The Men's CPG Brand's Guide to Working With Adult Content Creators for Dummies
Why some of the best influencers for men's products may be women—and why marketers may be looking at the adult creator economy backward
By Joseph Haecker, Founder of Sxgram
Here's a marketing question that shouldn't be particularly difficult: If you sell products to men, where should you advertise?
The obvious answer is wherever men are. Yet somewhere along the way, marketing became considerably more complicated than that. We created audience personas, influencer categories, creator archetypes, brand-safety committees, media classifications and increasingly narrow content verticals. Then we started putting creators into boxes and deciding which products belonged inside those boxes.
A beauty creator sells cosmetics. A fitness creator sells protein powder. A mom influencer sells household products. A tech creator sells electronics. And an adult content creator? Lingerie, adult toys, sexual wellness products and maybe a dating app.
That's usually about where the imagination stops.
But there is a fundamental problem with that logic. We're matching products to creators instead of matching products to the people those creators influence.
Nowhere might that mistake be more consequential than in the adult creator economy.
A significant part of the adult creator ecosystem presents marketers with an interesting demographic inversion. Many of the creators are women, while a substantial portion of the consumers following and paying those creators are men. Those men don't stop being ordinary consumers when they close OnlyFans, Instagram, X or whatever platform brought them to the creator in the first place.
They still shower. They shave. They drink coffee. They buy deodorant. They wear underwear. They snack. They work out. They buy skincare products, razors, fragrances, supplements, electronics and clothes. They travel, drive cars, play games, order food and buy gifts. They are not an exotic demographic called "adult-content consumers." They are consumers who also happen to consume adult content.
That distinction changes the marketing question considerably.
Instead of asking, "Why would a men's CPG company work with an OnlyFans creator?", perhaps marketers should ask, "If this woman has tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of men voluntarily paying attention to her, are those men also our customers?"
If the answer is yes, the conversation becomes much more interesting.
First, Let's Be Careful With the Demographics
Before going any further, we need to address one problem with conversations about OnlyFans: the internet is full of remarkably precise demographic statistics that are repeated so frequently they begin to look authoritative.
You'll see claims that a specific percentage of creators are women, a specific percentage of subscribers are men, or that the average subscriber is a particular age. The problem is that OnlyFans does not publicly provide marketers with the kind of comprehensive creator-and-subscriber demographic census that would allow us to state all of those figures confidently. Academic researchers have acknowledged this limitation themselves. One 2024 study noted the absence of official creator gender distribution data and pointed to substantial differences between estimates found in previous research.
What we do have is evidence from several independent research samples suggesting that men represent a substantial portion of the platform's consumer population. A peer-reviewed study examining adult OnlyFans users found that 63.1% of OnlyFans users in the relevant sample were male. The researchers described the typical user within their sample as male, white, married and heterosexual or bisexual/pansexual, while also cautioning against treating their sample as universally representative of the entire platform.
Another study examined 425 people who had used OnlyFans for sexual purposes during the preceding three months. Participants ranged from 18 to 74 years old, with a mean age of approximately 37, and 53.4% of that particular sample identified as male. Again, that's a research sample, not an official demographic census of every OnlyFans subscriber.
That distinction matters because marketers don't actually need to prove that every female adult creator has a predominantly male audience. They need to determine whether the particular creator they're considering has an audience that overlaps with their target customer.
That's a much easier question to answer.
Ask for the analytics.
What percentage of the creator's audience is male?
How old are they?
Where do they live?
What percentage is in the United States, UK, Australia, Canada or whichever markets the brand serves?
How engaged are they?
What happens when the creator shares a link?
What categories have converted before?
The creator economy gives marketers something much more valuable than an industry-wide demographic generalization: it gives them the ability to evaluate individual audiences.
The Creator Is Not Necessarily the Customer
Imagine that you manufacture a premium men's body wash. Your target customer is a man between 25 and 44 who lives in the United States, has disposable income and is interested in fitness, dating, entertainment, grooming and lifestyle products.
Your marketing department starts looking for influencers. Naturally, it searches for men's lifestyle influencers, men's grooming creators, fitness influencers and male fashion personalities. There's nothing wrong with that strategy.
Now imagine that somewhere else on the internet is a 29-year-old female adult creator with 600,000 followers. Suppose her analytics show that 82% of those followers are men, most are between 25 and 44, the United States is her largest market, and her followers regularly respond to her recommendations.
Your marketing department looks at her and says, "She's not our demographic."
That's correct.
She isn't your demographic. Her audience is.
That is the distinction marketers need to understand.
Influence doesn't require demographic similarity between the person doing the influencing and the person making the purchase. Women influence men's purchasing decisions every day, just as men influence women's purchasing decisions. Children influence parents. Doctors influence patients. Bartenders influence drinkers. Mechanics influence car owners. Interior designers influence homeowners.
The question isn't whether the influencer looks like your customer. The question is whether the influencer can influence your customer.
Urban Decay Already Crossed the Line
One of the most interesting recent examples comes from a company that isn't even selling men's products.
In 2025, Urban Decay launched its Battle the Bland campaign featuring Ari Kytsya. What made the campaign particularly noteworthy was that Urban Decay didn't disguise who Kytsya was. Its own campaign announcement explicitly described her as an "adult content and TikTok creator." Her participation wasn't a case of a brand unknowingly hiring someone who happened to have an adult career somewhere else on the internet. Her identity across both mainstream social media and adult content was part of the campaign narrative.
The campaign generated controversy. Critics questioned whether someone associated with adult content was an appropriate ambassador for a cosmetics brand with younger consumers among its broader audience. Urban Decay and parent company L'Oréal defended the collaboration, emphasizing Kytsya's artistry, authenticity and creative identity.
Whatever conclusion an individual marketer reaches about that particular partnership, something strategically important happened: the wall between "adult creator" and "mainstream influencer" became harder to defend.
A person can simultaneously be an adult creator, TikTok personality, beauty creator, lifestyle influencer and mainstream brand ambassador. Those identities are no longer mutually exclusive, if they ever were.
Consumers don't organize people into the neat verticals that marketing departments do.
Urban Decay Was Also Being Urban Decay
It's also worth putting the campaign into the context of the company's history.
Urban Decay built much of its identity around rejecting conventional beauty standards. Its 2019 Pretty Different campaign featured Lizzo, Ezra Miller, Joey King, Karol G and CL, explicitly positioning the brand around individuality and pushing against conventional definitions of beauty.
That makes the Ari Kytsya partnership more nuanced than simply saying, "Mainstream cosmetics company hires OnlyFans creator." A provocative creator can plausibly fit the identity Urban Decay has spent decades developing.
And that points toward an important lesson for companies considering adult creators: brand safety shouldn't mean every company reaches the same conclusion.
A men's fragrance brand can reasonably have a different risk tolerance than a children's cereal company. An underwear manufacturer can make a decision that a pediatric healthcare provider wouldn't. A nightclub, dating company, energy drink, men's grooming company and conservative financial institution don't have identical audiences, identities or reputational considerations.
Context matters.
"Adult creator" should be one piece of information in the decision. It shouldn't replace the decision.
Diesel Figured Out the Audience Question a Decade Ago
For an even more revealing example, go back to 2016.
Diesel was preparing a campaign and its creative team confronted an extraordinarily simple question: Where is the traffic?
One of the answers was Pornhub.
So Diesel did something mainstream fashion companies weren't generally expected to do. It advertised its underwear on Pornhub and YouPorn, alongside placements on Grindr and Tinder. Diesel creative director Nicola Formichetti explained the logic in remarkably straightforward terms: the company looked at internet behavior and wanted to go where people were actually spending their time.
That distinction is important. Diesel wasn't selling pornography. It was selling underwear.
Pornhub had people.
Those people wore underwear.
Therefore, Pornhub had potential Diesel customers.
Marketing departments can turn themselves into pretzels debating a problem that sometimes really is that simple.
Even more interestingly, Campaign subsequently reported that Pornhub became Diesel.com's No. 1 referring website during the effort, with an agency executive also describing sales as healthy. Diesel founder Renzo Rosso separately referred to a 31% increase associated with the Pornhub campaign, although contemporary reporting noted that he did not specify whether the increase referred to sales or website pageviews. That caveat matters; it shouldn't be repeated as a 31% sales increase without qualification.
The broader result is still fascinating. A pornography website became a leading source of traffic for a global fashion retailer.
And that happened in 2016.
Before TikTok became TikTok. Before OnlyFans became a mainstream cultural phenomenon. Before the current creator economy exploded. Before every marketing conference had panels about social commerce and influencer attribution.
Diesel had already stumbled onto the principle that matters here:
Don't judge a media channel solely by the content surrounding it. Understand who is actually there.
Now Take the Diesel Principle One Step Further
Diesel bought advertising around adult content. The modern creator economy gives brands the opportunity to take that same underlying audience strategy and move it one step closer to the consumer.
Instead of saying, "Let's advertise men's underwear on a website populated by men," a brand can potentially say, "Let's partner with the woman those men intentionally came there to see."
That's a very different form of distribution.
The media company is no longer the only gateway to the audience.
The creator has become the media.
And that's why I think marketers need to stop looking at successful adult creators simply as models or performers. Many of them operate what are effectively small media companies.
They acquire audiences. They produce content. They maintain publishing schedules. They analyze engagement. They manage subscribers. They communicate directly with customers. They develop pricing strategies, promotions, collaborations and upsells. They understand retention. They shoot photography and video. They distribute across multiple platforms. They manage communities. And, most importantly, they have learned how to turn attention into transactions.
The scale varies enormously, and most creators aren't celebrity millionaires. But operationally, that skill set should be extremely interesting to consumer brands.
Because converting attention into transactions is exactly what consumer marketers are trying to do.
Maybe the Best Person to Sell a Men's Product Isn't a Man
Imagine you're selling men's deodorant, body wash, razors, underwear, skincare, fragrance or supplements. The conventional influencer strategy would naturally involve finding men who embody the aspirational customer.
Again, that's perfectly reasonable.
But what happens when we add another question?
Who already has the attention of those men?
Suddenly, the pool of potential influencers changes.
Consider the psychological difference between a male influencer saying, "This is the fragrance I wear," and a woman saying, "Guys, this smells incredible on a man."
Consider the difference between a male model telling his audience, "These are my favorite boxer briefs," and a woman saying, "This is what I want a guy wearing."
Or between a man promoting a beard oil and a woman telling a predominantly male audience, "If you have a beard, use this. Trust me."
The product hasn't changed. The target customer hasn't changed. The only thing we've changed is the messenger.
That doesn't guarantee the female creator will outperform the male creator.
But it's certainly worth testing.
Adult Creator Doesn't Have to Mean Adult Advertisement
This may be one of the most important distinctions for mainstream brands.
Hiring an adult creator doesn't mean asking her to make an adult advertisement.
She can be fully dressed in her kitchen drinking coffee. She can review a men's fragrance. She can talk about the snack she keeps around for her boyfriend. She can demonstrate skincare on a partner. She can tell men which beard oil smells best. She can create a funny Reel about deodorant, hold an energy drink, recommend luggage, review headphones, talk about a mattress or show a watch.
Adult creator is her occupation. It doesn't have to be the creative concept.
That opens considerably more possibilities for brands.
A company can establish PG-13 creative requirements, prohibit nudity, prohibit explicit references, require FTC disclosures, approve product claims, establish usage rights, restrict sponsored content to particular platforms and geographies, and create whatever brand guidelines are appropriate for the campaign.
Professional creators already understand that different clients require different kinds of content.
This doesn't need to be complicated.
The Bigger Opportunity May Be the Middle of the Creator Economy
The Ari Kytsya partnership is valuable as a case study because it's visible enough to attract attention. But I don't believe the biggest commercial opportunity necessarily lies in signing the largest adult creators to enormous endorsement deals.
I think the much more interesting opportunity exists in the middle.
Imagine identifying 100 creators with audiences ranging from 10,000 to 250,000 followers. Instead of spending an enormous amount on one celebrity creator, a men's CPG company could offer products and affiliate opportunities to a diversified group.
Perhaps 50 accept the product. Thirty join the affiliate program. Twenty actually publish content. Twelve generate measurable sales. Three turn out to be exceptional performers.
Now you know something.
You can increase commissions for those three. Give them early access to products. Develop recurring campaigns. Invite them into product development. Build longer-term ambassador relationships. Test their audiences against other products in your portfolio.
That's how influencer marketing becomes an acquisition system rather than a celebrity sponsorship gamble.
Affiliate Marketing Changes the Entire Risk Equation
This is why affiliate marketing is such an important part of this conversation.
A corporate marketing team could spend six months holding meetings about whether adult creators would work for its brand. It could commission research, debate brand safety, interview agencies, create decks and still end up arguing from assumptions.
Or it could run a controlled test.
Give qualified creators tracked affiliate links. Give them unique coupon codes. Give them products. Establish clear content guidelines. Then measure impressions, views, clicks, click-through rate, add-to-cart behavior, conversions, average order value, customer acquisition cost, repeat purchases, revenue and commissions.
Then compare those creators with your conventional influencer cohort.
At that point, we're no longer arguing about whether adult creators are theoretically valuable.
We're looking at numbers.
And numbers tend to make marketing conversations much more productive.
Stop Obsessing Over Follower Count
Follower count may be one of the least interesting numbers in this experiment.
A creator with 30,000 followers who generates 600 purchases is considerably more commercially interesting than a creator with two million followers who generates 40.
I'd rather know how many people watched, how many clicked, how many purchased, how much it cost to acquire those customers, what their average basket size was, whether they purchased again and what their lifetime value became.
Influence and fame aren't synonymous.
That matters especially in the adult creator economy because many creators have developed remarkably engaged niche audiences without the public follower counts associated with mainstream celebrities.
The Industry Needs Better Infrastructure
And this brings me to why we've built Sxgram.com
I don't believe the adult creator economy needs another isolated adult platform. It needs infrastructure.
There are creators. There are audiences. There are consumer brands looking for customers. There are affiliate programs looking for publishers. There are podcasts, magazines, events, agencies, products and businesses. Yet much of this ecosystem still operates as disconnected islands.
Sxgram is designed to start connecting those dots.
One example is our Product Cards. A creator can incorporate products into Posts and Reels and connect those products with the appropriate destination. The retailer doesn't have to give up its ecommerce infrastructure. The brand can retain its own website, checkout, inventory, fulfillment, affiliate tracking and customer relationship.
Sxgram becomes the discovery and social-commerce layer between creator content and the merchant.
That creates a remarkably simple pathway:
Brand → Affiliate Program → Creator → Content → Product → Consumer → Brand Website → Purchase → Creator Commission
The creator doesn't need to become the retailer.
Sxgram doesn't need to become the retailer.
The brand doesn't need to abandon the commerce infrastructure it has already built.
We're connecting systems that already exist.
The Affiliate Program Marketplace Solves the Other Half of the Problem
Then comes discovery.
How does a female adult creator with a predominantly male audience discover that a men's grooming company is actively looking for affiliates? How does an underwear company discover creators willing to introduce its products to their audiences? How does a creator know which mainstream companies actually welcome applications from people working in the adult creator economy?
That's one of the reasons we created the Sxgram Affiliate Program Marketplace.
Brands can present their existing affiliate programs to creators. Creators can discover programs relevant to their audiences and follow the company's existing application process. The merchant continues controlling applications, approvals, commissions, terms, tracking and payouts.
Sxgram provides the connection.
And importantly, Sxgram doesn't need to take the creator's affiliate commission for the system to work. Our goal is to provide infrastructure that helps these two sides of the market discover each other.
That distinction matters because the long-term opportunity isn't merely creating another marketplace. It's creating a functioning ecosystem.
Think of the Creator as a New Kind of Retail Shelf
Traditional retail is easy to visualize. A brand manufactures a product. A retailer places it on a shelf. A customer walks down the aisle, discovers it and purchases it.
Creator commerce changes the shelf.
The shelf can now be a Post. A Reel. A podcast episode. An article. A recommendation. A creator profile. A conversation.
And the salesperson isn't necessarily an employee of the retailer.
It's someone the consumer already voluntarily follows.
That's an enormous change in how products can be discovered.
Maybe We've Been Categorizing Creators Wrong
The adult creator economy makes a much larger marketing problem easier to see.
We categorize creators according to what they produce: beauty, gaming, fitness, fashion, adult, travel, food, business and so forth.
But what if we increasingly categorized creators according to who pays attention to them?
Imagine a brand marketplace built around audience gender, age, geography, interests, engagement, purchase behavior, historical conversion and product affinity.
Instead of searching for "men's grooming influencers," a company could search for:
Creators whose audiences contain men ages 25–44 in the United States who demonstrate purchasing behavior around grooming, fitness and lifestyle products.
The results might be surprising.
Some creators might be men.
Some might be women.
Some might be comedians.
Some might be gamers.
Some might host podcasts.
Some might be adult content creators.
And that's perfectly okay.
Because the marketer is finally searching for the customer instead of the stereotype.
None of This Means Ignoring Risk
There are legitimate considerations when mainstream companies partner with adult creators. The Urban Decay controversy demonstrates that clearly.
Companies should consider audience age, product category, brand identity, retail partners, advertising standards, disclosure requirements, platform policies, contractual obligations, creator history and customer expectations.
There will absolutely be brands for which the conclusion is, "This isn't appropriate for us."
That's fine.
But that conclusion should come from analysis.
It shouldn't come automatically from stigma.
There is a considerable difference between saying, "We evaluated this creator's audience, content, history and brand alignment and decided against the partnership," and saying, "She has an OnlyFans account, so obviously she can't sell deodorant."
The first is brand management.
The second is an assumption.
If I Ran a Men's CPG Brand, I Wouldn't Start With a Massive Campaign
I wouldn't begin by hiring the world's largest adult creator. I wouldn't buy a Super Bowl commercial announcing the partnership. I wouldn't make it some enormous corporate declaration about changing society.
I'd run an experiment.
Take one product. Recruit perhaps 25 to 50 creators whose audience analytics align with the target customer. Give them the product. Establish clear PG-13 creative requirements. Give every creator individual attribution. Allow them enough creative freedom to communicate naturally with their audiences.
Then run the pilot for 60 to 90 days.
Measure everything.
Compare the results against a matched group of conventional creators.
Which group generated the lowest customer acquisition cost? Which produced the highest conversion? Which generated repeat purchases? Which delivered the strongest engagement? Which produced the most incremental revenue?
And perhaps the most valuable question of all: Did these audiences behave differently from the audiences you're already buying?
Now the company has proprietary knowledge its competitors may not have.
That's valuable.
Maybe Your Next Great Men's Influencer Is a Woman
The creator economy conditioned marketers to think in neat pairings: men's products with male influencers, women's products with female influencers.
But influence doesn't necessarily work that way.
Sometimes the person most capable of influencing a customer's purchase isn't someone who resembles him. It's someone he wants attention from, someone he listens to, someone whose opinion matters to him, someone he follows voluntarily and someone with whom he has developed a parasocial relationship.
Sometimes that person is an adult content creator.
That doesn't mean adult creators are automatically effective influencers for men's CPG brands. It means they deserve to be evaluated using the same thing marketers should be using everywhere else:
Audience. Fit. Performance. Data.
Stop Asking Whether "Adult Creators" Are Brand Safe
That's too broad a question to produce a useful answer.
Instead ask:
Is this creator appropriate for our brand?
Does this creator have our customer?
Can we establish appropriate creative boundaries?
Can we measure attribution?
Can this creator move product?
What does it cost us to acquire a customer through her?
How does that customer compare with customers acquired through other channels?
Those questions produce actionable information.
"Adult creator?" doesn't.
The Industry Doesn't Need Another Debate. It Needs Data.
Urban Decay tested one cultural boundary. Diesel tested another media boundary. Other brands and platforms continue experimenting with the intersection of creators, audience participation and commerce.
The next logical step is testing the performance-marketing boundary.
Can adult creators sell mainstream men's products?
Can they sell deodorant? Coffee? Razors? Body wash? Underwear? Fragrance? Protein bars? Energy drinks? Men's skincare? Travel products? Electronics?
We don't need to philosophize about it forever.
Test it.
Because if a female creator has 100,000 men paying attention to her, the least commercially interesting thing about those men may eventually be why they originally followed her.
The much more interesting question is:
What else will they buy from someone they already trust enough to give their attention to?
That's the experiment.
That's the opportunity.
And that's one of the reasons we've built Sxgram.
Diesel understood part of this almost a decade ago: go where your customers already are.
Today, brands can take that philosophy one step further. They don't merely have to advertise next to the content those customers consume.
They can partner with the person those customers came there to see.
And that is why I believe men's CPG could become one of the most interesting—and most overlooked—commercial opportunities in the adult creator economy.
Not because deodorant, coffee, razors, underwear, skincare or energy drinks are "adult products."
They're not.
Because the men buying them are already there.
Put Your Affiliate Program in Front of the Sxgram Creator Community
If your brand already has an affiliate program, you don't need to reinvent your ecommerce infrastructure to begin working with adult content creators. Join the Sxgram Affiliate Program Marketplace and make your program discoverable to creators looking for brands and products they can authentically introduce to their audiences.
You maintain control of your affiliate program—including applications, approvals, commission rates, tracking, terms and payouts—while Sxgram provides the discovery and social-commerce layer connecting your brand with creators. Approved creators can then use their affiliate links alongside Sxgram Product Cards in Posts, Gallery Posts and Reels, directing interested consumers back to your website to complete their purchase.
Your affiliate program. Your terms. Your customers. A new creator audience.
Interested in listing your affiliate program?
Join the Sxgram Affiliate Program Marketplace:
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