Bella Thorne broke a record on OnlyFans by earning $2 million in a week

Text me, I’m bored.

With these words and a series of bikini shots, Bella Thorne announced the decision to join OnlyFans, saying that:

OnlyFans is the first platform where I can fully control my image; without censorship, without judgement, and without being bullied online for being me.

Within only 24 hours of creating her profile, the actress earned $1 million. Less than a week later the figure had already doubled, breaking any record of the site.  The secret of her success? The direct and immediate way she interacts with her fans. It seems that Bella responds personally to every message sent to her and, at the same time, keeps them updated on her life and her projects by sharing videos and unreleased photos.

The former star of Disney Channel, who made her debut as a director last year with the short hard film Her and Him produced by Pornhub, has revealed that her presence on the payment platform will become the subject of a documentary directed by Sean Baker:

It’s a feature we are researching as I’m living it currently. What are the ins and outs? What does a platform like this do to its users? What’s the connective material between your life and your life inside the world of OnlyFans?How can it change your life for the worse and the better? How far are you willing to go, and how far do you want to go? You can be me, or this talented girl from Montana, and OnlyFans could change your life, if you want it to, of course.

But what is OnlyFans? It's a kind of social media born in 2016 with the aim of connecting artists, performers and creators with their fans who, in exchange for a monthly subscription, have access to images, videos and other exclusive content. The operation, which in some ways is similar to Instagram, is simple: the owner of the page enters his name, links his bank account to the site and decides what price the users will have to pay for his posts (the minimum monthly subscription is $4.99 per month, while there is no upper limit).

The key feature of the platform is the almost total lack of censorship. The possibility to freely publish adult content has made the site a popular destination for sex workers, so much so that the New York Times called it the paywall of porn. Who wants to watch, pays. And many people do if it is true that, as performer Matthew Camp told the newspaper, with his page he regularly earns more than $10,000 a month.

OnlyFans has become more popular thanks to coronavirus. Even if in Italy the platform has not yet as famous as it is in the United States or the United Kingdom, its diffusion has become more and more widespread, overtaking also the new approach to do-it-yourself pornography that brought it into the spotlight at the beginning. With lockdown, the lure to peek into the private life of people, both famous and not, has grown, prompting many to use the English site. Since the beginning of the pandemic, in fact, OnlyFans has seen a huge jump in the number of subscribers, precisely 75% from month to month, with an average of 170 thousand new users per day. A small role in this was also played by Beyoncé who, just by pronouncing the word OnlyFans in her remix of Megan Thee Stallion's Savage (Hips tick tock when I dance / On that demon time she might start a OnlyFans), made the traffic on the site go up 15%.

Add the nude; the chance to post anything from training sessions to backstage secrets; the boredom of the quarantine and the success of the paid service has begun to attract more and more creators. The company founded by Timothy Stokely promises to offer influencers "a richer and more authentic mix of content, free from brand sponsorship, campaigns and YouTube advertising commissions. Bella Thorne, in fact, is only the latest and most successful of celebrities and influencers such as Cardi B, Blac Chyna, Ansel Elgort, Rico Nasty or Caroline Calloway (famous thanks to an article written by her former best friend to defame her) who have joined OnlyFans. The sex workers, who are veterans of the site, have already said to Rolling Stone their concern about the arrival of the new creators that with their selfie and softer content could push the page to ban the most explicit posts, as already happened to Tumblr. Is the future of OnlyFans going from a pseudo-hard site to a site for celebrities and bloggers?