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Researching this story did my browser no reputational favors. That’s because this week’s subject is OnlyFans.

OnlyFans is a subscription-based platform that enables creators to monetize digital content by charging users for subscriptions, direct messages, and pay-per-view material. In practice, that content is overwhelmingly pornographic.

And since 2019, the number of creators on the platform has increased dramatically—from roughly 348,000 to about 4.6 million by 2025, a growth of more than 1,200 percent over six years. There is no official count of how many American college students sell content on the platform, but essays and surveys describing its rise on college and university campuses are now commonplace. Estimates from late 2025 suggest that between 10 and 14 percent of U.S. women aged 18 to 24—a cohort overlapping with the traditional college-student population—actively create content on OnlyFans. (Other analysts dispute those figures.)

The most cited reason college women are turning to the platform is financial strain. College has become egregiously expensive. Depending on the institution, the total cost of a four-year degree can now exceed $100,000. For students staring down tuition bills and rent payments, OnlyFans presents itself as an escape hatch. Flexible hours. No boss. The promise—at least in theory—of real money earned on one’s own terms.

Survey data suggest that the temptation to create OnlyFans content has become mainstream among students. A recent UK poll by OnlyGuider found that two-thirds of female undergraduates would consider joining the platform if money were tight—an indication that selling explicit images or videos is now treated as a plausible side hustle, akin to tutoring or bartending, despite its vastly different risk profile.

Success stories of OnlyFans creators help sustain that perception. A handful of creators, including a widely cited Boston University student, have earned extraordinary sums—enough to cover tuition and then some. But those cases are statistical outliers. For most participants, OnlyFans amounts to a bad gamble with long odds and permanent downside.

What makes this phenomenon more interesting, however, is how neatly it aligns with the culture universities themselves increasingly promote. As I have written before, sexual liberation is affirmed and promoted on many college and university campuses. The language of autonomy and empowerment through sexual self-expression is common in student life and academic discourse. Some faculty, in fact, have argued that student participation in sex work should be understood as legitimate and supported institutionally.

Heather Tillewein, who has written on student sex work and is listed as a professor at Austin Peay State University, has argued that universities should support student sex workers as a matter of institutional responsibility, concluding in one essay that “[t]he time has come for normalization of sex work for students in higher education and for universities to start supporting the student sex work population.”

That perspective also appears in classroom settings. At the University of Washington, an OnlyFans creator, Ari Kytsya (also known as Ariel Danyluk), was invited to speak in a large undergraduate human sexuality course as part of a unit on digital sexual labor. In an essay explaining the decision, the course’s professor wrote that Kytsya was chosen to provide students with firsthand insight into online content creation, the labor and strategy behind it, and the ways sex work is shaped by stigma, autonomy, and economic incentives.

Whether such appearances function primarily as a critical examination of sex work or, alternatively, operate as an inadvertent advertisement for participation in the industry is open to interpretation. Regardless, some observers see this institutional context as grounds for doubting that financial strain is always the primary motivation for selling explicit content on OnlyFans.

A graduate student in Texas training to become a therapist, who spoke with me on condition of anonymity, said that many young women sell explicit images simply because they want to—and because universities increasingly frame sex work as liberating and legitimate, they come to see it as real work. Students may still cite money concerns, he said, but the broader cultural signal suggests that financial pressure often functions less as a cause than as a justification.

He said this dynamic becomes most visible in success stories: the small number of creators who earn serious money often leave college altogether, complicating the claim that the work was primarily about paying tuition. The rest, he concluded, are left with modest earnings and permanent digital records that carry lasting professional consequences.

To some students, however, the most significant consequences are not professional ones.

Claire Harrington, a recent Liberty University graduate, warns that “when these college-age girls eventually desire a family later in life, they’ll likely feel shame over their past—not just for themselves, but for the shadow their actions now cast on their husbands and children.”

“I would tell any college girl considering OnlyFans that it is not worth it,” she added. “Work at Starbucks or Target or find some other source of income—no amount of money is worth your self-respect.”

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