Adult performers with millions of followers are conducting a quiet but consequential experiment on mainstream social media: building audiences that are predominantly young and female — often with no indication of what their primary work actually is. A peer-reviewed study published in the academic journal Sexuality & Culture in June 2025 found that adolescents in Spain, including children as young as 12, not only knew how OnlyFans worked in granular financial detail but viewed erotic content creation as a "desirable" and "accessible" career path. Researchers say age restrictions on adult platforms have done little to slow the cultural exposure driving these attitudes.
The Study: What Researchers Found
The research, conducted by Kristel Anciones-Anguita, a PhD candidate at the University of Alcalá, and co-author M. Checa Romero, involved focus group discussions with 164 high school students aged 12 to 16 from urban and rural areas of Guadalajara, Spain. The study, titled "Making Money on OnlyFans? A Study on the Promotion of Erotic Content Platforms on Social Media and their Influence on Adolescents," was published by Springer Nature in the peer-reviewed journal Sexuality & Culture on June 13, 2025.
The findings were stark. Many participants demonstrated a detailed understanding of how subscription-based adult platforms operate — including pricing tiers, how earnings scale with posting frequency and explicit content levels, and how to bypass age verification systems. Some girls described seeing the platform as a logical alternative to traditional employment, particularly if they did not pursue higher education. Several boys described it as a realistic option for their own futures as well, though they generally characterized it as more financially accessible for women.
Lead author Anciones-Anguita described the finding to PsyPost: "Although these platforms are legally restricted to adults, minors are not only accessing their content but also integrating it into their everyday cultural and career aspirations." The researcher said teens "demonstrated a clear understanding of its subscription-based model and even shared techniques to bypass age restrictions."
Girls in the study expressed awareness of the tension between financial agency and coercion — some framing content creation as a personal choice, others noting that economic necessity can make the decision feel less than voluntary. A subset of participants likened it to prostitution and questioned whether genuine choice was possible under financial pressure. This tension, the researchers noted, reflects academic debate about how "neoliberal sexual entrepreneurship" — the framing of sexual self-presentation as personal branding — obscures underlying power imbalances.
The study identified mainstream social media platforms as the primary vector. Teenagers reported regular exposure to promotional content on TikTok, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), featuring stories of creators earning thousands of euros per month. Some female participants said they had received unsolicited direct messages encouraging them to create content or subscribe to accounts. Male participants reported exposure through pirated content shared on Telegram and Discord group chats.
The Mainstream Crossover Problem
The study's findings are the academic manifestation of a trend playing out visibly on major platforms. Adult performers who monetize explicit content on subscription sites have increasingly built large mainstream social media followings — often posting make-up tutorials, fashion hauls, dance videos, and lifestyle content to audiences that are heavily female and substantially young.
One well-documented case is Ari Kytsya, an OnlyFans performer who spoke to approximately 1,200 students at the University of Washington in November 2025 at the invitation of a professor for a human sexuality course. Kytsya's TikTok account had approximately 5 million followers at the time of her appearance, with her audience skewing heavily female. She has publicly described a shift in her demographic, noting that her following changed from predominantly male to predominantly female. Many of her followers, per public comment threads reviewed by the Telegraph, were unaware of her primary work. Kytsya has said publicly that she earns between $5,000 and $10,000 per month and owns multiple properties and vehicles.
The University of Washington lecture generated significant media attention and criticism, with Fox News and other outlets reporting in November 2025 that families and some faculty objected to the invitation. The professor who extended the invitation, Dr. Nicole McNichols, defended it as part of a class on human sexuality.
The broader pattern — adult creators using mainstream platforms as a discovery funnel toward paid adult content — has been documented in a July 2025 academic paper published in SAGE Journals by researchers Di Cicco and Beraldo, titled "Sex work as cross-platform self-branding." The paper analyzed how adult content platforms' business model structurally incentivizes creators to seek visibility on mainstream social media, since those platforms are where new subscribers are found. The paper noted the "affordances" of adult platforms "force sexual content creators to seek visibility on mainstream social media platforms."
Regulatory Failure: The Age Verification Gap
Regulators have attempted to address underage access to adult platforms, with limited results. In March 2025, Britain's Ofcom — the media and telecommunications regulator — fined OnlyFans operator Fenix International Limited £1.05 million ($1.4 million at the time) for providing inaccurate information about its age-verification systems.
According to Ofcom's published enforcement decision, Fenix had told the regulator that its facial estimation technology used a "challenger age" of 23 — meaning it would flag and require additional verification from users whose appearance suggested they were younger than 23. In fact, the threshold had been set at 20. When the error was discovered, Fenix raised the threshold to 23 in January 2025, then lowered it again to 21 within a few days. Ofcom enforcement director Suzanne Cater said in a statement: "Receiving accurate and complete information is fundamental for Ofcom to do its job as a regulator and to understand and monitor how platforms are operating."
Reuters reported that OnlyFans, operated by Fenix, had $1.3 billion in revenue and more than 300 million registered users at the time of the fine. A company spokesperson said OnlyFans "recognises the importance of providing Ofcom with accurate and timely information." Separately, Ofcom had closed a parallel investigation in February 2025 into whether under-18s were actively accessing OnlyFans, without finding sufficient evidence to proceed — though the regulator noted continued monitoring.
The BBC has conducted multiple investigations into underage content on OnlyFans. In reporting published in 2022, a US investigator specializing in online child abuse told the BBC that children as young as five years old had been found in content hosted on the platform, and that "whatever their [OnlyFans'] current methodology, there's still cracks that it's still slipping through." Ofcom's own complaint process found OnlyFans' response inadequate — its complaint against the BBC's reporting was rejected by Ofcom in a 2024 ruling.
The "E-Pimp" Exploitation Layer
Beyond the question of underage exposure, researchers and NGOs have documented a secondary exploitation dynamic that both the Sexuality & Culture study and investigative reporting have highlighted: the emergence of so-called "e-pimps" who recruit young women into adult content creation, manage their accounts, and then use the leverage of holding explicit material to blackmail and coerce them.
In a November 2023 research report, CARE International UK documented how these managers operate: presenting themselves to prospective creators as legitimate business partners, then gradually pressuring models to produce increasingly explicit content. Because these managers maintain administrative access to the accounts, they hold explicit material that can be used as leverage. CARE's report quoted an account of the dynamic: "There are e-pimps who don't keep their promises. They are pressuring their models to go further than initially agreed. Because the e-pimps have access to all accounts, they have sexually explicit material at their disposal with which they can blackmail the models."
Le Monde reported in November 2025 on a related phenomenon in France: young men promoting the "e-pimp" model as an entrepreneurial opportunity on social media — recruiting women to OnlyFans, taking a percentage of earnings, and pitching the model as a passive income stream. The Le Monde investigation found the actual business in many cases operated more like a pyramid scheme, with "managers" selling expensive training courses to aspiring e-pimps rather than generating sustainable income from content.
Platform Economics and the Structural Problem
OnlyFans launched in 2016 as a general creator platform. After Leonid Radvinsky acquired a majority stake in 2018, the platform reoriented toward adult content. Radvinsky, who died of cancer in March 2026 at age 43, built the site into what Reuters described as a fusion of "sex work with the online creator economy." The platform saw a major expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic as physical sex work declined and existing performers moved to digital revenue streams.
In recent years OnlyFans has attempted to diversify its brand — signing mainstream celebrities in sports, music, and entertainment — and its CEO, Keily Blair, has publicly described the platform as "feminist." The majority of content on OnlyFans is non-explicit, per the company's own characterization. But the platform's top earners remain adult performers, and the subscription model — which rewards exclusive, increasingly explicit content — creates structural incentives that researchers say push creators toward more extreme material over time.
The Spanish study found that teenagers understand this incentive structure. Participants described, unprompted, how earnings on the platform depend on willingness to share more explicit material, and several framed the escalation as a known and expected feature of the business model — not an unexpected outcome.
What Comes Next
The regulatory and cultural responses remain fragmented. The UK Online Safety Act has created new requirements for age verification on adult platforms, and Ofcom's fine against Fenix represents the first enforcement action under that framework — though critics note a £1.05 million fine against a platform with $1.3 billion in revenue amounts to a rounding error.
In the United States, no equivalent federal regulation of adult platform age verification currently exists. Proposed state-level legislation requiring age verification for adult websites has passed in states including Louisiana, Texas, and Virginia, but has faced First Amendment challenges in federal courts.
The authors of the Sexuality & Culture study called for mandatory, age-appropriate sex education that addresses the economic framing of adult content — arguing that generic warnings are insufficient when teenagers have already developed detailed, market-literate understandings of how the platforms work. "We wanted to explore how this exposure affects their psychosocial development, gender perceptions, and views on intimacy and success," lead author Anciones-Anguita told PsyPost. The study concluded that adolescents "lack the maturity to fully understand" the risks and power dynamics involved, even when they believe they do.
The core problem documented across multiple research streams is structural: adult content platforms require mainstream social media visibility to grow, mainstream social media platforms permit that visibility because the content itself does not violate terms of service, and the teenagers who watch make-up tutorials and wealth-flexing videos by creators whose primary work is adult content are rarely told — and often do not know — the difference.