A year-long study says there’s a “TikTok to OnlyFans pipeline.” Of course there is. That is the point of a lot of TikTok content. Creators build an audience on a free platform with lifestyle content, then move fans to a place where they can pay. Whether that’s OnlyFans or a coaching website, it’s something that people have done for years. The report comes from two advocacy groups, Collective Shout in Australia and CEASE in the UK, and is titled “The TikTok to OnlyFans Pipeline: How TikTok is promoting, normalising and glamourising the sex industry.” The 26-page report was co-authored by Melinda Tankard Reist and Dr. Elly Hanson, and was released earlier this week.
Researchers spent months scrolling posts from popular OnlyFans creators and following TikTok’s recommendations. What they found, by their own account, is non-explicit content: get-ready-with-me videos, shopping hauls, baking, pet videos, and skincare advice. It was the same content many other lifestyle creators across the platform created. That’s because TikTok doesn’t allow creators to mention OnlyFans or link to it directly, and prohibits sexual solicitation, so creators use workarounds like the word “corn” or a corn emoji next to a star. In other words, the explicit material isn’t on TikTok.
And that’s the key point about the pipeline the report is worried about. Creators build audiences on TikTok because that’s where audiences are. OnlyFans creators have, as the report itself says, become “adept at finding ways” to signal what’s available elsewhere, because they depend on social platforms for reach. That’s no different from a chef who posts recipes on TikTok to sell a cookbook, or a musician who posts clips to sell tickets. The difference is stigma, and the penalty adult creators pay for it. Instagram has restricted the reach of safe-for-work creators like Paralympian Catarina Guimaraes for associating with OnlyFans
The report is also concerned that these adult content creators have gone mainstream. It notes that L’Oréal appointed Ari Kytsya as a brand ambassador for Urban Decay last year, with TikTok ads viewed millions of times, and Kytsya has since become an executive producer on the upcoming dark comedy series “Subs.” Sophie Rain, who has more than 15 million TikTok followers and reportedly earns around $45 million a year, has walked New York Swim Week. Creators in the study also do brand promotions for household items, from pet food and burgers to pineapple juice. Those deals suggest that the audiences built on TikTok are valuable to mainstream companies, not only to OnlyFans.
The report’s authors argue that young women and girls are being offered a life of selling sexual content as aspirational, and they flag viral posts showing cash, big houses, and private jets, with captions like “how it feels knowing I own all of this at 23 thanks to 250,000 men.” They also cite creators hospitalized after extreme stunts. Tankard Reist, who said the research was commissioned in response to the TikTok following of creators like Rain and Kytsya among teenage girls, called TikTok “an industrial-scale digital pimp.” They want the bans on showing pornography to under-18s extended to posts that promote or relate to the sex industry. Those are the authors’ claims and recommendations, and they raise real questions about marketing to young audiences.
The real debate is what to do about the overlap. Extending restrictions to any post “related to” the sex industry could sweep in non-explicit content from adults who are following the rules, and, as creators have found on Instagram, association alone can already cost them reach. If TikTok’s rules are working, and adults are posting lifestyle content that stays within them, then what exactly would a broader ban protect?