``Nudes? Shouldn't I charge for these?'': Motivations of New Sexual Content Creators on OnlyFans - Video

``Nudes? Shouldn't I charge for these?'': Motivations of New Sexual Content Creators on OnlyFans
Vaughn Hamilton, Ananta Soneji, Allison McDonald, Elissa M. Redmiles

CHI 2023: The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Session: Social Media and Moderation

With over 1.5 million content creators, OnlyFans is one of the fastest growing subscription-based social media platforms. The platform is primarily associated with sexual content. Thus, OnlyFans creators are uniquely positioned at the intersection of professional social media content creation and sex work. While the motivations of experienced sex workers to adopt OnlyFans have been studied, in this work we seek to understand the motivations of creators who had not previously done sex work. Through a qualitative interview study of 22 U.S.-based OnlyFans creators, we find that beyond the typical motivations for pursuing gig work (e.g., flexibility, autonomy), our participants were motivated by three key factors: (1) societal visibility and mainstream acceptance of OnlyFans; (2) platform design and affordances such as boundary-setting with clients, privacy from the public, and content archives; and (3) the pandemic, as OnlyFans provided an enormous opportunity to overcome lockdown-related issues.

Web:: https://programs.sigchi.org/chi/2023/program/content/96419

Pre-recorded presentation videos for papers at CHI 2023