Drea de Matteo will probably always be remembered as Adriana La Cerva, Christopher Moltisanti’s tragic girlfriend on The Sopranos. It was a brilliant, heartbreaking role that earned her an Emmy in 2004. But aside from occasional appearances, the rest of her acting career never reached the same heights. During the COVID era, she became an outspoken vaccine skeptic and was dropped by her agent. By 2023, she was in serious financial trouble and her home was in foreclosure.
That was when her children, then 15 and 12, suggested she open an OnlyFans account. They even had a specific recommendation for their mother: show your feet.
“I thought to myself, everyone is already in sexy underwear on Instagram and I’m not doing that there,” de Matteo said. “But I can do it on OnlyFans and get paid. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.”
She uploaded a photo in a tiny bikini and, she said, “within 75 minutes I made the $75,000 I needed to save the house from foreclosure.” Since then, de Matteo has said she earns tens of thousands of dollars a month. The money helped finance a podcast where she talks about “selling sexy” and voices support for Donald Trump, and she has also launched a clothing company.
“I always say that this OnlyFans page is Adriana’s fan page because people love her,” de Matteo said. “I’ve done a lot of other TV shows, but The Sopranos is the show people really love. So if you want to see more Adriana, go to OnlyFans and you’ll find her.”
What the 54-year-old does much less of these days is act in Hollywood.
Hollywood’s middle class finds a last resort
This November, OnlyFans will mark 10 years since it was founded in London by British entrepreneur Tim Stokely and his father, Guy Stokely. Their original vision was a subscription-based platform where creators from different fields, including chefs, fitness trainers, musicians and fashion influencers, could make money directly from fans without intermediaries.
Two years later, Jewish billionaire Leonid Radvinsky acquired a 75% stake in the company, removed many of its restrictions and helped turn the platform into one primarily associated with adult content and nudity.
Like sourdough bread and Ted Lasso, OnlyFans benefited enormously from the pandemic. A world stuck at home went searching for every possible form of online distraction, sending both creator and user numbers soaring. By then, the platform had effectively become an adults-only version of Instagram, attracting more and more users, as well as celebrities whose names often shared one thing in common: the word “former.”
Increasingly, that includes members of what might be called Hollywood’s middle class. From Jaime Pressly to Denise Richards and Shannon Elizabeth, actresses who once had a moment at the center of pop culture but later saw the phone stop ringing have turned to OnlyFans.
The platform gives them direct access to an audience and the ability to build a paying fan community waiting for new content.
Shannon Elizabeth
(Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images)
Shannon Elizabeth is one of the latest former stars to find a home there. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, she became a global sex symbol through films including American Pie and Scary Movie. But her career never sustained that momentum. Elizabeth has said the films that made her famous also boxed her into being seen primarily as a sex symbol, limiting the roles Hollywood would offer her.
She also found herself caught in the machinery of the Harvey Weinstein era.
After the success of American Pie, which grossed more than $235 million on an $11 million budget, Elizabeth signed a three-picture deal with Weinstein’s Miramax.
“We had a couple of meetings with Harvey, but my manager and my ex were very protective of me,” she told Variety. “If I was invited to meet Harvey somewhere, they would say no. So Harvey told my representative, ‘Don’t call me about her again or I’ll end her career.’”
Her three-picture Miramax deal ended after just two years. Not long after Weinstein’s alleged threat, Elizabeth’s acting career lost momentum quickly. She eventually developed a professional poker career.
It was a familiar Hollywood story: the machine chews you up and spits you out. Now Elizabeth is on OnlyFans, posting sexy images and, according to her, earning $1 million a week.
‘In one year I made more than in my entire acting career’
The story itself is ancient: fame fades, so use it while you can. And if the world is already sexist and objectifies women, some celebrities have decided they might as well be the ones getting paid for it.
Musicians, actresses, athletes and comedians once posed for Playboy. Kim Kardashian entered the public consciousness after a sex tape leaked online. Today, the same dynamic increasingly plays out on OnlyFans, a platform that publicly emphasizes “creative ownership,” “inclusion” and “freedom” rather than pornography.
In practice, about 70% of creators are categorized broadly under adult or NSFW content, including nudity, lingerie and pornography, while the remaining 30% are spread across fitness, music, cooking and fashion.
OnlyFans has more than 300 million users, about 70% of them men. Of its roughly 4.1 million creators, 84% are women, most of whom are selling exactly what much of that male audience comes to see.
But the wealth is distributed extremely unevenly. Only about 1% of creators earn more than $100,000 a year through the site, and celebrities almost uniformly occupy that upper tier. In that sense, OnlyFans is not so different from the United States itself: a thin wealthy layer at the top and everyone else struggling underneath. The difference is that many of the people at the top on OnlyFans had long since fallen out of Hollywood’s elite.
Jesse Cave
(Photo: Kate Green/Getty Images)
Jesse Cave, who played Lavender Brown in the Harry Potter films, joined OnlyFans last year after another audition rejection.
“In one year on OnlyFans, I easily made more than I did in my entire acting career,” she told The Times of London.
Cave began posting videos of herself brushing and styling her hair while preparing to resemble different characters, including Lavender Brown. She made £15,000 on her first day.
“I predict more people are going to have to use other platforms to make money,” she told The Times. “Everyone will pay for everything.”
It is a dark and dystopian vision, perhaps, but the women profiting from the situation are not the ones who created it.
Fame itself becomes the product
Before the digital era, celebrities sold entertainment products. Now, increasingly, they sell access to themselves.
Fandom is nothing new. Intense, one-sided relationships with celebrities existed in the Elvis Presley era. But social media intensified that bond and created the impression that the relationship was no longer entirely one-sided. That parasocial connection underpins the success of influencers, and OnlyFans is designed to monetize it directly.
When the content is explicitly pornographic, attracting attention becomes even easier. British porn performer Bonnie Blue made headlines after filming herself having sex with hundreds of men in a single session. OnlyFans refused to host the video, but the publicity alone was enough to send her subscriber count soaring. Blue says she now earns about $1 million a month.
Clickbait is clickbait. There is no such thing as bad clickbait.
Celebrities and ordinary creators do not play the same game
The gap between regular OnlyFans creators and celebrities is enormous. While stars can earn millions, independent market research, including work by economic researcher Thomas Hollandsdal, suggests the average creator makes about $131 a month. Around 85% of creators reportedly earn less than $180 over an entire year because they lack the marketing power and name recognition of Hollywood and music stars.
Celebrities can also use the platform for self-promotion without necessarily offering the explicit content many OnlyFans users expect.
Denise Richards, a former Bond girl, posts swimsuit and lingerie photos but does not show full nudity. Her husband is involved in the shoots and helps choose “what men like.” The simple fact that subscribers have to pay to see what Richards posts creates the feeling of entering an exclusive club, with membership itself becoming a status symbol.
Carmen Electra joined OnlyFans in May 2022, around her 50th birthday, calling the move a “no-brainer.” After decades in which studios, managers and magazines dictated how she dressed, posed and presented her body while making money from her image, Electra said she wanted to take control back.
Carmen Electra
(Photo: Getty Images)
She posts bikini and lingerie photos but stops there. Unlike many celebrities who charge a fixed monthly subscription, Electra prefers a pay-per-post model, giving her more control over when she uploads content and placing her among the platform’s highest earners.
Bella Thorne, who became a Disney star through the series Shake It Up, was among the first major celebrities to join OnlyFans. In 2020, she became the first person on the platform to earn $1 million in a single day, briefly overwhelming its servers. She made more than $2 million in less than a week, and her total OnlyFans earnings are estimated in the tens of millions.
Thorne initially teased more daring content but mostly posted swimsuit and lingerie photos. Subscribers complained, prompting OnlyFans to alter its refund policy. The episode also made clear what users expect from the relationship: people pay for particular forms of access, and most creators have to deliver what the audience believes it bought.
Zendaya, who starred alongside Thorne on Shake It Up, is notably absent from the platform.
Feet can pay better than Spotify
One of the more striking celebrity arrivals on OnlyFans came from Lily Allen in 2024.
The British singer, who released two platinum albums in the 2000s, said she made more money selling photos of her feet on OnlyFans than she earned from Spotify royalties, despite having nearly 8 million monthly listeners there.
The idea reportedly began after a pedicurist complimented her feet and told her she had a perfect five-star rating on foot-fetish websites.
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” Allen said. She earned about $10,000 a month and explained that just 1,000 OnlyFans subscribers provided a steadier and higher income than streaming.
“Imagine being an artist and having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify but earning more money from having 1,000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet,” Allen told the Evening Standard last year when explaining why she eventually left the platform. “It wasn’t that much fun.”
British singer Kate Nash used OnlyFans to help finance a tour in 2024 after post-Brexit costs left her in debt.
Kate Nash
(Photo: Joe Maher/Getty Images)
“The only reason I could keep touring is because I sell pictures of my ass online,” Nash said during a British parliamentary hearing on the state of the music industry. “If you’re a woman in the public eye, you will always exist as a sexual object too.”
Australian rapper and model Iggy Azalea charges $24.99 a month for her OnlyFans content, which focuses largely on artistic concepts and music-related material. She told the Los Angeles Times that she earned so much in her first month that she “couldn’t even say how much because people would be jealous.”
Model Blac Chyna was among the first mainstream celebrities to build a major presence on OnlyFans and reportedly earned tens of millions of dollars. She later deleted the account after undergoing a religious transformation that included Christian baptism and removing implants and fillers. Today she can be found on rival platform Passes, which bans nudity entirely.
There are male celebrities on OnlyFans too, though far fewer. The best-known example is rapper Tyga. After private photos of him leaked online, he turned the incident into an opportunity, opened an OnlyFans account and posted full-frontal nude images that reportedly earned him tens of millions of dollars.
In the end, OnlyFans may be changing the way fame is converted into money, but it has not changed the deeper question of who gets to profit from fame in the first place.