ONLYFANS AND THE PLATFORMIZATION OF SEX WORK

The thesis investigates the platformization of sex work. Employing a mixed methodology, including a comprehensive platform ethnography, in-depth interviews with 35 digital sex workers, and qualitative digital methods, OnlyFans is examined as a primary case study to explore how digital platforms are reshaping sexual labor. This research highlights an unprecedented process of sex work mainstreaming, blurring the lines between adult entertainment platforms and social media. Adult content creation on OnlyFans is identified as an emerging form of digital labor at the intersection of sex work, amateur pornography, and social media influencing. This labor is characterized by the monetization of pre-existing popularity, where successful integration into a broader ecosystem of interconnected platforms is crucial for earning income, often outweighing the importance of sexual content production itself. The analysis of OnlyFans creators' work focuses on three key dimensions. First, it explores the legitimation and subsequent normalization of the economic aspect of intimate relationships. Second, it examines creators’ paradoxical relationship with the concept of work, as participants often frame their activities as a rejection of traditional employment while simultaneously investing significant time and effort that exceeds the conventional boundaries of employed work. This leads to complex tensions between perceived empowerment and underlying precarity. Finally, the central role of self-branding in adult content creators' work is highlighted. The concept of affordance-driven cross-platform dependency is introduced to capture how OnlyFans’ specific features compel creators to utilize a wide range of social media platforms for self-promotion. Consequently, creators are often required to engage in unpaid content production across a broad ecosystem of social media platforms to maintain a financial relationship with OnlyFans. This contributes to the reframing of sex work as self-branding labor, complicated by the stigmatizing approach to sexuality of social media content moderation policies, leading to complex tensions between workers’ infrastructural dependency and potential exclusion.