Only Fans: Exploiting Men's Loneliness For Profit

Why does anyone spend money on OnlyFans in a world where X rated content is free? I asked myself that question the other day and quickly concluded that people were just being stupid and I moved on. But of course that's not the case. I've learned that whenever I think masses of people are being stupid, I'm the one who's being stupid. I just don't understand them. But if I did, I'd learn something about the real world and human psychology. So with credit card in hand, I signed up for an OnlyFans investigation. And what I found surprised me. Not only for what it said about human psychology, but also the direction that consumerism is taking all of us. But before we get there, we need to cover exactly what OnlyFans is. Essentially, OnlyFans allows anyone to put a paywall on their content. You can set up a monthly subscription fee and have the option for one off upsells to easily monetize photos, video, audio or just the chance to message you directly. OnlyFans has some fitness trainers and some musicians on the platform, but really they specialize in X rated content. Same story with their co owned sister site MyFreeCams, which offers live X rated webcam chat rooms. On both platforms the dominant business model is men paying women for racy messages, photos and video. Which is where the question that started this whole video arose. Why do these men pay when free pornography has been available on the web since 56k dial up connections? The surprising answer comes in three parts. First, OnlyFans has nailed the dopamine hooks of social media sites and casinos that pornography has not fully exploited on the web. You see, the very structure of OnlyFans is gated silos. When you log into a creator's page, you can see the number of posts they have, but no details about those posts. Once you're a subscriber, you can see the posts, but some of them are blurred out behind a locked paywall. The only thing that you can see is a provocative text description. Of course, though, you can pay to unlock those. If you want to go deeper into the gated community. You can order custom videos, but you'll have to send extra tip money to get those made for you. The constant feeling that one has on OnlyFans is kind of like the one that you might get if your phone buzzed with a text or someone sent you a snap video but you couldn't open it. There's mystery, you're thinking about it and that creates anticipation. You can contrast this with X rated websites where every mystery is immediately revealed. Want to know what's in a video? In seconds, you can read the explicit title, see an explicit thumbnail, and even hover over that thumbnail to see various moments in the scene. There's almost zero space in between desire and the fulfillment of that desire. With OnlyFans, though, your imagination has to work. You focus on the hints at each level of gated content, wondering what exactly is on the other side. And when you focus longer on something, you tend to value it more. That's partially why digital slot machines still show the real stopping one by one. That extra time builds anticipation and investment in the game. Now the dopamine hacks are even more aggressive on the live cam sister sites that incorporate other staples of the gambling industry straight from it. There are kino boards in the chat where buying the winning number can get you a sexy dance or something of that nature. Instead of gambling winnings, there's roulette wheels with different racy activities for your preferred cam girl to act out. And if you donate enough tips on censored OnlyFan posts that will make the creator show the uncensored version. The unclear amount required, though, to win is reminiscent of those coin games in Chuck E. Cheese, where the next coin could be the one that tipped the whole game. Again, the prize in all of these cases is similar to what's available on every other pornography website. But the mystery in anticipation drives seemingly irrational behavior. Family Guy understood this years ago. No, no, not so fast, Lois. A boat's a boat. But the mystery box could be anything. It could even be a boat. But the mystery box isn't the only thing that has made OnlyFans so successful. Our second point is where OnlyFans starts to really distinguish itself. Take the top creator, Jem Wolfie. Her Instagram page is pretty darn explicit in several photos, but what's missing here? You On Instagram, Jem is often aloof. She doesn't always look at the camera. The audience is more like a voyeur that she doesn't recognize. But on OnlyFans, the audience is acknowled. She and other creators will often send messages asking you to react if you like the recent shots. And at the time of writing this, in her last 10 Instagram posts, GEM has commented the word you or your only twice. But with OnlyFans, those words appear in eight of the last ten posts. This recognition becomes something like intimacy when creators send good morning or good night texts claiming to be thinking of you. One creator sent me a message complaining about being bored, asking me all of us to write messages to give her something to do. And I'll tell you how I responded in the next point. But the point for now is that the relationship on OnlyFans begins to mimic a friendship or a long distance relationship, at least in its cadence. In fact, active members of live cam chat rooms often form friend groups. They recognize one another when they came in, which was shocking to me. They'll check in with one another to see how the big work project went or where they've been if they haven't showed up in a while. If the creator doesn't stream, though, the fans can't hang with that friend group on that day. So aspects of intimate relationships and friendships are are offered via OnlyFans. But really, it's this last piece that makes OnlyFans potentially more addictive even than casinos. Because on OnlyFans you can purchase guaranteed acceptance. I told you earlier that I responded to that creator who said that she was bored, and I had a hunch that acceptance was a huge piece of the OnlyFans psychology puzzle. So I purposely wrote back the most lame, boring message I could think of just to see if I could get her to reject or ignore me. This is a message that if you sent on a dating app like Tind Bumble, would get you left on Red because it's just totally uninteresting. It's the type of thing that so many guys text, and it's very boring for someone who gets a lot of messages like this to respond to. I said, hey there, just doing some work this week, enjoying the sunshine. Wbu any plans and what do you know? On OnlyFans I didn't get left on read, she wrote back with a message containing two exclamation points and a smiley face emoji. That's without even tipping her, which I suspect could have netted me half a dozen exclamations exclamation points. The point is, on OnlyFans, I didn't need to make myself interesting to her. I didn't need to stand out from the crowd. She would remain interested even if I wasn't interesting. I saw the same dynamic in the hobbies of OnlyFans creators. On most dating apps, it's the exception to find a woman who emphasizes her love of basketball, golf, anime, or obscure philosophers. Of course those women exist, but those interests tend to be mainly held by men. On OnlyFans, the number of women highlighting predominantly male hobbies is through the roof. Beyond hobbies, I also saw stories of not fitting in in high school and feeling different from everyone else. Now all of These creators may genuinely have these hobbies and backstories, but their representation is far higher than that of the typical dating pool. And I think the reason for this discrepancy is that men sometimes struggle to relate when speaking to a woman that they're attracted to. They have to put in effort to make their hobbies relatable to someone who doesn't necessarily share them or step beyond their interests to talk to someone who doesn't love all the same activities, entertainment and conversational topics. But OnlyFans shortcuts this discomfort. Not only will your dream girl send you naked photos, she'll also do the more important work of carrying the conversation of finding ways to make relating easy. You don't need to feel uncomfortable or at a loss for words, or reject it if she doesn't reply for a fee. That's all gone to reveal your biggest insecurity to someone that you're wildly attracted to, and for them to see that insecurity tell you the truth about it and then not have that insecurity impact your relationship. That is not always the case. Outside of OnlyFans, we often have insecurities precisely because at some point we were rejected for some aspect of our body, personality, or our history. It's one of the most gut wrenching feelings and one most people avoid at all costs. So why does OnlyFans exist in a world with lots of pornography? Because if porn offers arousal and orgasm, OnlyFans offers connection without the fear of frustration or rejection. The difficulty of getting into and maintaining a relationship can be bypassed, at least in part for a price. You get a sex obsessed long distance girlfriend without having to offer her anything in return but money. You don't have to interest her, relate to her, or help her through any of her difficulties. Unless of course, that's your thing. In a way, OnlyFans is a direct competitor to personal development resources, including this channel, because you no longer have to change your habits to get different results in your social or romantic life. Now I should pause and say that OnlyFans doesn't totally replace relationships for all of its subscribers. Several creators told me that they have followers with girlfriends or wives. For those men, they said they offered an escape, but I think that it's a similar escape to the men who are not in a relationship but are also subscribed. In both cases, you leave behind the obligations and pressures of dealing with another potentially difficult human being. My personal take is that this isn't great for the customer. If you bypass the challenges of relating to other people, you deprive yourself of life's major catalyst for personal growth. Instead of building hard won character traits that can last a lifetime, you rely on cash to maintain relationships that are comfortable and pleasing to you. So my humble recommendation is to avoid paying for connections, risk rejection, to develop the skills and the character traits that make you someone people want to be around and someone that can handle the problems that arise when other people aren't being paid to be friendly. It's certainly slower and more difficult, but I believe that it's ultimately more rewarding and you can save your money for somewhere that it can go a lot farther. I'm talking about simping for charity. You see, we've partnered with to get clean water to 10,000 people who don't have it. We are nearly halfway there, but quite frankly, I need the help of this community to make it happen. If you choose to donate using the link below, even a small amount, the people that you are helping are people who may get diseases from dirty water, who have to walk hours a day just to get a few gallons and try to avoid that fate for one more day. And what's crazy is that for the price of unlocking some onlyfans photos, you personally can give someone clean water for 10 years. That is $30 to get someone clean water for a decade. We've worked with water in the past and thanks to your generous donations, we've already built several wells where entire communities get water every single day. And just so you know, every single dollar that you donate through the link below goes directly to the field, so it's being used as efficiently as possible. So I hope that you click the link and again join me in simping for charity. It might be something that you decide on a whim right now, but it is no exaggeration to say that that choice can literally save someone's life. And if you're on the edge, I will match whatever you donate until we hit those 10,000 people. So your giving goes twice as far today. So click the link on the screen to donate. I hope that you've enjoyed this video and I will see you in the next one.