The porn star Bonnie Blue offers a straightforward explanation for her decision to join OnlyFans. She was in her early twenties, married to her teenage sweetheart, pursuing a career in recruitment and living in Derbyshire, the county of her birth. As she told an interviewer last year: ‘I used to work an office job, nine to five, sit in rush hour, get given 20 days’ annual leave. And for a while I’d accepted that. I was like “OK, this is what life is. This is as good as it can get.”’
But Blue (whose real name is Tia Billinger) wondered if life might not have more to offer her. So she left her husband, moved to Australia and pursued a new business idea: having sex with hundreds of (in her words) ‘barely legal’ teenage boys and uploading the footage to subscription-based, content-sharing platform OnlyFans. ‘I just wanted a better life,’ she insists. And, in her opinion, OnlyFans gave that to her.
Now 26, Blue has become world famous for the escalating depravity of her stunts. She was planning to host what she called a ‘petting zoo’ event this weekend, in which as many as 2,000 men would be given sexual access to her over 24 hours, all on camera. She cancelled the stunt after an online backlash, but promised to replace it with the ‘craziest, largest livestream ever’ instead.
OnlyFans is the most profitable content subscription service in the world. Subscribers pay monthly fees to creators in return for access to images, videos and personal interaction via messaging or video calls. Yet even though the platform generated £4.5 billion in gross revenue last year, the vast majority of its content creators make very little from it.
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