Here is an article I have been working on for the past 6 months. The situation of Covid-19 in the world has generated an acceleration in unemployment, especially among the youngest. Many of them went online and became sex workers thanks to the development of platforms like Only Fans. It is sad to see this seems the only alternative for many people out there in financial distress. You might argue that this is a good thing, but we should never consider this alternative to survive. It is a step backwards from a societal point of view. It shows how vulnerable countries are without being able to take care of their citizens.
Covid-19: From Losing Your Job To Become A Sex Worker – The Only Option?
Companies are suffering from the lack of activity and the successive lockdowns. Travel has stopped or drastically reduced, which has a significant impact on business and private tourism. Therefore many people lost their jobs. Only in the US, we tend to say the unemployment rate on people below 24 years old jumped from 8.4% to 24.5% (Source: Economy Policy Institute). To maintain financial independence, many young (and less young) people started looking for online opportunities to make money. Unfortunately, there are not so many apart from becoming a sex worker. Here is how.
Covid-19: The Biggest Economic Challenge Of Modern Times
In 2020, 8.8 per cent of global working hours were lost relative to the fourth quarter of 2019, equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. Working‐hour losses were particularly high in Latin America and the Caribbean, Southern Europe and Southern Asia. Working-hour losses in 2020 were approximately four times greater than during the global financial crisis in 2009.
Globally, the decline in working hours in 2020 translated into both employment losses and reduced working hours for those who remained employed, with significant variation across regions. Employment losses were highest in the Americas and lowest in Europe and Central Asia, where job retention schemes have supported the reduction in working hours, especially in Europe. In total, there were unprecedented global employment losses in 2020 of 114 million jobs relative to 2019. In relative terms, employment losses were higher for women (5.0 per cent) than for men and young workers (8.7 per cent) than for older workers.
Employment losses in 2020 translated mainly into rising inactivity rather than unemployment. Accounting for 71 per cent of global employment losses, inactivity increased by 81 million,2 which reduced the global labour force participation rate by 2.2 percentage points in 2020 to 58.7 per cent. Global unemployment increased by 33 million in 2020, with the unemployment rate rising by 1.1 percentage points to 6.5 per cent. You can read the full study here: International Labour Organization.
Best Option: To Become An Online Sex Worker?
When you are at home, with no job and many invoices to pay, you realize the situation is not great with Covid-19. Nobody has a crystal ball to guess when everything will be back to normal. Millions of people lost their job and have no perspective in the short term to find another job. Unfortunately, many found a way to make easy money from their living rooms and bedrooms by selling adult content online. The word Sex Worker was never so popular. With more than a billion hits across the most popular social networks, it became a true concept in your modern society. The term “sex worker” was coined in 1978 by sex worker activist Carol Leigh. Its use became popularized after the publication of the anthology, Sex Work: Writings By Women In The Sex Industry in 1987. Initially, this was a term strictly connected to prostitution, but its definition has broadened over time, and today it encompasses, for example, live sex webcams and selling adult content online.
Technology Development Supporting The Sex Industry
With the development of technology, content creation, editing and publication have never been so easy. To publish content online, you need a smartphone, an internet connection, a couple of free software, and an account on the right digital platforms. When you decided to sell adult material online, you can build your business in just a couple of clicks. Today, specialized platforms are proposing private accounts on a subscription-based model that content creators can use to monetize their content. It is a bit like Youtube meets Netflix.
Only Fans: The New Porn online destination
In 2016, a London-based company called Fenix International Limited launched an online platform called ONLY FANS. Content creators can monetize their work by charging “fans” who subscribe to their content. It allows content creators to collect monthly support, as well as one-time tips and the pay-per-view (PPV) feature, directly from their fans. The initial concept was to support content creators worldwide, no matter if they were artists, journalists or simply entertainers. With the arrival of Covid-19, the platform increased exponentially the number of users thanks to the adult content you could find. Currently, the platform has 85 million users, of which 1 million are regular content creators. The platform is growing fast. According to OnlyFans CEO, the platform is creating currently over 500’000 new accounts each day.
The business model is quite straight forward. A fan of a content creator can view their content for a monthly subscription fee. The company pays 80% of the content creator’s fees, retaining the remaining 20%. After merchant and processing fees, the company’s share is around 12%. As of April 2020, OnlyFans was valued at between $810,000,000 and $936,000,000, though estimates are difficult to ascertain as the company does not release its aggregate level data.
By selling adult explicit material on the platform, you become a sex worker, and you can make a lot of money. From several hundred dollars a day up to…. a lot! Take the example of actress-singer-model Bella Thorne. In less than 24 hours on the platform, she made one million dollars and two million dollars in less than a week. She placed the subscription at USD20, and she got more than 50K fans almost instantaneously.
There are multiple ways to make money on OnlyFans. You get revenue from monthly subscriptions to your account, you can send content in a private message to your fans with a paywall, and you can also “answer” to special requests from the fans. All go through the platform system, and the financial transfer is clean and safe.
Twitter and Tik-Tok: The #NudesForSale Showrooms
By creating a private account where you will sell your adult material, the most important thing is that people need to find you. Otherwise, all the efforts put into creating content is for nothing. Users from OnlyFans, Patreon or Myvids found the perfect way to operate. They create a Twitter and/or a Tik-Tok account(s), and they use them to showcase suggestive imagery and videos to drag potential customers to their private accounts. They will basically publish a soft-porn image on Twitter and TikTok and add a link to their accounts where you can “see it all”. Last month, BBC 3 released a documentary. It explains that 30% of all Twitter accounts are “online windows” to recruit clients for adult material accounts on OnlyFans, Patreon, Myvids, and other platforms.
Wired magazine wrote last month that TikTok has accidentally conquered the porn industry. “While nudity and sexual activity goes against TikTok’s community guidelines, a number of these types of videos slip past the algorithm – and besides, videos don’t need to contain explicit content to help performers drive traffic to other platforms” – say Daisy Schofield for Wired UK. Another article on theverge.com explains how a 20 years old girl, Lee, makes between USD 110K and USD 220K a month using TikTok to link to her OnlyFans account. The mechanics are simple. You find a good trend on TikTok, and you publish a video with a slightly sexualized context. Users will find your “linktree” on your TikTok profile and get to your OnlyFans to subscribe (obviously, if they like what they see). It became such a usual mechanics that girls on TikTok receive private messages from other users asking for their OnlyFans accounts. The article on theverge.com also says that many girls discovered OnlyFans thanks to TikTok users asking repetitively for their OnlyFans account.
Instagram and Reddit became as well top places to promote one’s OnlyFans account. While Instagram has more strict rules concerning nudes, Reddit is one of the best places where the top posts in NSFW subreddits always have an OnlyFans account that is associated with it.
At the beginning of the year, I spoke with a content creator; let’s call her Emma. She publishes a lot of content on Instagram and specially TikTok, where she reached 690’000 fans. Because of the current crises and the need to make money, she created her OnlyFans account. Talking to her, we could see her motivation was to be free to say and to show whatever she wanted and, above all, to get revenue from her content creation efforts. It was an interesting case as we can wonder why major platforms like Instagram, Facebook or TikTok do not share revenue with their top content creators?
Alternatives to Sex Working? Some Already Exist, Others Require Courage, Responsibility And Sharing
With more than 255 million jobs lost due to the current pandemic situation, more and more people are joining the sex industry because of money. It is sad to see how bad certain countries take care of their own population. Moreover, all main platforms like Facebook, Instagram or TikTok enjoy a dominant position thanks to the talents of content creators who entertain users for several hours per day. An average Instagram user spend 53 minutes on average each day looking at content produced by their friends, digital influencers and brands they like. Every day, almost 100 million posts are published on Instagram. On TikTok, there are over one billion video views accomplished every single day. So the creative effort done is massive by users, and some of them have become platform stars.
Major Platforms Should Share Revenu
Instagram makes on average USD 20 to 30 billion in ad revenue every year. Facebook as a company makes USD 85 billion in total. TikTok ranked in 2020 around USD 27 billion of ads revenue. The question is: why these platforms do not share revenue with their top content creators. Users would never connect to these platforms if there were no content. Facebook, Instagram or TikTok do not produce content themselves. Therefore they live and evolve thanks to the efforts of what we call user-generated content. It would be fair enough to say that those platforms could dedicate 1 or 2% of their ad revenue to reward top content creators.
There Are Ways To Make Money Online Without Showing Your A**
While selling your body online can make you earn a lot of money and make you lose your dignity, there are ways to make money online more properly. Here are some tips. The first one is what we call online surveys. It is more and more popular activity among students and unemployed people. The most popular online surveys platforms are:
Toluna, Branded Surveys, LifePoints, InboxPounds, Onepoll, i-Say, Opinion Outpost, Populus Live, YouGov, Pinecone, Valued Opinions, The Opinion Panel, Prizerebel, Marketagent, Mingle, Opinion Bureau, SurveyBods, Panel Base, Survey Junkie.
Also sign up for Swagbucks which rewards you for surveys as well as simply surfing the web, watching videos and playing games.
There is also another option is to be paid by searching the web. It sounds simple, but the idea is great. Qmee.com has come up with a clever way to reward you for browsing on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. You install a browser add-on, and when you perform a search, you can see a few supported results alongside your regular results.
Another interesting way to make money online would be to review products and apps. UserTesting.com is a modern platform that pays regular people to check websites of all kinds. Each review takes about 20 minutes to complete and pays USD10.00 via Paypal. Sign up here, complete a test analysis, and wait for websites to arrive in your inbox.
If you are a successful social media content producer, you can also get into affiliate programs with brands and do product placement. Obviously, this will require more investment on your side, but it can pay quite a lot. Most of the above methods to make money without selling your body will surely not bring as much money as the easy money of OnlyFans but at least will preserve your dignity and maybe give you ideas to build your own business model.
If the internet was a fantastic evolution in communications, Social media was for sure a tremendous revolution. While social platforms allow us to connect people worldwide in ways that we could not imagine 20 years ago, they also brought their part of misery. With the Covid-19 crisis still pulsing, many people became sex workers online—easy money made in their bedrooms’ comfort and safety. The important question is the psychological impact of such a thing among young people. Some of them are barely at the legal age. The majority of women (78%) said that sex work negatively impacted their personal, romantic relationships, with problems primarily arising from deceit, confidence, shame, and envy. A small number of women indicated that sex work positively affected their sexual self-esteem and trust (source: US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health).
So respect yourself, be brave and support others.
José Amorim
Information sourced by the author for luxuryactivist.com. All content is copyrighted with no reproduction rights available. Images are for illustration purposes only. Featured Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy from Pexels
