OnlyFans Links Are Boosting Creator Visibility

OnlyFans creators have always had to fight tooth and nail to get seen online. Platforms like Instagram have made it harder in recent months by disallowing direct links to OnlyFans. The workaround is pretty simple: use a third party “landing page” style webpage to link your OnlyFans page. And as it turns out, this workaround has been pretty effective, most of the time.

A new report published by Giggster found that OnlyFans links on the Australian landing page site Linktree have led to increased “search visibility”. Almost 5,000 accounts were studied across 10 states in the U.S., 55% of which contained OnlyFans links. 

Interestingly, the pages with OnlyFans links made up 76.4% of Ahrefs Traffic Value, a fancy term that estimates how much a page’s organic traffic would cost per month if all its “clicks” were bought through pay-per-click ads. The data is clear, OnlyFans-linked pages have exponentially higher “traffic value”, about 8.2 times the traffic you’ll find on a Linktree page without a link to OnlyFans.

This is interesting to see, and directly contradicts the effects some age verification laws recently passed in the U.S. were supposed to have. Adult performers like Siri Dahl have been targets of “blacklisting” by companies like Meta (who owns Instagram and Facebook), essentially shutting down or temporarily suspending their account for the high crime of linking their OnlyFans. Meta has even gone as far as to prohibit Dahl from posting until she removed the link to her OnlyFans. 

It’s one thing for Meta to not allow direct links to adult content, but Dahl says they weren’t even ok with her promoting OnlyFans on Linktree. Apparently, Meta tracks what users click on if they're on the internet browser inside of Instagram. Dahl was forced to use a different landing page site that opens outside of Instagram, so she could still post and promote her OnlyFans. Oh except Instagram found out about that too and restored the suspension of her account.

Dahl also says that this censorship has given people “OnlyFans fatigue”, which she defines as too many OnlyFans creators going viral on Instagram or TikTok promoting their OnlyFans. She says that OnlyFans models have had to get creative “because of attempts to censor the internet”. 

The major problem with social media networks is their reliance on retention. Their only goal is to keep users on their app for as long as possible. When someone links to a different platform, that’s when their content becomes far less discoverable. Meta and TikTok have decided to blatantly disincentivize posting links to other platforms by taking away a creator’s potential untapped audience at the drop of a hat. Sure, a video of a popular creator like Lily Phillips doing some risque dance in a bikini is bound to get attention on Instagram, but her hugely popular account has been suspended in the past for merely linking her OnlyFans. 

While these age verification laws have been called by their authors a “back door” to a complete porn ban, the recent data surrounding OnlyFans’ popularity on Linktree show it’s not all bad news. OnlyFans creators around the world have dealt with laws and patterns that seem specifically designed to draw them into a different line of work. Mike Stabile, public policy director at the Free Speech Coalition, compares the adult industry to a “weed”. “It is adept at growing in really hostile circumstances and figuring out ways to exploit the cracks and the resources that are available to survive.”