If you have ever come across an online sex worker’s Twitter profile, you’ve probably seen that they have a percentage in their bio. Top 4.7%. Top 1%. Top 3%. To an outsider, this might seem like an arbitrary number. But to those in the know, it is a sacred figure by which they live their life. It dictates how they sleep, how stressed they are, their next business move and their happiness. There are some who haven’t been captured by the bewitching spell of the OnlyFans percentage, and they have had a lucky escape.
What Is It?
The OnlyFans percentage is a number that pops up on a creator’s statement. The infamous line of text reads, “You are in the top X% of all creators!”. Your percentage is private and only accessible by the accountholder, but it has become relatively commonplace to plaster your percentage across your social media as a promotional tool. Twitter usernames will often read “Ron Fairbanks, Top 3%, 4$ OnlyFans”.
How It Is Calculated?
It’s hard to know how that percentage has been calculated. It isn’t explained anywhere in OnlyFans’ Terms of Service, and the enquiring messages that I’ve sent off to OnlyFans have been left on read. There are several factors that could be coming into play to calculate where you fall in OnlyFans’ ranking of creators. It could be based on engagement: how many comments you’re getting; how many likes on a post; how many DMs in your inbox. It could be based on followers: your fan count goes up, you bump up the rankings.
More likely than not however, it’s based on the thing OnlyFans cares about most – cash. The income you make on OnlyFans is compared to the income of all other creators by a fancy algorithm that someone very clever created, and then it churns out a ranking and tells you where you fall within that ranking. Why a percentage and not a numbered list? I guess with over 500,000 content creators, it would be discouraging to read “You’re #56370 of all creators!”. Top 10% feels much more elite, even if it’s saying the same thing.
How Does It Affect Creators?
For some creators, the percentage is a great motivational tool. It allows you to compete against yourself and measure your success in statistics. If there is a creator you aspire to, you can use their percentage as a goal for yourself. In the world of self-employment motivation can often be in short supply, so if you find the percentage helps you avoid creator’s block then it can be really useful for getting through the working day. Reaching certain percentage points can be a chance to pause and celebrate your achievement, and a way to communicate your success to your friends and family without talking about money.
However, for others it can bring anxiety and stress. You become a slave to your percentage, measuring your entire life’s worth by a number on your computer screen. If you find out that a creator who started at the same time as you has a higher percentage, it can be upsetting and cause you to lose drive. Checking your percentage five times a day, assessing fellow creators by their percentage and following rather than the quality of their content. For creators who don’t measure their success by the money in their bank account, it’s entirely pointless.
Should The OnlyFans Percentages Remain Private or go Public? The million-dollar question. Should a ranking of all OnlyFans creators be available for public consumption? Many other sex work sites have public rankings, namely AVN Stars and IWantClips. Consumers can use the rankings to find out who’s popular on the site. OnlyFans doesn’t have much of an internal marketing system and it is very difficult to find people on the site. The vast majority of the time, fans subscribe to you because they’ve found you on Twitter. You can’t search for creators by the type of content they make, or by their popularity on the site. A public ranking would go some way to solve that problem, by making the site accessible for newcomers. For creators who are driven by the percentage, it could be an even bigger motivator if it were public. It would also ensure creators were truthful about their percentage position. There have been accusations made in the past about creators doctoring images to falsify their percentage, in an attempt to gain more followers and to get access to engagement groups that they otherwise wouldn’t be eligible to join.
On the other hand, the only creators it would really benefit would be in the top echelons. No consumer is going to page 16 to check out creator #358275. For people below the 1% it could become a source of constant stress or shame, a further fixation than it already is. For those who don’t use OnlyFans for money but for a creative outlet, it may prevent them from getting the audience they deserve as they are being measured by the wrong metric.
Does the OnlyFans percentage matter? Hard to say really. Each creator has their own relationship with the percentage, and it can benefit or hinder them in various ways. For consumers, it can be a handy tool to see what’s popular on the site, but what’s popular may not be what you’re interested in. OnlyFans has recently changed their backend development so that the percentage is no longer stamped on the Statement page. You now have to seek it out. Maybe the change in the site’s infrastructure reflects a shift away from placing importance on the percentage, and a greater focus on the quality of content being produced on the site. Only time will tell.
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