The Adult Creator Economy Doesn't Need More Features. It Needs Infrastructure.

I didn't set out to write this. I set out to interview people.

Over the past year I've sat across from creators earning a few hundred dollars a month and creators earning seven figures a year. I've talked to agency owners who manage a dozen accounts out of a converted garage, photographers who shoot fifteen sets a week, marketers who left agency jobs to work exclusively with creators, software founders trying to solve identity verification, bankers who quietly help clients whose own banks won't, and a few journalists who wandered in skeptical and left having changed their minds about something they didn't expect to change their minds about. Somewhere around the fiftieth conversation, I stopped taking notes for a magazine and started taking notes for an argument. This is that argument, and I've tried to write it the way I'd actually say it to someone over coffee, not the way an industry report says it.

Here it is, plainly: the adult creator economy is one of the largest entrepreneurial movements of the past decade, and almost nobody — including the platforms profiting most from it — is treating it like one.

An industry hiding in plain sight

The numbers, when you actually line them up, are uncomfortable in how large they are.

OnlyFans paid creators more than $5.3 billion in 2023 on roughly $1.3 billion of its own net revenue, supporting more than 4 million creators and over 300 million registered users worldwide. It built that scale with what's reportedly fewer than fifty direct employees — which makes it, by revenue per head, one of the most efficient businesses on the planet, adult content or otherwise. Patreon has paid out more than $8 billion to creators since 2013, and did it largely outside the adult category, proving the subscription-membership model works for musicians, educators, and podcasters long before "creator economy" was a phrase anyone used in a pitch deck.

Fansly's growth story is almost an accident of corporate panic: in August 2021, OnlyFans announced it would ban sexually explicit content, creators fled in a matter of hours, and six days later OnlyFans reversed the decision — but not before an entire generation of creators had already diversified onto a second platform out of necessity. Fanvue has leaned hard into AI, building a following among creators experimenting with virtual personas and AI-generated companions, for better or worse forcing the rest of the industry to have conversations about digital identity it wasn't ready to have. Passes raised venture money chasing celebrities and influencers looking to diversify beyond brand deals. And Tim Stokely, having built and then stepped away from the platform that started most of this, launched SUBS in 2025 — which means he gets to try building creator infrastructure a second time, this time without three decades of legacy debt sitting underneath him.
Behind all of these sits an entire shadow economy that almost never gets discussed: accountants who specialize in creator tax structures, attorneys who handle takedown requests and platform disputes, editors who cut a week of raw footage into something postable, photographers who've built entire studios around a single niche, talent managers negotiating brand deals that would make a mid-tier influencer jealous. These are real businesses serving other real businesses, the same way a film industry supports caterers and costume houses and stunt coordinators nobody in the audience ever thinks about. And yet an industry moving this much money still doesn't have the scaffolding that far smaller industries take for granted.

There's no Chamber of Commerce for creators. No lobbying body fighting for banking protections, for sane AI disclosure rules, for the kind of privacy legislation that would actually protect someone whose face is their income. No standards organization helping a twenty-three-year-old new to the industry figure out which identity verification vendor to trust, or what a fair contract with an agency looks like before she signs one out of desperation. There's no trade press creators actually trust, because most of what gets written about them is written by people whose careers don't depend on creators succeeding — documentary producers chasing controversy, newspapers chasing clicks, late-night hosts chasing an easy laugh at someone else's expense. I don't think any of that is malicious, exactly. I think it's just incentives working the way incentives work. But it means the public record of this entire industry has been written almost entirely by people standing outside it, and outsiders tend to write what performs, not what's true.

What's actually missing

It's worth being specific about what "infrastructure" means here, because it's easy to nod along with the word and picture nothing concrete.

It means there's no annual gathering that draws thousands of people working in this space the way a SaaS conference draws thousands of people working in software — a place where a creator can meet the founder building her payment processor, where an agency owner can compare notes with a competitor instead of guessing in the dark, where a researcher studying online safety can actually find subjects willing to talk to her. It means there's no awards show that does for this industry what the Oscars do for film: take something dismissed as disposable entertainment and, once a year, insist in front of a wide audience that it's actually craft. It means there's no research institute publishing peer-reviewed work on creator burnout, on what AI-generated likeness theft does to someone's livelihood, on how subscription churn in this category compares to subscription churn anywhere else — because without that research, every policy conversation about this industry happens based on vibes and anecdote instead of data.

It means there's no legal defense fund a creator can call when a bank closes her account with no explanation and no appeal, which happens constantly and which would be a genuine scandal in almost any other industry. It means there's no pension or retirement framework built for an income that can be enormous at twenty-four and gone at thirty, the way it can be for an athlete, except athletes have players' associations negotiating on their behalf and creators mostly have a group chat. None of this is hypothetical. I've sat with creators who've lived every one of these gaps personally, usually more than one at a time.

What creators actually told me

What sells in the press is rarely what I actually heard in these conversations.

I heard from a creator paying down a mortgage on a house she genuinely never thought she'd qualify for, on a salary history that no traditional lender would have taken seriously five years earlier. I heard from a mother covering private school tuition for two kids, the kind of tuition she used to lie awake doing math on and now just pays. I heard from people quietly supporting a disabled sibling, an aging parent who doesn't entirely know where the money comes from, a younger creator just starting out who needed someone further along to show her which mistakes not to make. One woman told me she'd never once cared about economics or accounting in her life, had barely passed the one business class she took in community college — and then she started earning more in a year than anyone in her family ever had in a decade, panicked a little, and taught herself how an LLC works out of pure necessity. She now runs three entities, has a CPA on retainer, and has a ten-year plan that ends with her retired and mentoring the next wave of creators coming up behind her. Another told me, almost offhand, that she'd started angel investing — small checks, mostly into other creators' businesses, because she understood the cash flow problems they were describing better than most actual investors would.

None of that is the stereotype. It's also not unusual, in my experience — it's just what running a real business looks like when nobody bothers to write it down. Many of the creators I've spent time with are functionally chief executives of small companies. They employ editors, schedulers, photographers, social media managers, sometimes five or ten people whose own livelihoods depend on the creator's continued success, which is its own kind of pressure most discussions of this industry never mention. They understand customer lifetime value and recurring revenue and retention curves better than most retail businesses I've consulted for in my career, and they learned it the hard way, by doing it, with real money on the line, not by sitting through an MBA elective.

What they consistently don't have is what entrepreneurs in nearly every other legal, regulated industry take for granted. A bank that won't quietly close their account with a form letter and no explanation. A payment processor that won't freeze six weeks of earnings while it "reviews" the account. A platform that won't shadowban them for using ordinary anatomical language in an educational post. A room full of peers where they can say what they actually do for a living without bracing for a reaction. I asked one creator what the hardest part of the job was, expecting her to say something about the content itself. She said it was the isolation — that she made more money than almost anyone she grew up with, and couldn't talk to most of them about how.

That gap, between how these people actually run their lives and how the public is conditioned to imagine them, isn't a behavior gap. It's a stigma gap. And stigma doesn't get closed by a better messaging feature or a smarter recommendation algorithm. It gets closed the way it's always gotten closed for every misunderstood industry before this one: by institutions willing to put a name and a face and a track record next to the work.
Hollywood already solved this, a hundred years ago

It's worth remembering that Hollywood never thought the movie itself was the whole business. The film was the catalyst. Everything built up around it was what made the catalyst permanent.

Variety started covering vaudeville performers in 1907, long before "the industry" it now covers existed in any recognizable form. The Hollywood Reporter launched in 1930 and became required morning reading for every agent and executive in town within a few years. By the 1940s and '50s, fan magazines like Photoplay had circulations north of a million copies, built almost entirely on carefully managed interviews and photo spreads that turned working actors into household names — not because the films alone did that, but because an entire publishing apparatus existed whose sole purpose was telling stories about the people making them. The first Academy Awards ceremony, held in 1929, drew 270 people to a banquet room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Today the Oscars are watched by tens of millions of people, and a single win can permanently reset an actor's quote, their access, their leverage in every negotiation that follows. The ceremony isn't really about the trophy. It's a yearly, very public reminder that this is craft, not just commerce.

Film festivals do something structurally similar, just earlier in the pipeline. Cannes started in 1946, Berlin in 1951, Sundance in 1978 — and none of them exist primarily to screen movies for an audience that could just go to a theater. They exist to manufacture relationships: the room where a distributor meets a first-time director, the party where a financier hears about a project six months before anyone else does, the shared experience that turns "people who work in the same industry" into "people who actually know each other." Careers get built in those rooms in ways that have nothing to do with box office.

Even representation got built as infrastructure. Agencies like CAA, WME, and UTA were never just contract negotiators. They actively shape which projects an actor takes, which brand deals make sense, which magazine covers are worth the time, which speaking engagements build the right kind of scarcity. The entire philosophy is that becoming more recognized should eventually mean working less while earning more — leverage compounding over a career instead of resetting with every project. I haven't met a single creator manager in this industry operating with that kind of long-horizon thinking. Most of the management here is closer to a booking agent than a career architect, and that's not the managers' fault — there's no infrastructure underneath them to build toward yet.

Netflix is maybe the clearest modern proof that this playbook still works. Industry estimates put Netflix's annual awards-campaign spend somewhere between $100 million and $200 million — money spent on screenings, ad buys, junket interviews, and events for films like Roma, The Irishman, and Maestro, none of which moves next week's subscriber number in any measurable way. Netflix spends it anyway because prestige compounds in ways a single metric can't capture: a nomination raises perceived value, a strong review starts a conversation, a junket interview makes an actor feel like a person instead of a product, and a documentary years later extends the whole thing's shelf life. Each piece reinforces the next one in a loop that has nothing to do with this quarter's earnings call.

Disney took the same logic and ran it further than anyone. A Disney film was never really the business — it was the seed of a flywheel that runs through merchandise, theme parks, cruise lines, Broadway productions, documentaries, and decades of fandom that outlive the original release by generations. By 2025 that flywheel includes more than a dozen parks and resorts, multiple cruise ships, stage productions on three continents, and roughly $91 billion in annual revenue, none of which would exist if Disney had ever treated a film as a finished, standalone product instead of a piece of something much larger.

Even outside entertainment, the pattern holds. Salesforce didn't build Dreamforce — now drawing roughly 45,000 people in person — because it sells more licenses the week of the event. Adobe didn't build MAX, HubSpot didn't build INBOUND, Apple didn't build WWDC, because any of those things show up cleanly on a product roadmap. None of it is a product. It's infrastructure, and infrastructure almost never pays for itself on a quarterly basis. That's not a bug in the model. It's the entire point of the model.

I keep coming back to one sentence, because I think it's the whole argument compressed: products generate revenue, infrastructure generates permanence.

Why I started a magazine in a coffee shop in Tijuana

I should be honest about where my own stake in this actually sits, because an open letter from someone with nothing on the line isn't worth the time it takes to read.
I launched Only Fans Insider Magazine in May 2025 from a coffee shop table in Tijuana. By that point I'd spent years as a startup founder and growth strategist — raised around $4.5 million for my own companies, mentored founders who went on to collectively raise more than $80 million — and I understood, at least in the abstract, how ecosystems form around an industry. What I didn't understand, walking into this one, was why an industry this large had quietly let almost everyone else write its story for it.

Hollywood actors don't wait for a Netflix documentary to define who they are. Startup founders don't sit around hoping an outside journalist eventually explains their company correctly. But creators, for the most part, had nowhere to just say things in their own words — no outlet where they pitched themselves, chose their own framing, owned the byline, and walked away having told the story they actually wanted told instead of the one an editor decided would generate more engagement. So that's what the magazine tried to be. Creators choose their own interview questions. They write their own answers. They pick their own photos. They decide their own headline and subtitle. It sounds small written out like that. In practice, for a lot of the people I worked with, it was the first time in their entire career they'd been the author of their own profile instead of the subject of someone else's.

It didn't stay just OnlyFans creators for long, because the need wasn't actually platform-specific. Fanvue creators needed the same outlet. So did Fansly creators, photographers who'd never had anywhere to talk shop publicly, agency founders tired of being treated as an afterthought, SexTech builders nobody in mainstream tech press would touch. Eventually that expansion ran straight into a harder, less solvable problem: even once creators had somewhere to actually tell their story, the broader social internet was perfectly happy to keep their subscription money while quietly limiting their ability to be found at all. Posts disappeared with no explanation. Accounts got shadowbanned for using ordinary medical or anatomical language in an educational post. Therapists discussing sexual wellness got treated by moderation systems the same as explicit performers. Creators started self-censoring their own marketing copy on platforms that were never built with them in mind in the first place — not out of malice on the platforms' part, necessarily, just because those platforms' founders had a different audience in their head when they designed the rules, and creators happened to occupy the leftover space.

That's what led to Sxgram. Not a replacement for Instagram or X, not trying to be — just somewhere built specifically for this audience instead of somewhere they have to constantly apologize their way into existing on. It combines posts, stories, video, and longer-form features into one place designed around the assumption that the people using it are adults running real businesses, not a liability to be managed.

The part that tends to surprise people

Here's the piece of all this that throws most founders off when I explain it: I don't actually want a monopoly on any of it. I want the opposite.

Most of what you're taught as a founder is to build a moat — lock people in, raise switching costs, make leaving as painful as possible. I've spent the better part of the last year trying to do close to the opposite. I want fifty creator magazines, not one. I want agencies launching their own. I want photographers, educators, investors, and creators themselves starting competing publications, competing podcasts, competing awards shows, even competing social platforms. We built a licensing program specifically so other people could spin up their own version of what we built — their own magazine, their own community, their own events — using our infrastructure instead of starting from zero.

It sounds like bad business until you remember that no individual film festival benefits from being the only film festival on earth. Every new outlet covering this industry creates another interview, another search result, another piece of public evidence that this is a real economy and not a punchline. Competition doesn't dilute legitimacy for a young industry — it's the thing that actually manufactures legitimacy in the first place. Fashion didn't get taken seriously because there was exactly one magazine covering it. Tech didn't get taken seriously because of one trade publication. An industry becomes permanent the moment enough independent institutions have their own reasons to keep writing it down, long after any single company's incentive to do so might fade.

Who's actually funding any of this? Right now, almost no one.

It's worth sitting with that question honestly instead of rhetorically, because the honest answer is uncomfortable.

Who's funding journalism that serves creators instead of mining them for headlines? Almost no one. Who's funding a real annual conference — not a meetup, an actual industry gathering with the budget and reach to matter? Almost no one. Who's funding the research that would let policymakers regulate this industry based on data instead of moral panic? Almost no one. Who's funding legal defense for creators facing arbitrary bank closures, who's funding cybersecurity education for people whose entire livelihood depends on not getting doxxed, who's funding media training so a creator doesn't have to learn how to handle a hostile interview in real time, on camera, for the first time?

I keep asking founders in this space some version of that question, and I keep getting the same honest, slightly embarrassed answer: nobody, really. Not because they don't care, in most cases. Because product roadmaps are built to answer a much narrower question — does this feature move retention next month — and none of the things on that list above will ever show up cleanly in that kind of dashboard. That's not a criticism of any one company. It's just what happens when an entire industry is run exclusively by product teams optimizing for product metrics, with nobody specifically tasked with asking whether the industry itself still exists in a recognizable form in twenty years.

Imagine, for a second, if other industries operated this way. Imagine if Disney and Warner Bros. had spent a hundred years optimizing the movie ticket checkout flow while refusing to fund a single film festival. Imagine if Netflix had poured hundreds of millions into recommendation algorithms while skipping every awards campaign, on principle, because it doesn't move next week's number. Imagine if the NFL had spent decades polishing its fantasy football app while declining to fund youth leagues, players' associations, or any community program at all. Every one of those decisions would read as obviously short-sighted from the outside. I don't think the decision-makers at these creator platforms are short-sighted people. I think they're simply optimizing the only thing anyone's ever asked them to optimize.

What I'm actually asking for

So, Tim — and OnlyFans, Fansly, Fanvue, Patreon, and Passes, every founder currently building in this space — this isn't a complaint dressed up as an article. It's an invitation, and I think it's a better business decision than it sounds like on first read.

You've already done the hard part. OnlyFans paid out $5.3 billion to creators in a single year while reportedly running with fewer than fifty employees, which makes it one of the most efficient businesses on the planet by revenue per head, full stop. Patreon proved the membership model worked years before "creator economy" was a phrase anyone used in a pitch deck. Fanvue is already wrestling, in public, with what AI does to creator identity, which the rest of the industry will be forced to confront eventually whether it wants to or not. SUBS gets to build a subscription platform in 2025 without three decades of legacy infrastructure sitting underneath it, which is a genuinely rare advantage in any industry.

What none of you have built yet is the layer that sits above the product — the layer that makes this feel less like a collection of apps people happen to use and more like something people actually belong to.

Run the math with me for a second, because I think it makes the ask feel smaller than it sounds. A single percent of OnlyFans' annual revenue would be something in the neighborhood of $13 million a year. That's enough to fund independent journalism that actually serves creators instead of mining them for headlines. It's enough to run a real annual gathering — founders, creators, photographers, agencies, researchers, all in the same room instead of scattered across a dozen group chats that never talk to each other. It's enough to seed a legal defense fund for creators facing bank closures or platform bans with no appeal process, which happens to someone in this industry essentially every week. It's enough to fund the research nobody's funding right now — on burnout, on online safety, on what AI-generated likeness theft actually does to someone's income and sense of self, on how people in this industry plan for a retirement that some of them are genuinely close enough to start thinking about seriously.

None of that shows up in next quarter's growth numbers. That's not an oversight in the argument. That's the entire point of the argument. Infrastructure isn't supposed to pay back next quarter. It's supposed to still be standing in twenty years, long after the apps that paid for it have been redesigned a dozen times over and the people running them have moved on to something else.

I'd encourage OnlyFans to put real money behind creator journalism instead of treating press as a crisis-communications function. I'd encourage Fansly to back an independent conference instead of waiting for one to happen organically. I'd encourage Fanvue to fund the AI-ethics research its own product roadmap is going to need answers to within a few years anyway. I'd encourage Patreon to extend its educational programs further into the kind of financial literacy work creators are already doing for themselves, unpaid, in private group chats. I'd encourage Passes to invest in real networking infrastructure instead of one-off celebrity moments. And I'd encourage Tim and the team at SUBS, more than anyone, to think past subscriptions entirely and ask what role a company can play in building institutions that outlive any single platform it ever launches — because Tim, of everyone on this list, has already lived through what happens when a platform's fortunes and an entire industry's fortunes get treated as the same thing.

What this is really about

I don't think the people running these companies lack the imagination for this. I think product roadmaps are simply built to answer a narrower question than the one that actually matters here — how do we retain this user next month — and infrastructure only ever answers a different one: does this industry still exist, in any recognizable form, in fifty years.

Every creator I interviewed this year was, somewhere underneath the actual interview, asking some version of the same question — not "can I make money," because most of them had already answered that for themselves a long time before I showed up with a notebook. What they were really asking was whether any of it added up to something. Whether the business they'd built quietly, often without most people in their life knowing the real details, was part of something larger than a subscription count on a dashboard somewhere. Whether, twenty years from now, there'd be any record at all that this was a real industry full of real entrepreneurs, or whether it would just fade the way so much of the internet fades — undocumented, unmemoried, easy for the next generation to dismiss because nobody bothered to write it down while it was happening.

I think it can add up to something. I think the companies that figure that out first won't just be remembered as the platforms that paid creators well, the same way nobody remembers studios primarily for their best ticketing system. They'll be remembered the way the studios that built the Academy are remembered — not for the best feature they ever shipped, but for the institutions they were willing to fund before anyone could prove, in a spreadsheet, that it would pay off.

That's the bet I've already made, with a coffee shop table and a magazine nobody asked me to start. I'd like some company.