> To date, she estimates she’s dispensed advice to 26k adult content creators — college students, single moms, retail workers, and white-collar professionals.<p>> There’s a misperception that online sex work is easy money. But in the <i>vastly populated</i> digital tundra, getting visibility is no simple task.<p>People want to argue with me when I mention that over the last year I've been able to correctly assume people (women, because thats who I talk to) have a subscription service, and they've found it refreshing when I asked. An erotic subscription service about their body. I've never gotten it wrong.<p>They're just not telling you about it.<p>Many men make it their entire identity to make sure <i>everyone knows</i> they wouldn't pay* for anything related to visually sexually stimulating entertainment, but the analytics data shows a very broad distribution of society of every background does subscribe and/or pay later in the funnel. It's not even gendered as many performers are consumers too as they do market research on competitors, cross promote, and also reshare earnings - tipping others because they had a good day. (And many non-performer consumers are women as well, organically funneled or just friends). I think the platform earnings from performers resharing is not well discussed as people quizzically wonder about why OnlyFans grows so much.<p>Its extremely strange to me that people are willing to normalize the supply side, but pretend the demand side is some marginalized man far away instead of a fairly consistent distribution of <i>everyone around them</i>. I'm fine with helping normalizing the demand side instead of "Nordic model-lite".<p>*Also, many subscriptions are actually free. It's a funnel. See, the consulting article above.<p>I don't say "hey! you look like you have an OnlyFans" I say "I wanna subscribe, I like supporting local businesses", I've literally gotten anything from private snapchats, patreons, patreons for non-sexual hobbies, Onlyfans, etc, all in person so no bots. Good rapport too! And you don't have to actually pay anything, but now you know the link or the top of the funnel to browse, or consider it.<p>My new go-to supporting a direction of empowerment that conveniently matches my carnality is "support local". It was really frustrating when I was in a tech hub and many of the people only supported an exclusionary form of empowerment that didn't include performers or sex workers (or gogo dancers, or atmosphere models or anything that any one female developer somewhere on Twitter once said 'no' to). Not only did I dislike that the performers were never asked and just assumed to be irrelevant, privileging one kind of professional's goals over the other without even a discussion of greater inclusion, it was also just <i>simply boring</i> for me. How many times do I have to hear the groupthink that all performers are coerced people with no interest/capability in choosing that for themselves when I know that a couple of the empowered people in the office are also erotic performers or some subset of sex work. People are glad they can confide in me instead of simply resorting to a geofence. It just took me a while to recalibrate the wording for a more impervious and durable consensus, and 2020, erotic content creators are my favorite part of the pandemic.