How onlyfans top earner Bryce Adams make millions selling a sex fantasy

SOMEWHERE IN FLORIDA — In the mornings, the workers of Bryce Adams’s OnlyFans empire buzz in through a camera-wired security gate, roll up the winding driveway that cost $120,000 to pave and park outside Adams’s $2.5 million home-office-studio complex. A large American flag waves from a pole above their office door. So does a banner depicting Adams, in tight shorts, from behind.

On OnlyFans, subscribers pay for monthly access to feeds of creators’ videos — many of them sex videos, known as “collabs” — as well as pay-to-watch clips the “fans” can buy a la carte. And as one of the platform’s most popular creators, Adams runs her business like a machine.

Inside, a storyboard designer opens the day’s publishing plans for not just OnlyFans but all of their customer feeder sites — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. Editors start splicing video into short looping clips, optimized for virality. Collabs are sent to paying fans.

Brian Adam, Bryce’s longtime boyfriend (who, like Bryce, uses a stage name for privacy), stops at each employee’s desk to review the day’s assignments, vetoing any posts or captions that seem “cringe” or “off brand.” In an office loft, four young women start texting with Adams’s paid subscribers, who talk about sex and their personal lives in conversations that often exceed a thousand messages a day.

This being a sex business, their workdays are filled with what others might see as debauchery, but which they see as just work: Two (or three) people will slip into a bedroom next to the kitchen or the gym with a cameraman, or just their cellphones, to record a collab or start live-streaming themselves exercising in the nude.

Then they’ll head back to their desks to resume chatting or drive to the beach to make TikToks. After a few days, the video editors will upload the files to the OnlyFans servers with names like “Bryce & Holly Shower” or “Sex on a Jungle Trail,” retailing for $25 a scene.

Adams’s employees call their headquarters in central Florida “the farm.” Bought last year with OnlyFans money, the 10 acres of pastureland once held a grove of pecan trees.

Its only cash crop now is attention, and Adams’s business out-earns most American farms. The company brings in roughly $10 million annually in revenue, and many of her two dozen workers get paid more than the average farmer; her total corporate payroll exceeds $1 million a year.

“People don’t understand the scale of the opportunity. I mean, really: You can make your own world,” said Adams, 30, as she walked the grounds in jean shorts and a tank top. “This is our business. This is our life.”

In the American creator economy, no platform is quite as direct or effective as OnlyFans. Since launching in 2016, the subscription site known primarily for its explicit videos has become one of the most methodical, cash-rich and least known layers of the online-influencer industry, touching every social platform and, for some creators, unlocking a once-unimaginable level of wealth.

More than 3 million creators now post around the world on OnlyFans, which has 230 million subscribing “fans” — a global audience two-thirds the size of the United States itself, a company filing in August said.

And with help from a pandemic that isolated people at home, fans’ total payouts to creators soared last year to $5.5 billion — more than every online influencer in the United States earned from advertisers that year, according to an analysis into the creator economy this spring by Goldman Sachs Research.

If OnlyFans’s creator earnings were taken as a whole, the company would rank around No. 90 on Forbes’s list of the biggest private companies in America by revenue, ahead of Twitter (now called X), Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International and Hallmark Cards.

On the surface, OnlyFans is a simple business: Fans (mostly men) pay to scroll through feeds of photos and videos (mostly of women), with a few perks offered at additional cost, like direct chats with the creator or custom-made videos by fan request. Most, though not all, of its content is risqué, or “spicy,” and company executives joke that they are often misconstrued as “sexy Facebook.”

But as OnlyFans’s pool of influencers has grown, it has also professionalized. Many creators now operate like independent media companies, with support staffs, growth strategies and promotional budgets, and work to apply the cold quantification and data analytics of online marketing to the creation of a fantasy life.

The subscription site has often been laughed off as a tabloid punchline, a bawdy corner of the internet where young, underpaid women (teachers, nurses, cops) sell nude photos, get found out and lose their jobs.