of videos on her OnlyFans site, and is only too happy to talk about the incident, again.
“They are the videos he paid for,” she explains of the bundle, noting he does not feature in them, and that she mostly does “solos” on OnlyFans, apart from content featuring her tradie boyfriend (his face is never shown and she declines to give his name). “I thought, ‘Why not get something out of it?’ ” Maddison says.
When the story broke, it resulted in her biggest single month of earnings on OnlyFans when $150,000 was funnelled into her bank account. “I made $US25,000 in one day. I’d never earn that working in a shop,” she says, revealing she bought a new car and personalised number plates with the money.
When I ask about her stepfather’s whereabouts, or if she could pass on his contact details, she says: “No one’s heard from him, we have no idea where he is or how to get hold of him.”
For a time, single mother of two Lucy Banks was one of Australia’s biggest stars on OnlyFans, claiming to have made more than a million dollars out of the site over four years. “It is a slippery slope,” she reveals. “Initially, I didn’t show my face, I was just doing cleavage photos. Within six months it was full nudity and sex videos. Once you are on OnlyFans, everyone presumes you are already doing that anyway. I figured if people think I’m a slut doing this, I might as well be a rich one.”
Lucy Banks quit the site “in disgust” over how she claimed it was treating creators.Credit: @imlucybanks/Instagram
But her success came at a price. Lucy Banks is her OnlyFans pseudonym; she is fiercely protective of her real identity and fears what impact OnlyFans might have in the future.
Her parents did not speak to her for 18 months, while her oldest friends dropped her after one revealed her double life. “People sent links to my kids’ school. The school dads were all joking about it, but the school reported me to the police! I’ve had rocks with ‘slut’ written on them thrown at my house … so yes, there can be a downside to OnlyFans.”
Today, the 33-year-old former bank teller has an investment property portfolio, owns her own home and her parents are speaking to her again.
Last August, Banks announced she was quitting OnlyFans “in disgust” over how she claimed the site was treating creators. OnlyFans had flagged her account for deletion, claiming she breached rules about cross-promotion on other platforms. She denies this.
‘I’m not ashamed about any of it, about being nude.’
Former OnlyFans creator Lucy Banks
“It’s disappointing that we earn literally billions of dollars for this company as adult creators, and we receive zero support. OnlyFans treats its adult creators like cash cows,” Banks said at the time, having been on the platform for four years.
Lucy Banks has not turned her back on the site completely, launching the Million Billion Media talent agency for other OnlyFans content creators. For a monthly retainer, she consults on everything from content to publicity generation. Banks has 15 women in her “stable”, including Taila Maddison of “stepdad bundle” fame.
Banks uses third-party facial recognition services, such as Rulta, to scour the internet around the clock searching for illegally copied content stolen from OnlyFans accounts. She has become proficient in issuing take-down notices on behalf of “my girls”.
“In making the transition back to normal life, I didn’t realise how much I would struggle,” she says. “Lucy Banks became a huge part of my identity. I’m not Lucy Banks any more, nor am I the person I was before OnlyFans. I’m keeping the name because it’s what everyone knows me as, it’s my business brand. I’m not ashamed about any of it, about being nude. I had a beautiful conversation with my kids about it all … they are flourishing now, that’s more than enough justification for me.”
Unlike Banks, Melbourne-based OnlyFans “creator manager” Bjorn Olsen has never personally featured on OnlyFans – well, not knowingly. On his website, Olsen tells potential clients of his “talent agency” Your OnlyFans Empire (YOFE), “Mediocrity is not in my vocabulary.” Apparently modesty isn’t, either; claiming he doesn’t just build careers, “I catapult them into the stratosphere”.
Fast-talking Olsen, who moves from hotel to hotel as it best suits his “playboy lifestyle”, is managing multiple OnlyFans creators, handling their social media output and outsourcing direct messaging “chats”. Just don’t call him an “e-pimp”. “That is a really stupid term. It’s very cringey. I don’t see myself as a pimp at all,” he says when asked about what he does in return for a 50 per cent slice of a creator’s revenue.
Olsen gives a colourful potted history of his life, including overcoming his drinking and drug addictions. He is also disarmingly honest about his role. “I know we are deceiving people. It is 100 per cent deceitful,” he says when explaining how “chat” services are outsourced, mostly to the Philippines, where specialist OnlyFans “chatters” are paid about $3 an hour to lasciviously respond to direct messages from Australian OnlyFans subscribers.
“Ultimately, the guys get the contact they desire, the girls do the video, and quite frankly everyone has a happy ending. I used to do the chatting myself. I got caught out using a translation app for one of my clients based in Germany … only once!
“Things have progressed a lot since then. If they get suspicious, we can do certain things to reassure them, like having the girls do a video message saying the subscriber’s name.”
Olsen, who taught himself software coding, says he has 14 women on his books and claims he is earning $20,000 a month.
Lucy Banks lets out a long sigh when I mention Olsen. She says OnlyFans is filled with characters like him. “Why pay someone to do something you can, and should, be doing yourself?”
On its website, OnlyFans encourages creators to cater to their “superfans”, who will “give more if they feel they’re getting something special”.
Back in Dover Heights, Lora Carmichael concurs, though adds: “Things can get very weird, I’ve had a couple of scary encounters, like the guys who start talking about cannibalism … I don’t want that coming into my personal life.”
Explaining what she will do on a $300, 10-minute video call, Carmichael laughs: “A lot of them won’t make it to the 10-minute mark. Many of the younger guys just hang up without so much as a goodbye, almost like they are shutting down a web browser. I try to give my subscribers an authentic experience, but I also like the attention. I like the way men will worship me, tell me I’m desirable and beautiful.”
She reveals one of her most loyal subscribers is “Tom” [not his real name]. “Tom’s a lovely guy,” Carmichael says before arranging for him to be interviewed, but on a first-name basis only. He turns out to be an eloquent, 32-year-old wine merchant from Sydney’s north.
Over the phone, an initially sheepish Tom tells me Carmichael represents a fantasy he can not have with his own girlfriend, who knows nothing about his OnlyFans activities, or the hundreds of dollars he spends on them each month.
“Lora’s physique is part of that fantasy,” he says. “I have always had a thing for that type of body, that very womanly shape … nice, round, big bottoms. Lora will do things for me that I can’t ask my girlfriend to do … And she is also a really smart and nice girl.
“It’s different to just watching porn, this is two-way. I have developed a kind of relationship with Lora. It’s not all sex … she is very articulate, so there is a bit of a thing going on between us, more than just getting off.”
I ask Tom if he feels like he’s cheating on his girlfriend with Lora. “I don’t see it as cheating,” he says, pausing momentarily. “But, in saying that, I don’t know what I would tell my girlfriend if she ever found out. That would be a difficult thing to explain to her, just as it is difficult to explain the exact nature and meaning of the relationship I have with Lora or why I even go on OnlyFans.”
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