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Start with a division problem, because it settles the whole question before the argument begins.
In 2023, fans paid roughly $6.6 billion into OnlyFans, up about 19% on the year before. The platform keeps 20% of what a creator takes, so somewhere in the region of $5.3 billion reached creators. At that point there were something like three million registered creator accounts. Divide one by the other and the reported average lands at a little under $1,300 per creator for the year.
That is the number the platform's own accounts imply. Now hold it next to any leaderboard promising you nine people clearing seven figures a month.
What is actually published, and what is not
This distinction is the whole of it, and almost nothing written about OnlyFans earnings observes it.
The company behind the platform, Fenix International Limited, is a UK entity and files accounts. Those filings are where the credible numbers come from, and they are genuinely detailed. The most recent full year reported group revenue of $1.41 billion, up 9%, with pre-tax profit of $683.6 million. Fans put in about $7.2 billion. About $5.8 billion of that went back out to creators. Creator accounts rose 13% to 4.6 million; fan accounts rose 24% to 377.5 million.
Every one of those is an aggregate. Not one of them is a per-creator figure, and the company has never published one. There is no audited disclosure of what any individual makes, no regulator that requires it, and no mechanism by which an outside party could obtain it.
So when a list states that a named person earned a precise sum last month — to two decimal places, as the original version of this article did — the question worth asking is not whether the figure is accurate. It is: from what?
Where the numbers actually come from
The leaderboard sites are, to their credit, reasonably open about this in their methodology notes. There are three sources, and each fails in a different direction.
Subscriber count multiplied by the advertised price. This is the common one, and it is wrong at both ends. The sticker price is a starting point, not a realised one: pages run promotional rates, free trials, bundle discounts and outright free access with the actual money coming from pay-per-view messages and tips. Meanwhile the subscriber count being multiplied is usually a social media follower count from a different platform, which is not the same population and is not paying anything.
Self-report. A creator says a number in an interview or a post. There is no penalty for overstating it and an obvious commercial reason to. This also introduces the selection bias that quietly breaks the entire genre: the list records people who chose to talk about their income and had a promotional reason to, which is a completely different set from the people who earn the most.
Press coverage. Which, traced back, is nearly always one of the first two.
There is a fourth problem layered over all of them. The headline figures are typically peak-month numbers, most often from the launch window of a heavily promoted new page, and then presented as a monthly rate. A spike is not an income.
The arithmetic the original does not survive
Take the six mid-table monthly figures the 2023 version printed — leave the names off, they should not have been attached to unverified financial claims in the first place — and annualise them.
Those six alone come to roughly $267 million a year. Set that against the approximately $5.3 billion that reached every creator on the platform that year, and six people account for about one dollar in twenty of the entire global payout. The three entries ranked above them, by the list's own logic, would each be larger again.
That is not a distribution. That is a list that was never checked against the size of the pot it was drawing from.
Being fair to the average
The $1,300 figure deserves the same scepticism, in the other direction, or this becomes a different kind of dishonest.
It counts registered creator accounts, not working creators. A very large share of those accounts are dormant, abandoned after a few weeks, or were never seriously attempted. Dividing the whole pool by all of them understates what someone actively posting makes, possibly by a lot.
What it does establish is the shape. Earnings on a platform like this follow a steep power law, which means the average is already pulled well above the middle by the top of the distribution — and the median creator therefore earns meaningfully less than $1,300, not more. Both the leaderboard and the naive average mislead, and they mislead in the same direction, because both are dominated by a tail that almost nobody is in.
If you are reading this to work out whether the subscription platforms are worth attempting, that shape is the finding. It is also the one thing the make-money-in-adult listings tend to be least direct about.
Why the format persists anyway
The top-earners list is cheap to produce, endlessly re-publishable with the year changed, and structurally unfalsifiable. Nobody can correct it, because the correct figure is not public either. The only party who could contradict it has no interest in doing so, and the people named mostly benefit from a large number being attached to them.
The published totals are the only hard surface in this subject. They are, conveniently, also more interesting than the leaderboard: a platform moving billions to millions of people, where the typical participant earns roughly what a modest side income pays, and where the interesting story is the size of the base rather than the height of the tip.