Sex Sells, Until It Doesn't 🍆
The diminishing returns of a career in the Sex Industry
The Sex Industry Isn’t The Route To Riches It Would Have Us Believe
Disclaimer: At The Wealth Gap we support your choice to do what you want with your life. You do you, we don’t care. What we do care about is making the right business, finance and cashflow decisions. We view the Beauty and Sex industry like any other, based on the financial merits. From this perspective as with any other topic we can look at the “investment” case for Beauty and Sexuality toward driving revenue. We want to focus on the individual rather than the big agencies as our help and guidance “could” help a young person who is considering a future in this industry. Hopefully our insights can provide some additional consideration before embarking on a sex career but at the end of the day it’s really none of our business. If you want to end up sad, dejected with no income and soul crushing insecurities you go for it.
Sex sells, until you ain’t sexy no more! Then it crushes souls
The Top Down View
Let’s take an orbital view of the entire sex industry and focus on independent businesses and owners. OnlyFans is one of the most prominent platforms on the planet and a large portion of its revenue comes in from independent sex workers who stream content to paying customers. Let’s look at the Pro’s & Con’s.
Positives of the industry
If you can make it, it can be very lucrative
Ability to pivot to other markets (if business minded)
Low start-up / infrastructure costs
Low barrier to entry when getting started
As you are working for yourself you are much less likely to be exploited.
Negatives of the Industry
Success statistics are hugely against you
Revenues are at their highest while you are young and diminish over time (beauty & physical attributes)
Without diversification, investing and saving it’ll be for nothing (encourages high time preference)
Time is not on your side (tick tock)
Central control mechanisms can restrict/delete your access to income
What do you fall back on…?
Statistics Suck Harder Than You Can!
The OnlyFans business model provides a platform which individuals can build a following and charge/host activities for a subscription or adhoc payment. OnlyFans take a 20%1 cut of the revenue generated with 80% going to the creator. As an example, if a creator makes $10,000 via the platform then OnlyFans take $2,000 and they get $8,000. Sounds pretty good right?
It’s great if you can earn those numbers and that is where the biggest issue is. All the money is made by the top creators! It is estimated from various sources that the top 10% of the creator accounts make around 73-75% of all the money, with the top 1% making 33% of all the money!
If you take the number of creators and divide that by the revenue payouts - the median account generates around $180 A MONTH!
We pulled some of the data scraped by Thomas Hollands report and found the below statement quite pertinent
The standard way to measure inequality of an economy is with a Gini Index. An index of 0 implies a communist utopia, a value of 1 implies a single greedy capitalist owns all the wealth. The Gini index of OnlyFans is 0.83. The most unequal society in the world, South Africa, has a Gini index of 0.68. OnlyFans is less equal than an ex-apartheid state.
In layman’s terms, blindly jumping into OnlyFans as a career move is like moving to an emerging market economy that has the worst rate of pay equality on earth and expecting to make it.
Sure, you hear the stories of creators making huge sums of money every month sat on their bed at home with a camera, but the harsh truth is this is somewhat akin to winning the lottery by the numbers of the game.
The other issue with a career in the Sex/Beauty industry is that you are trading on an asset that is linked to your self-esteem and declines in value as you get older (sorry). Failure in the Sex/Beauty industry can be devastating to your self-esteem as there is very little you can do about it (aside from spend thousands on surgery and ending up looking wax work). A lot of Sex/Beauty workers are in denial about this as it is easier to lash out at the world than admit that they are not as beautiful as you once were.
Everyone knows the chances of winning the lottery but few understand the odds are similar when it comes to making money off of ones physical attractiveness. We have Disney to thank for that. “Everyone is a princess” does not translate into a guaranteed income when it comes to the platform and the hordes of phap happy men in waiting.
Do You Have What It Takes?
If you are youthful the feel free to use the assets you have to generate attention, income and a social following. Just make sure you are prepared for a rapid diminishment of that benefit over time.
Diversify, use your mind as well as your ass. One should want unconnected income streams that aren’t dependant on your looks to get returns (property, stocks, crypto) but that is true of all forms of manual labour.
Till next time
The Wealth Gap Team
The OnlyFans fee is subject to change