Because I have a deep and childish fear of being exposed as uncool, I try hard to act nonchalant when I'm around people with lives more interesting than my own. This is the tactic I employed last year when I met an OnlyFans star, a fit cosplayer and Japanophile who has soared into an enviable tax bracket by selling what she terms "exxxtra spicy content." I made a show of calmly nodding along as she recounted how she'd ditched her plan to become a tech consultant after discovering that droves of admirers will pay $10.99 a month to watch her try on leggings or vigorously bring herself to climax.
Despite my best efforts to appear blasé about the nuances of modern sex work, the creator caught me off guard with one detail about her business. Like many of OnlyFans' top earners, she had hired a management agency to help keep up with her customers' demands for personal attention. "The chat specialists they give you, that was a huge deal for me," she said. The agency provided a team of contractors whose sole job is to masquerade as the creator while swapping DMs with her subscribers. These textual conversations are meant to be the main way that OnlyFans users can interact with the models they adore.
The existence of professional OnlyFans chatters wouldn't have surprised me so much if I'd given just a few moments' thought to the mathematical realities of the platform. OnlyFans has thrived by promising its reported 190 million users that they can have direct access to an estimated 2.1 million creators. It's impossible for even a modestly popular creator to cope with the avalanche of messages they receive each day. The $5.6 billion industry has solved this logistical conundrum by entrusting its chat duties to a hidden proletariat, a mass of freelancers who sustain the illusion that OnlyFans' creators are always eager to engage—sexually and otherwise—with paying customers.
I wanted to know more about this murky yet vital sector of the OnlyFans economy, so I set out to interview some veteran chatters. But nearly everyone I contacted was reluctant to open up. Some demanded to be paid for their insight; others ghosted me after initially agreeing to speak. I couldn't fault them for their wariness: OnlyFans is already a touchy subject because sex weirds people out, and chatters have nothing to gain by revealing one of the platform's shadier quirks. "We need to be anonymous so we can get hired," said Bel, a 26-year-old engineering student from Argentina who moonlights as a chat specialist.
Gradually I realized that my best shot at understanding how chatters operate would be to join their ranks. As an English major who's been fortunate enough to make a living with words for more than 20 years, I naively assumed I was qualified to land a gig. And as a writer, I was curious to learn what kind of artistry the job would require—what it takes to ensure that OnlyFans users never doubt they're really interacting with the objects of their desire.—Brendan I. Koerner
