The creator economy is often portrayed as an accessible path to entrepreneurship: Build an audience, attract followers, and turn those followers into paying customers. But building a sustainable creator business can be far more difficult than it looks.
New research from OnlyFinder estimates that fans spent nearly $7.8 billion on OnlyFans in the latest fiscal year, with the U.S. accounting for about $4.8 billion. Those overall figures are based on financial filings from OnlyFans’ parent, Fenix International, while OnlyFinder used search activity and its own conversion data to model how that spending is distributed geographically.
But behind those billions is a familiar small business challenge: A relatively small percentage of creators account for a large share of the revenue. Success requires finding customers, standing out in a crowded market, managing acquisition costs, retaining subscribers, and continually reinvesting in the business.
I talked with Max Anderson, CEO of OnlyFinder, about what the numbers reveal about the creator economy — and what entrepreneurs outside OnlyFans can learn from the people who have managed to build successful businesses on the platform.
A $7.8 Billion Creator Economy
Rieva Lesonsky: Your report estimates that Americans account for about 62% of worldwide OnlyFans spending. What does that tell us about the size and maturity of the creator economy in the U.S.?
Max Anderson: Americans spent $4.82 billion on OnlyFans over the past 12 months, accounting for 62% of the platform’s $7.8 billion in worldwide fan spending. That works out to about $18 per U.S. adult per year.
The U.S. is not just the biggest market; it’s also a mature one. Spending is growing at roughly the same rate as the platform overall — 8% compared with 7.6% globally.
Lesonsky: Before we get into the findings, can you explain how you calculated the spending estimates? What numbers are based on reported OnlyFans/Fenix financial data, and what numbers — particularly state and city spending — are modeled estimates?
Anderson: The financial starting point is Fenix International’s audited accounts filed at UK Companies House for the year ended November 30, 2025: $7.765 billion in gross fan spending, including $4.825 billion in the U.S., $1.735 billion in the U.K. and Europe, and $1.205 billion in the rest of the world.
The state and city estimates are modeled using Google Ads search volume on roughly 14,500 OnlyFans-related keywords, weighted with OnlyFinder’s conversion data. Everything below the three audited regional totals — including individual country, state, county, and city figures — is a modeled allocation of those dollars.
Lesonsky: What surprised you most when you broke U.S. spending down by state and city? Were there places that spent considerably more — or less — than population or income alone might suggest?
Anderson: Intensity doesn’t necessarily follow total spending. New York City is the biggest market in dollars at $170 million but ranks only 50th per adult. Portland, Oregon, ranks first per adult at $455,000 per 10,000 adults — 2.5 times the national rate — on just $23 million in spending.
Mid-size cities also punch above their weight. Omaha, Milwaukee, Albuquerque, and Fort Wayne are all in the global top 11 per adult, ahead of Houston, Phoenix, and San Diego.
Income doesn’t appear to be a strong predictor, either. Several high-income Northeastern states rank relatively low per adult, while lower-income states such as New Mexico and West Virginia rank in the top 20.
What Separates Successful Creators?
Lesonsky: OnlyFans is essentially a marketplace connecting independent creators with paying customers. What does the amount consumers are spending tell us about their willingness to pay individual creators directly rather than consume free content?
Anderson: Fans spent $7.8 billion in a year, 80% of which — about $6.2 billion — went to creators. Growth of 7.6% on a base that size suggests direct payment to individual creators has become an established consumer habit rather than a fad.
Lesonsky: OnlyFans has become known for adult content, but from a business perspective, its creators face many of the same challenges as other independent entrepreneurs: finding customers, differentiating themselves, pricing, retaining subscribers, and building recurring revenue. What separates creators who successfully build businesses on the platform from those who don’t?
Anderson: Earnings on OnlyFans are extremely concentrated, with the top 1% of creators taking in roughly one-third of total earnings on the platform.
The main thing that separates the top creators is whether they treat their profile like a true business. Successful creators routinely reinvest a significant share of their earnings into marketing to drive new subscribers. Creators with particularly large fan bases may also use CRM software and teams of employees to help manage fan engagement at scale.
Lesonsky: How important is niche positioning? Does success tend to come from trying to reach a very large audience or from developing a smaller but highly engaged customer base?
Anderson: For smaller creators, niche positioning is extremely important. It’s one of the primary ways a smaller creator can rise above the noise and attract meaningful numbers of new fans. Larger creators tend to dominate the broadest, most competitive search terms.
Customer Acquisition — and the Churn Problem
Lesonsky: How do successful creators acquire customers? How dependent are they on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, X, or other channels to drive customers to OnlyFans?
Anderson: The marketing mix has changed considerably. In the platform’s early days, established celebrities could promote their OnlyFans accounts to existing social media audiences. Today, many top earners were not independently famous before joining the platform.
Discovery outside OnlyFans is particularly important because the platform itself doesn’t offer search or discovery functionality. That means creators rely heavily on Google traffic, social media, and third-party discovery platforms to attract customers.
Lesonsky: Customer acquisition is only half the challenge in a subscription business. What are successful creators doing to retain subscribers and reduce churn?
Anderson: Churn is a significant problem. Even successful creators can see very high subscriber turnover from month to month. Fans may remain OnlyFans customers while moving from one individual creator to another.
Larger creators sometimes address this by working with agencies that manage multiple creators and cross-promote them. The agencies also invest in outside marketing to continually replenish customers and grow the overall audience.
The Business Lessons Beyond OnlyFans
Lesonsky: Are there lessons from the OnlyFans business model that entrepreneurs running completely different kinds of subscription, membership, or creator businesses could apply to their own companies?
Anderson: One lesson is the importance of platform economics. Before OnlyFans, large webcam sites could take as much as 70% to 75% of a creator’s earnings. OnlyFans’ decision to take 20%, allowing creators to keep the other 80%, was disruptive.
Creators moved to a platform that offered better economics, and fans followed. There’s certainly a lesson there for other entrepreneurs.
Lesonsky: The creator economy is often portrayed as an easy path to entrepreneurship. Does the reality support that? How concentrated are earnings among the most successful creators?
Anderson: Not at all. Most creators on OnlyFans have earned less than $100 on the platform in total.
More than 5,000 individual OnlyFans creators have earned over $1 million, but that’s out of over 5 million creators. The small percentage who find significant success tend to treat their OnlyFans profiles like real businesses and work extremely hard at them.
Lesonsky: After analyzing all this data, what do you think traditional small business owners misunderstand about the creator economy as a business?
Anderson: When taken seriously, the creator economy is no different than any other kind of business. Successful creators are just businesses with a face instead of a company logo at the end of the day.
Rieva Lesonsky is the founder of Small Business Currents, a content company focusing on small businesses and entrepreneurship. You can find her on Twitter @Rieva, Bluesky @Rieva.bsky.social, and LinkedIn. Or email her at Rieva@SmallBusinessCurrents.com.
Photo courtesy Getty Images for Unsplash+
