New York Times took Onlyfans managers to task with their story on e-pimps.

Think Expansion manages OnlyFans pages on behalf of more than 30 women, and as a full-service agency, Rosero and his employees handle every aspect of running the accounts. They market them on social media; they write all of their daily posts; they even handle direct messaging sales, impersonating the women in conversations with their subscribers in order to sell erotic videos. That afternoon, Rosero was looking to expand his roster. Wearing a snug short-sleeve hoodie, he scrolled through numerous Instagram messages he’d sent to women that day. All of them said essentially the same thing: I know you’d make a lot of money with me; I want to work with you.

Spend enough time on social media, and you’ll encounter young people engaged in all sorts of schemes: running drop-shipping companies, minting NFTs, pumping crypto, selling real estate in the metaverse. Many are based in Miami. It’s a place where young marketing types have embraced a vision of what the internet is actually for that is at odds with Silicon Valley’s: less a utopian escape from reality than an infinite expansion of its strip malls. Rosero, 27, is an exemplary member of this burgeoning class. He pregames his daily gym session with a smoothie made from egg whites and whey protein, then spends his day bouncing between OnlyFans and WhatsApp, where he manages his employees. He likes working from his downtown apartment building’s 27th-floor pool deck, looking out over the blue-gray expanse of Biscayne Bay.

Rosero has a long and colorful résumé. Born in Florida to parents from Colombia, he served in the military, worked as a stripper and imported ponchos from South America. He started Think Expansion in 2017, employing a mix of friends and salespeople he found on forums. They helped generate leads and build social media accounts for any company that came calling: yacht merchants, medical billers, insurance companies, lawyers, influencers, even multilevel-marketing firms. He’s a born hustler whose personal hero is Jordan Belfort; his speech is peppered with a mix of marketing jargon (“lowering the action threshold”) and impressions of film and cartoon characters, sometimes in the same sentence. “My mission is to stop Dr. Evil at all costs!” he said in 2019 in an interview with a local news site. “Haha, something like that — I’m a digital entrepreneur.”

He started working on OnlyFans near the beginning of the pandemic, after Think Expansion was hired by an OnlyFans creator looking to grow her social media following. Rosero noticed a strong correlation between her social reach and her profits on OnlyFans. “No business really benefits from growing on Instagram as directly as someone working in the sex industry,” he told me. It’s pretty intuitive: Instagram doesn’t allow full nudity, but provocative photos posted there can drive sales on other platforms that do. He began reaching out to models and creating pages on their behalf. In November 2020, he posted on Instagram recruiting people to work for him managing OnlyFans pages. “OnlyFans is a true opportunity for not just sexy girls, but also guys as well,” he wrote. “What I’m proposing here is ‘e-pimping.’”

Two years later, Rosero has the OnlyFans operation more or less routinized. When he starts managing a new client, he asks for a bank of nude photos and videos. Rosero’s ghostwriters — known in the industry as chatters — will act as the model in private messages with the customers who pay to talk to her. These chatters work in shifts, responding to incoming messages and reaching out to new subscribers, trying to coax them into buying expensive pay-per-view videos. They tell particular subscribers that a video was recorded just for them; in fact, the same clip might be sold to dozens of people. The chatters earn a small percentage on most sales, and the rest is split between the agency and the model. The subscribers presumably think they’re talking directly to the woman in the videos, and it is the job of the chatter to convincingly manifest that illusion. Their clientele — typically horny, lonely men — make it pretty easy. “Our best customers come to us not so much to buy content as they come to us to just feel a connection,” reads a post on Think Expansion’s website. This desire, the post explains, is a pimp’s bread and butter, “e-” or otherwise: “Hustling simps has been an art since the beginning of time!”

It’s both a little awkward and entirely inevitable that businesses like Think Expansion would emerge on OnlyFans. Awkward because OnlyFans markets itself as providing the infrastructure for authentic, personal connections between creators and their fans. Inevitable because platforms like OnlyFans naturally encourage businesses to scale up, maximizing profits through growth however they can find it. And when the product is intimacy — or at least a persuasive facsimile — scale can turn the seemingly simple exchange of dollars for sexts into a Rube Goldbergian transaction across layers of third-party intermediaries. In these situations, just a fraction of the sum paid to a model will actually end up in her bank account: a small cut goes to the chatter whose labor manifests her online existence; a larger one enriches the schemers who made the connection, and the app on which it all takes place collects its own 20 percent fee.

Think Expansion is just one example of a broader phenomenon. Over the course of two dozen interviews spanning six countries, I’ve discovered a thriving warren of companies employing a similar business model, using ghostwriters on OnlyFans to provide digital intimacy at scale. These agencies operate, out of necessity, a little below the radar. They collectively represent hundreds of models, and some claim to bring in profits that can range into seven figures annually.

As the sun set beyond the pool deck, Rosero laid out his enterprise for me. He logged into the OnlyFans page of a model who appeared to be in her mid-40s, pictured reclining nude on a bed. “This girl we literally just started yesterday,” he said. “She started with eight subscribers. OK, now she’s got 108 subscribers. You know, an older lady. But the thing is that, look, since she’s blond and white skin, bro, it’s easier to market her, because all over the world, they like blond girls with white skin.” Rosero tries to position OnlyFans pages in line with archetypes familiar to habitual porn viewers. A model this age could be marketed as a “MILF”; someone younger, a “barely legal” teenager, or a relatable girl-next-door type. These categories inform how his chatters talk to the subscribers.

“An 18-year-old girl, she texts different than a 25-year-old girl, you know, or an older lady,” he explained. “An older lady won’t use emojis; she’ll use, like, a semicolon and parentheses for a winky face, when a younger girl will actually use a winky emoji.”

He pulled up a page with a young model wearing pink-striped thigh-high socks, opened a chat with a subscriber, and typed out: “Heyy daddy !”

“You see how there’s a space before the exclamation mark?” he said. “Yeah, that’s how 18-year-olds type.” When it comes to sales, Rosero said, those details make all the difference.

OnlyFans started in 2016 and has since emerged as the top platform worldwide for creators to sell monthly subscriptions for self-produced erotic content. The platform has become synonymous with this sort of business, though some use it for other purposes. It served as a financial lifeline for many in the pandemic, allowing people to monetize time spent indoors. In 2019, there were reportedly 120,000 content creators using the platform; by December 2020, that number had risen to more than a million. Many creators on the site aren’t just posting nudes. The real product is relationships. Money from subscriptions can be trivial compared with the profits earned by selling custom videos, sexting sessions, and other forms of fan interaction that require more concerted engagement than simply posting to a feed.

This can be extremely time-consuming: In an interview with this magazine last year, an OnlyFans creator said she spends six hours a day just sexting with subscribers. But these relationships are important to cultivate. In a blog post on its website, OnlyFans encourages creators to cater to their “superfans,” who pay for custom content and will “give more if they feel they’re getting something special.”

Last year, I was given a 40-page instruction manual used to train newly hired chatters at an agency called Ekko DM. According to someone with knowledge of its operations, Ekko — which is based in Florida and has practically no public internet presence — built a stable of lucrative pages by reaching out to women overseas (especially in Russia and Eastern Europe) on cam sites like Chaturbate, and offering to spin up OnlyFans accounts on their behalf. The company takes as much as 70 percent of the gross — a steep cut, but some find the offer appealing since the company’s pages can make tens of thousands of dollars each month. The manual explained in granular detail how that money is earned.

“Every page needs to have an established back story to make the person seem more believable,” it stated. OnlyFans works because people pay for a connection that feels deeper than porn. The document encouraged Ekko’s employees, called page managers, to identify “big spenders” who would part ways with more than $200 in short order and cultivate a deep rapport by asking about their life and what they do for a living. (This would have the added benefit, the document notes, of assessing how much more they might spend.) If someone spent over $1,000, managers ought to “text them as if they were your significant other.” It even included a list of diminutive nicknames managers might use for their customers: “babes, baby boy, bb, cutie, honey, good boy, bad boy, boo, sexy.”

Above all, the manual emphasized efficiency. Managers were told to answer DMs in less than five minutes since users were coming to OnlyFans for immediate gratification and would go elsewhere if ignored. It encouraged the creation of keyboard shortcuts, so that managers could deploy an arsenal of rote sexual phrases with a few keystrokes, steering conversations toward the hard sell. It also outlined a series of strategies to boost engagement on the pages, including a gambit in which models would offer to rate a picture of a subscriber’s penis for a fee. The models, however, would do no such thing; their page managers would, and the document instructed them to be honest in these situations, sending the highest ratings only to the truly well endowed while reserving low ratings for those with either a humiliation fetish or “clearly a very small penis.” (Ekko DM did not respond to requests for comment.)

When I first saw the document, I had never heard of OnlyFans agencies. I figured Ekko must be an aggressive outlier exploring the margins of possibility in an unregulated industry. In fact, there are a variety of OnlyFans-oriented companies in the field which employ a spectrum of techniques to maximize profits from the accounts they manage. But all of them take advantage of the same raw materials: the endless reproducibility of digital images, the widespread global availability of cheap English-speaking labor, and the world’s unquenchable desire for companionship.

One of the world’s most famous porn stars, who goes by Riley Reid, started her own agency in 2021 called A.S.H., short for All-Star Hustle. She told me she started the agency to spare her clients from the more exploitative models of other agencies, which often charge 30 percent or more. (A.S.H. charges between 10 and 15 percent.) It doesn’t use chatters or rely on aggressive sales of paid content through “girlfriend experience” relationships. Rather, Reid’s agency tracks which types of content perform best for any given page and then provides creative direction and sales strategies.

Reid’s clout helps her arrange media appearances for her clients. It’s not unlike the sorts of services provided by a traditional modeling agency or porn studio.

Other agencies take a far more active hand in managing accounts and a much bigger slice of the profits. Marc Schultheiss, 19, and Oliver Dreyer, 20, were working boring desk jobs until two years ago when they started a company called the Bunny Agency. Today, Schultheiss claims the agency grosses between $150,000 and $200,000 every month from 12 OnlyFans pages. The agency takes as much as half; a small percentage goes to the chatters, and the rest goes to the models.

The models are asked to promote the pages on their social channels — otherwise, everything is handled in-house, with hired chatters in the Philippines and the United States impersonating the models in conversations with subscribers. The chatters are sometimes told to make their clients feel as if they have “an online girlfriend” so that they’ll tip more. Sure, this business model is “a bit tricky” as far as the subscribers are concerned, Schultheiss acknowledged. But when it comes to OnlyFans’ strategies, he said, using chatters makes “the most money.”

You can read the full article on the NY Times website.