While the cost of living keeps climbing, some college students are opting to post content on OnlyFans to earn extra cash to support themselves.

OnlyFans is a subscription-based platform created in 2016 by Tim Stokely, a British entrepreneur who created a “BDSM and fetish” site called GlamWorship.com five years earlier. People must pay monthly fees ranging from $4.99 to $49.99 to access videos and photo content. While users are free to post a wide range of content, the site quickly became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic for adult content creators as a way to earn money. During certain days in 2020, the platform reported almost 200,000 new users creating accounts, according to the Supercreator website, which “helps OnlyFans creators and agencies grow with AI.”

As of 2024, over 377 million users are registered to the platform, with around 4.6 million posting content, according to Business Insider.

Pipe Dream spoke with an anonymous Binghamton University student who posts OnlyFans content. They first created an account a few months after turning 18 years old to earn some extra money. Platform users must pay $5 a month to view their content.

OnlyFans operates by taking 20 percent of all fees paid for content, leaving creators with the remaining 80 percent. For this student, monthly earnings are usually between $250 and $300, which is in the top 15 percent of creators. They added that their income has increased “slowly and steadily throughout the two years I have been a creator.”

“Most of what I post is photos of myself nude, just high quality aesthetic nudes,” they wrote.

As for who views their content, they told Pipe Dream that virtually all of their subscribers are men, most of whom are older than 50, along with some college-aged people.

According to the Supercreator website, the average age of OnlyFans content creators is 29.

Some students have earned thousands of dollars from their accounts. In 2021, one anonymous student from the University of California, Los Angeles reportedly earned $75,000.

Over the past few years, several teachers across the United States have been fired for posting content on OnlyFans. One Missouri high school English teacher claimed she earned around $2 million from OnlyFans in one year and told ABC News she opened an account to help pay the bills after her husband was laid off.

Many creators tailor their posts to maximize views. Alex Le Tissier, the daughter-in-law of a former Southampton Football Club player, opened an OnlyFans account in 2025 to help pay off her husband’s financial debt. She told The Athletic last month that she eventually began to post videos of herself wearing Southampton attire because her viewers requested it.

OnlyFans has broken into the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, even among adolescents. A study conducted in Spain showed that 13 and 14-year-old children associated the platform with its sexual content and pay-for-view system.

In August 2021, OnlyFans announced that it would prohibit content featuring explicit nudity from its platform, only to reverse course days later .

“I think humans are sexual beings in a lot of cases,” said Keily Blair, the company’s CEO, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in December 2024. “What’s very important, though, is that we are mindful about where and how we turn up. We’ve turned down sponsorship activities on the basis of having a youth group or youth element to them.”