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Abstract

Social media platforms are increasingly considering models to incentivize
creators to publish high quality content on their platforms. As a result,
social media content creation has transformed into a form of gig work for some
creators. In order to better design social media platforms to support this
labor, we need to understand professional creators' motivations. In this work,
we present a qualitative interview study of the motivations of $22$ U.S.
OnlyFans creators. OnlyFans is a subscription-based social media platform that
is unique in that it is primarily associated with sexual content (although it
is not marketed as such) and thus creators are positioned at the intersection
of professional content creation and sex work, exposing them to a unique set of
potential challenges. Beyond the typical motivations for pursuing other forms
of gig work (e.g., flexibility, autonomy) our findings highlight three key
factors explaining the rapid growth of OnlyFans despite the potential stigma of
sexual content creation: (1) societal visibility and mainstream acceptance of
OnlyFans, created through a combination of celebrity hype and the design of the
platform itself; (2) platform design: affordances for boundary setting with
clients, privacy from the public, and content archives, which together create a
labor environment participants viewed as better than other forms of gig work, a
natural avenue for sexual expression, and enabling monetization of existing
content, audiences, and skills; and (3) the pandemic, which led to both high
demand for immediate income while waiting for -- or after running out of --
unemployment benefits, and increased free time, which increased general demand
for pornographic content.