Access is an illusion. Or, really, what I mean to say is: access, filtered through social media, is an illusion. In 2016, no one understood that better than Timothy Stokely, who launched an adult subscription site called OnlyFans that summer. He knew that access—the selling of it, and what buyers believed it opened up—could be quite lucrative.
I interviewed Stokely in 2019. His background was in soft-core camming; he ran, with mild success, the sites Customs4U and GlamWorship. But Stokely wanted OnlyFans to be different. He believed if he could get people to buy into the platform's promise he could stand to make a lot of money. At the time, he explained his utopian vision to me in blunt terms. “The way that Uber enabled anyone to monetize their own car, OnlyFans allows anyone to monetize their own content and following,” he said. “Influencers are the new celebrities.”
Like the generation of tech industrialists before him, Stokely was driven by questions of volume, ambition, and impact. Just how big could OnlyFans be?
Almost a decade later, we have an answer: really fucking big.
Impact is more than numbers, of course. OnlyFans' core influence is perhaps best measured by what it culturally shifted. It is one of the platforms that has changed, in part, how we think about social media. What OnlyFans reaffirmed, more than anything, was a culture increasingly built around and addicted to fandom.
OnlyFans sold “access.” It made middle-of-nowhere users into influencers. It dangled the carrot of micro-fame and easy money. Like clockwork, many people—millions per month—bought into the illusion.
“What providers are largely selling isn't the mechanics of intercourse but an authentic connection,” says Kurt Fowler, an assistant professor at Penn State Abington and author of The Rise of Digital Sex Work. “The idea of making clients feel unique and special has always been part of the equation.”
Photographer: Yana Van Nuffel; Model: Nassia Matsa @nassia_
In the US, we like to say American culture is celebrity culture. And, sure, some of that is true. We're fame whores. But, really, what American society is built around more than anything is fan culture. Fandom infects everything we do.
