Watch out, horny people—there’s a new OnlyFans on the market. The second cumming, if you will.
Tim Stokely, founder of OnlyFans and architect of pandemic-era sex work monetization, has returned with a new creator platform called Subs. Launched in May, the site promises to be a hub for “all creators,” though you wouldn’t guess that from the homepage—equal parts women in bikinis, fitness influencers doing deadlifts, and podcast bros who definitely say “alpha” too much. Cold cuts, sadly, not included.
Subs enters a crowded market with a familiar strategy: center sex appeal, imply legitimacy, and avoid ever saying the word “porn.” It’s a sleek repackaging of the platform Stokely already built—but this time, the pitch feels a little more desperate. And a little more dishonest.
What interests me more than the homepage is the product itself—how it’s built, who it’s courting, and what that reveals about the shifting line between sex work and content creation. Because beneath the polished pitch, Subs points to a larger trend in platform design: one that smooths over the realities of sex work in favor of something more marketable, more sanitized—and arguably more extractive.
Before building Subs, Tim Stokely built OnlyFans—alongside his brother, Thomas Stokely, and with a £10,000 loan from their father, a former Barclays banker. But OnlyFans wasn’t his first time in the adult space. He’d already launched GlamWorship and Customs4U, sites focused on fetish content and custom videos. If you knew where to look, his blueprint was already there.
In 2018, Tim sold a majority stake in OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix International, to Leonid Radvinsky, the founder of MyFreeCams. He stayed on as CEO until 2021, when he stepped down and was succeeded first by Amrapali Gan, then by Keily Blair in 2023. The reasons for his departure remain vague, but the blueprint he left behind is clear: build a platform on erotic labor, keep the branding ambiguous, and try to edge toward legitimacy without ever actually saying what you are.
It’s tempting to compare Stokely to someone like Hugh Hefner, but that gives him too much credit. Hefner was showy and oddly sentimental about his empire, styling Playboy as art, fantasy, and media. You couldn’t pry him from an interview chair if you tried. He didn’t just build Playboy to sell sex—he styled himself as the embodiment of it. He wanted to be a sexual icon. He wanted to define masculinity. It wasn’t just business. It was legacy.
If Hefner saw himself as a cultural tastemaker, Stokely has always seemed more like a businessman who happens to make money off the sexual economy. His approach has always felt quieter and more transactional. He doesn't project ideology or vision. He builds systems that monetize desire, not identities. He’s not trying to be the face of anything—just the one who cashes in.
Transparently, I think OnlyFans just hit the right stroke of luck—pun intended. The platform was poised to grow during a time when we were locked down and horny. Full-service providers and other in-person sex workers were scrambling to find new ways to make money amid rising COVID cases and lockdowns. Some pivoted to the platform. Meanwhile, users who found themselves particularly hot and bothered suddenly had more time on their hands—fueling even more platform growth. OnlyFans was expanding fast, pushing out stars, and building a new kind of generational wealth. As it grew, you could too.
But OnlyFans also began to pivot its marketing, especially by courting new creator audiences—most notably, comedians. They rolled out campaign assets to assert they were more than just their ASSets. Aligning with mainstream celebrities like Bella Thorne, Iggy Azalea, and Denise Richards helped legitimize the brand without necessarily moving it away from its sexual associations. While their new CEO has signaled interest in broadening its perception, the platform still leans heavily on content creators…but is much more centered on sex work. Comedians like Whitney Cummings host exclusive specials and promote the platform in interviews, while celebrities like Heidi Montag debuted new music videos on OnlyFans as recently as January 2025.
Subs, for all its ambition, isn’t offering a new model. It’s offering another round of the same.
A quick scroll through Subs makes its intentions clear. For a platform supposedly built for “all creators,” the homepage is overwhelmingly populated by a certain type: women in bikinis, gym influencers arching into their ring lights, and creators doing swimsuit try-on hauls. There’s a heavy emphasis on the sexual—but never quite explicit. It’s content that flirts with sex work while avoiding the label, tapping into desire without taking on the responsibility of what that means.
To be fair, there are a few outliers. There’s Lisa Ann, a podcaster whose content straddles lifestyle, sex, and internet culture. There’s even a controversial career coach from TikTok offering “unlimited private messaging” for $8 a month. These creators are meant to signal variety—but the overall aesthetic stays razor-thin. Soft-core, sellable, and algorithm-ready.
What Subs is really selling isn’t creator empowerment or niche community. It’s an optimized funnel for suggestive content that performs well across platforms already. It trades on sex, but lightly. Just enough to draw you in, not enough to call it what it is.
Subs isn’t doing anything especially new—it’s just picking up where things were already headed. Over the past few years, sex work has increasingly been pushed into content spaces out of necessity. Craigslist shut down its “Adult Services” section in 2010. Backpage was seized in 2018. FOSTA/SESTA passed that same year, making platforms liable for “promoting” or “facilitating” sex work. Social media tightened its rules around anything even adjacent to sex. Instagram shadowbanned. TikTok quietly removed accounts. Payment processors got stricter. Options narrowed.
For a lot of people, moving toward content wasn’t about building a brand. It was about survival. If you couldn’t advertise services or show up in search, you worked with what was left. And what was left were platforms that only allowed the suggestion of sex—as long as it didn’t call itself that.
Social media didn’t just offer a space. It set the expectations. You were supposed to be online, visible, and marketable. Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok taught everyone how to perform a version of themselves that was palatable and slightly horny, and OnlyFans picked that up and ran with it. It made sex work feel like social media—scrollable, postable, responsive. Subs is doing the same, just with slightly better features.
But something gets lost in the translation. What used to be sex work became “content.” Subscription posts. Digital intimacy. A feed. It’s easier to promote when you rebrand, and easier to monetize when the language softens. The product didn’t really change, but the framing did. And that framing benefits platforms a lot more than it does the people working on them.
For some, this shift made things more accessible. The tools are better. You can work from your phone. But the job is different now. You’re not just doing the work—you’re curating it. Posting consistently. Responding to messages. Learning the algorithm. Sex work used to be a job. Now it’s also a strategy.
And somewhere along the way, just offering a service stopped being enough. You needed a presence. A feed. Maybe a podcast—ideally with a video version clipped for TikTok. The expectation was no longer just to do the work, but to document it, expand it, turn it into something bigger.
That’s where something like BOP House comes in. A group of seven women living in a Fort Lauderdale mansion, with a collective 90 million followers across platforms, reportedly bringing in millions a year from OnlyFans and lifestyle content. It’s a full-time operation, but the job isn’t just shooting scenes—it’s also filming behind-the-scenes vlogs, making TikToks, or, if you’re Camila Araujo, getting into petty public beef with Alabama Barker and co-hosting podcasts with ill-fated TikTokers. The work is the content, but the content has to be everything else, too.
It’s not that social media ruined sex work. But it did change what doing the job looks like—and not everyone can or wants to keep up with that.
Subs, like most platforms in this space, is designed to sell a dream. Not just to subscribers, but to creators. That dream looks like autonomy, big earnings, and the ability to build a brand on your own terms. But the tools themselves tell a more complicated story.
The first thing you’ll probably see is the earnings calculator. It asks for your follower count and the price you plan to charge—then spits out a projected monthly income. I’m a retired sex worker, so out of curiosity, I tested it using numbers from when I was active. The estimate was wildly inflated. Thousands off. And no explanation of how it gets calculated. It's less a tool and more of a lure—something to convince people they’re just a few posts away from six figures.
The rest of the features, though, are solid. The 1:1 video and audio call options could work well for all kinds of creators—people offering personalized services, coaching, or just looking to build a closer relationship with subscribers. The collab tool is genuinely helpful, making revenue splits easier to manage without the added admin. Same with the search and explore features. One of the biggest challenges on OnlyFans has always been discoverability, and Subs seems to have taken that seriously.
None of these are revolutionary on their own, but together they make the platform feel more thought-out—especially for creators who already treat their work like a full-scale business. If anything feels out of step, it’s the inflated income pitch, not the tools themselves.
Subs isn’t disrupting anything. It’s fine-tuning a model that already exists—and was already working. The features are better, the branding is shinier, but the logic behind it hasn’t changed. Sex work is still the engine, even if the platform would rather not say so out loud.
What sticks with me most isn’t the creators on the homepage or the structure of the site. It’s the way platforms like Subs continue to walk the same line OnlyFans did: built on sex, branded as “content,” marketed as opportunity. That in-between space is profitable, but also exhausting. Because when you’re asked to be a creator, a business, a brand, and a fantasy all at once, it stops being about the work—and starts being about keeping up.
And just like that, I couldn’t help but wonder…where has all the smut gone?
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