Spicy Platforms Solved Monetization

By Joseph Haecker, Editor-in-Chief of Only Fans Insider Magazine and founder of Sxgram.

Spicy content platforms solved one of the hardest problems in the creator economy: direct monetization

For decades, adult performers, models, and entertainers needed a studio, a distributor, or a broadcaster standing between them and their audience. That middleman controlled the money. OnlyFans, Fansly, and Fanvue tore that structure down. A creator can now build a direct relationship with a fan, charge for access to it, and keep the overwhelming majority of what that fan pays. That is one of the most significant shifts in how creative labor gets paid in the last twenty years, and the numbers behind it are staggering.

The Scale of What Monetization Solved

Start with OnlyFans, the platform that proved the model could work at scale. In 2024, OnlyFans generated about $7.22 billion in gross fan payments, paid roughly $5.8 billion to creators, and reported 4.6 million creator accounts and 377.5 million fan accounts. Those figures alone would make it one of the largest creator platforms in the world. But the trajectory since then has only accelerated. Speaking at Bloomberg Tech in London in October 2025, OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair revealed that the platform has paid out $25 billion to creators since it launched in 2016 — a scale few digital platforms of any kind can match. Blair, a former cybersecurity and data-privacy lawyer who took over as CEO in July 2023, framed the company's mission in stark terms: OnlyFans, she said, is "about creating wealth for others rather than just profiteering." A month later, on stage with Masters of Scale host Jeff Berman at Web Summit in Lisbon, Blair reiterated the scale of that redistribution and made a point of distinguishing OnlyFans' moderation environment from the platforms creators still depend on for discovery, noting the company sees "a lot less" flagged content than traditional social media.

Blair has also been candid about where OnlyFans draws the line on AI. Discussing the platform's decision not to allow wholly AI-run accounts, she explained that "every business decision needs to benefit the creators," arguing that AI-generated accounts competing for attention would cannibalize real creators' ability to monetize their own work. That's a notable philosophical stance from the largest player in the category — one that stands in direct contrast to a competitor's strategy, which we'll get to shortly.

OnlyFans is not the only company proving the monetization model scales. Fanvue, the London-based platform founded in 2020 by Will Monange, Joel Morris, and Harry Fitzgerald, reported more than 17 million monthly active users, 250,000 creators, a $100 million-plus annualized run rate, and a $22 million Series A investment round in January 2026. The round was led by Inner Circle, a fund backed by more than 50 exited founders whose portfolio also includes Revolut, Anthropic, and xAI — a signal that sophisticated technology investors see the category as durable, not a novelty. Fanvue's revenue grew 450% year over year, and the company's headcount nearly tripled, from 42 to 115 employees, in twelve months. Co-founder and Co-CEO Will Monange called the momentum "a huge statement and a stamp of approval" for the platform's direction after signing Swiss footballer Alisha Lehmann, who brings more than 16 million Instagram followers to the platform.

Fanvue's bet is that artificial intelligence, not just direct payment, is the next lever for creator income. More than 93% of creators on the platform use at least one of its proprietary AI tools — messaging, voice replies, or predictive analytics — and the company has partnered with voice-generation platform ElevenLabs so creators can clone their own voice for calls and messages at scale. Co-founder Joel Morris, a former YouTuber who built a channel of more than 2.5 million subscribers before stepping behind the camera to build Fanvue, has spoken about the burnout he experienced as a creator as the direct inspiration for the company's product. "I used to be caught up in all of the struggles that creators can face," he said, describing "the constant pressure to appear omnipresent and 'always on.'" That pain point — not a business-school thesis about monetization gaps — is what Fanvue has built its entire AI roadmap around.

Fansly has taken a different approach to the same underlying problem: helping fans find creators in the first place. The platform's internal "For You Page" uses machine learning to recommend creators across the app, functioning, in the company's own description, as a way of addressing "a key limitation of competitor platforms that lack internal promotion mechanisms." Fansly says its FYP saw more than one billion swipes in 2025 — a volume of internal discovery activity that rivals a mid-sized social network in its own right.

And the founder who started this entire category isn't done building. Tim Stokely, who founded OnlyFans in 2016 with a £10,000 loan from his father and stepped down as CEO in December 2021, returned to the space in May 2025 with a new platform, Subs.com. Stokely has been unusually direct about what he thinks the next generation of creator platforms needs to solve. "There's a clear demand for a subscription platform that gives creators everything they need in one place," he said at launch, describing Subs as built for "all creators" — podcasters, athletes, musicians, and adult performers alike. He's also made the underlying economics vivid with a hypothetical: if a creator with Kylie Jenner's Instagram following converted just 0.5% of those followers into $10-a-month subscribers, he noted, "she could earn around $20 million a month." Stokely frames his broader thesis about where creator platforms are heading in a single line: "I believe the future of media belongs to individuals and platforms should support that shift."

Add it up, and the case is closed: the creator economy has solved the problem of getting money from a fan's wallet into a creator's bank account, without a studio, publisher, record label, broadcaster, or traditional media company standing in the middle. That is a massive structural shift. But solving payments is not the same thing as solving marketing, and that is exactly where the spicy creator economy remains exposed.

The Discovery Gap Is Not Imagined — It's Documented

For years, spicy creators relied on mainstream social platforms to drive traffic back to paid platforms. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, X, YouTube, and LinkedIn became the top of the funnel, while OnlyFans, Fansly, Fanvue, and similar platforms became the monetization layer. The structural problem with that arrangement is obvious once you say it out loud: the monetization platforms depend on traffic from social platforms that, in most cases, do not want spicy creators there at all.

This is not a hunch or an anecdote. It is one of the most studied phenomena in platform-governance research over the past several years, and the research consistently points the same direction. A 2018 U.S. federal law — FOSTA-SESTA, the combined Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act — amended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to hold online platforms legally liable if users were found facilitating illegal sex acts through their services. The law was written to target trafficking. In practice, researchers studying its aftermath have found something broader and more damaging: platforms responded by conflating all sex work with trafficking and over-policed content and accounts accordingly. A 2024 study published in *new media & society* found that FOSTA/SESTA caused platforms to "over-censor posts worldwide to be seen to be complying with the new law," applying American legislation to content and creators far beyond U.S. borders. A separate 2025 study in *Gender, Work & Organization*, built on interviews with 23 sex workers from a sex-worker-led podcast, found that the law exposed workers to greater financial precarity through intensified policing by both platforms and payment processors — a dynamic the researcher described as threatening workers' basic safety, not just their income. A third analysis reviewing nine empirical studies conducted between 2018 and 2023 concluded that SESTA/FOSTA reduced sex workers' income, restricted their access to safety and client-screening resources, increased their exposure to exploitation and violence, and eliminated online spaces they had used for community building and political organizing.

None of this is abstract for anyone who has run a spicy creator's social accounts. Separate research on platform community guidelines, based on a qualitative analysis of seven major platforms' policies, found that sex workers experience the resulting restrictions as making it "difficult to just exist" online — the platforms these creators need for visibility are frequently the same platforms working hardest to remove them. That research also points out something easy to overlook: for sex workers, especially those who are disabled or part of marginalized gender or sexual identities, social platforms are often the only accessible space for community support, harm-reduction information, and client screening. When platforms shut that down in the name of trafficking compliance, they don't just cost creators followers — they remove safety infrastructure.

Meta's own public policy record shows how this tightening has continued to accelerate, independent of FOSTA-SESTA. Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger now apply a default "Teen Accounts" content setting modeled on 13+ movie ratings, which — according to Meta's own transparency documentation — hides "content that may be seen as implicitly sexual" from teen users by default, on top of removing content the platform prohibits for everyone. Meta has continued layering on restrictions: blocking accounts identified as regularly sharing age-inappropriate material from being followed by teens, restricting search terms like "alcohol" and "gore" for younger users, and, following Australia's under-16 social media ban that took effect in December 2025, blocking roughly 550,000 accounts belonging to Australian minors in the opening days alone. None of that is aimed at spicy creators specifically — it's aimed at protecting minors, which is an unambiguously good goal — but the practical effect for adult creators is the same regardless of intent: the discovery surface on the largest platforms in the world keeps shrinking.

X is the partial exception, and it's worth understanding exactly how narrow that exception is. X's policy states plainly: "users should be able to create, distribute, and consume material related to sexual themes" as long as it's consensually produced. The company frames sexual expression as potentially "a legitimate form of artistic expression" and says it wants to protect "the autonomy of adults" to engage with content reflecting their own desires. As of 2026, X remains, in the words of one platform-policy analysis, "the only major social media platform that permits explicit adult content alongside general-purpose content and third-party advertising." But that permissiveness now comes with real friction: X's Adult Content Creator program, launched in January 2026, requires identity verification and a mandatory three-tier sensitivity labeling system before a creator can post adult material at all, and the platform excludes labeled adult content entirely from its For You recommendations and standard ad placement. In other words, even the one mainstream platform that formally welcomes spicy creators still walls their content off from the discovery engine that drives the rest of the platform. That exception proves the broader rule: mainstream platforms were not built as business infrastructure for spicy creators, and creators feel that reality every day, regardless of what any single platform's written policy says.

The Platforms Know This, and They're Trying to Fix It From the Inside

To their credit, none of the major spicy platforms are ignoring the discoverability gap. But their responses reveal exactly why the fix can't come from inside a single platform alone.

OnlyFans launched OFTV as a safe-for-work streaming channel, deliberately built to carry no pornographic content and to skip ad monetization entirely. Coverage of the launch has described it functioning more like a marketing and brand-extension arm than a direct monetization play — a place where OnlyFans creators can build a broader, platform-agnostic media presence without triggering the platform restrictions that follow adult content everywhere else.

Fansly, as noted above, went a different direction, investing in an internal discovery algorithm rather than an external safe-for-work brand. Both are legitimate, sensible moves, and Tim Stokely's Subs.com has effectively built a third variation, an "Explore" discovery feed alongside a YouTube-style "Shows" feature designed to convert casual viewers into paying subscribers with, in Stokely's words, one click. Stokely has called the format "a game changer," and told Business Insider bluntly that "creators need more than just a paywall."

Every one of these efforts is smart. None of them fully replaces the value of a third-party social network, and the reason is structural, not a failure of execution. Internal discovery tools, no matter how good the algorithm, only reach people who are already inside that platform's ecosystem. OFTV can build brand equity, but it remains tied to OnlyFans' own app-store constraints and strategic priorities. A creator who only exists inside one company's walled garden — however well-designed that garden is — has not solved the discovery problem. They've just relocated it.

What spicy creators need is not another feature bolted onto a subscription platform. They need an ecosystem outside of it.

Why Mature Industries Build Ecosystems, Not Empires

I've spent 14 years in startup ecosystems and 31 years in corporate America, and I have watched the same mistake play out across nearly every industry I've touched: companies try to become "all things to all people" because every new feature looks, in isolation, like an opportunity worth building. Almost none of them are, once you account for what building that feature costs you elsewhere. Ecosystems win when companies know exactly what they are best at, and they let strong, independent partners handle everything else.

This isn't a theory unique to the creator economy — it's how every mature industry on earth actually functions. Nobody expects Zillow to provide accounting services, legal representation, industry conferences, continuing education, political lobbying, local networking groups, CRM software, mortgage lending, and title services. Those businesses exist as an independent layer around real estate because the industry grew large enough, and specialized enough, to support them. Each company competes and innovates in its own lane, and the entire industry is stronger for it. Technology tells the same story: Apple doesn't run venture capital firms, software consultancies, trade associations, accounting firms, cybersecurity companies, coding bootcamps, or developer conferences. It supports a sprawling independent ecosystem of businesses that make the platform stronger without Apple having to build any of them itself — and that ecosystem is one of Apple's most durable competitive advantages, precisely because Apple's success stops being dependent on Apple building every single feature in-house.

The spicy creator economy hasn't matured to that point yet, and you can see it in the way the platforms talk about their own roadmaps. Every one of the major companies discussed above is, in some form, trying to become payment processor, subscription platform, social network, discovery engine, CRM, media company, and brand marketplace simultaneously. That instinct is understandable — every feature genuinely does look like it could keep a creator inside the app a little longer — but it's also how products become bloated, confusing, and expensive to maintain, while consuming engineering resources that could otherwise sharpen the platform's actual core product: getting creators paid, reliably and safely.

A healthier question for these platforms to ask isn't "what feature should we build next?" It's "who in the ecosystem is already solving this problem better than we ever could?" The answer is almost always another company, another entrepreneur, or another community whose entire mission is built around that one specific challenge.

That's precisely the gap that Only Fans Insider Magazine, Fanvue Insider Magazine, Fansly Insider Magazine, and Sxgram exist to fill. The magazines provide editorial credibility, searchable stories, creator features, business coverage, and owned-media assets creators can share far beyond a single social feed. Sxgram provides the social layer: a place where spicy creators, agencies, brands, software companies, educators, and advertisers can connect around business growth without pretending the category doesn't exist. Neither is trying to replace OnlyFans, Fansly, Fanvue, or Subs — we depend on all of them existing. Their success is what creates the opportunity we're built to serve.

Why Press Is Infrastructure, Not Marketing Fluff

Press is one of the most underrated forms of infrastructure in the entire creator economy, and it's worth being precise about why.

A social post might generate engagement for a day, maybe two if the algorithm is kind to it. An editorial feature becomes part of a creator's digital footprint for years. It gets indexed by search engines. It gets referenced in conversations with brands. It gets shared during sponsorship negotiations and included in media kits. It gets discovered by people who were never part of the creator's existing audience in the first place. Every article a creator is featured in becomes an asset they own and can keep leveraging for the rest of their career — unlike a post buried three scrolls down on a platform they don't control.

That distinction matters more now than it ever has, because creators are increasingly building businesses, not just social profiles. Brands don't evaluate follower counts in isolation anymore. They research Google search results, media coverage, interviews, speaking engagements, podcast appearances, community involvement, and thought leadership before they sign a partnership. A creator with credible editorial coverage looks — and functionally is — more established than one whose entire digital presence lives inside algorithm-controlled feeds that can vanish or get suppressed overnight.

Editorial coverage also builds a form of protection most creators never think about until it's too late. Lose an Instagram account, take an unexplained reach cut on TikTok, or run into unexpected moderation somewhere else, and years of visibility can disappear almost instantly — a risk made concrete by the FOSTA-SESTA research above, and by Meta's own admission that it blocked over half a million accounts in a matter of days during Australia's under-16 rollout. Independent press can't eliminate that risk, but it meaningfully reduces dependence on any single platform. Articles persist after the fact. Search results keep sending traffic. Interviews keep establishing credibility. Third-party publications keep telling a creator's story regardless of what any one company's algorithm decides to do next.

Sxgram is built to extend that protection by acting as connective tissue between creators, businesses, agencies, technology providers, educators, and brands — a professional networking and discovery platform designed for building relationships, publishing articles, sharing updates, and establishing authority, rather than existing solely as one more place to uplo