The Unlikelihood of Being an OnlyFans Millionaire

Various creators from the adult content website OnlyFans have described earning thousands of dollars a day through the service. One model told the DailyMail that they earned over $6 million in a year and $60 thousand from a single livestream. Others describe making $30,000 a day.

While those numbers could technically be possible, they are unlikely. Based on annual reports from the company’s parent firm, Fenix International, in 2022 OnlyFans had 3.18 million creators who brought in $5.55 billion in revenue.

Large numbers indeed, but that works out to an average annual revenue before taxes and fees of $1,744. Helpful side income for some, but not exactly thousands per day.

It’s possible those numbers could come from a large group of high-income earners and the rest earn nothing. For example, if creators earned either $100,000 a year or nothing, then there would be 55,500 people earning that $100k mark. Quite lucrative. But that would mean that only 1.6 percent of creators were earning the big bucks and millions of others would be earning nothing and be much better off working part-time at McDonalds.

More likely is that there is a continuity of earners, from those earning thousands to those earning hundreds and some earning somewhere in between as is common with large datasets of populations, like that of income and wealth.

To model this situation so that it has the most people earning the largest amount of money you would need a heavily skewed population distribution—the function that determines how common each income bracket is.

A skewed distribution—such as the exponential distribution or a log-normal distribution—would mean an uneven distribution where most earn little and a few earn a lot. In the graphical representation, the spike of largest probabilities skews to the side earning the least.

It’s possible to create a heavily skewed distribution modeling the OnlyFans’ data like this using 1 million earners where at least one person earns $100,000 in a year and the average income is $1,744. That distribution still leaves over 87 percent making less than the federal minimum wage of $15,000 a year.

But it’s not possible to create a continuous distribution like that including all of OnlyFans’ 3.182 million earners. It would need to be an even more severely skewed distribution with even more people earning less to include some earners making $100k.

An exponential distribution that includes all OnlyFans’ creators with an average of $1,744 would max out at around $2,800 in gross earnings (pre-tax and fees). Even the top earners would not be making minimum wage.