  With over 1.5 million content creators, OnlyFans is one of the fastest
growing subscription-based social media platforms. The platform is primarily
associated with sexual content. Thus, OnlyFans creators are uniquely positioned
at the intersection of professional social media content creation and sex work.
While the experiences and motivations of experienced sex workers to adopt
OnlyFans have been studied, in this work we seek to understand the motivations
of creators who had not previously done sex work. Through a qualitative
interview study of 22 U.S.-based OnlyFans creators, we find that beyond the
typical motivations for pursuing gig work (e.g., flexibility, autonomy), our
participants were motivated by three key factors: (1) societal visibility and
mainstream acceptance of OnlyFans; (2) platform design and affordances such as
boundary setting with clients, privacy from the public, and content archives;
and (3) the pandemic, as OnlyFans provided an enormous opportunity to overcome
lockdown-related issues.
