Over the past five years, OnlyFans creators have collected over $15 billion – with $5.3 billion paid in 2023, a 19% increase year-over-year. As a point of comparison, total NBA salaries during the 2023-2024 season was $4.9B, Premier League payroll was just under $5.3, and the cap for the NFL was $7.2 billion. Of course, these leagues count 500-1,700 players each whereas OnlyFans has some 4.1 million creators. However, OnlyFans is an open platform (any legal adult with a bank account can become a creator) whereas these leagues include only the very best players of a vastly larger system of developmental, semi-professional, collegiate, and hobbyist leagues. And as tends to be the case with UGC platforms, OnlyFans earnings are highly concentrated among top creators who collect the vast majority of revenues while most creators take home very little (just as the payrolls for athletes who aren’t in the “marquee” leagues are modest-to-non-existent). According to CNBC, the top YouTube creator, MrBeast, now generates $600-700 million annually – a sum that doubtlessly eclipses the revenue of most of YouTube’s other 114 million active channels when combined, and which makes the “average” YouTuber take home (let alone average uploader to YouTube) irrelevant by comparison.

Mathematically, the average OnlyFans creator grosses roughly $1,800 annually (of which $1,450 nets to the creator). But according to data previously displayed on OnlyFans’ internal creator dashboards, creators in the top 0.1% collect 15x as much as the average creator in the top 1%, and 100x that of those in the top 10%. The multiple versus those in the rest of the distribution was not shared but is likely to be in thousands and tens of thousands. According to one 2020 research report cited by the Washington Post last year, the top 10% of accounts collected to 73% of revenues (which would have been 365,000 and $3.9 billion in payouts last year, or $11,000 each), while the the top 1% were 33% (or 36,500 collecting $1.8 billion, or $49,000 each). Under such a distribution, the top 0.1% would hold 15% (3,650, $800 million, and $220,000 each), and top 0.01% would be 6.8% (365, $361 million, $1 million). OnlyFans does not disclose its distribution, and it should be noted the two distributions above are not consistent, but a handful of creators proved to make upwards of ten million per year – and these creators are not even the highest earning ones!

Pictured Below: Screenshots released by the creator Bhad Bhabie on Instagram Stories showing her OnlyFans’ dashboard during her first year on the platform (2021), as well as running totals in April 2022 and July 2024. These reports, which have not been independently verified, show her lifetime gross billings exceed $70 million, with Bhabie collecting $57 million. Over half of revenues were generated via paid messages with individual users (which may include custom audio-visual content).