Jerome Powell's Total War Against the Monetization of E-Girls

A fundamental analysis of how one man is ending the current and future financial viability of the ''OnlyFans content creator'' model of income with only a few strokes of his pen.

But before I start I would like to note that the character of this analysis will be economic and financial, not so much political. Though I must also note that my personal ‘‘political’’ stance on monetized e-girls, porn and prostitution in general are extremely negative, if it was up to me (which unfortunately isn’t a reality yet) it would all be fully criminalized and totally banned. But don’t despair (yet), today I’m not here to preach, today I’m here to write about the very bleak future (and current) financial viability and prospects for the average woman to live her life as an ‘‘OnlyFans’’ content creator.

The Boom: the economic preconditions for it’s inception and growth

’’Nils, do you think that an admixture of certain economic variables fueled the extreme growth of this industry?’’

That’s an excellent question, I’m glad you asked, and yes, I certainly do believe that this is the case. But for starters I would like to suggest this very informative ‘‘rap’’ video, the old fashioned cycle of Boom and Bust will simply never cease to be relevant:

So what are these specific economic preconditions that have fueled this collective digital monetization that has turned many average women and girls into raging hyper e-girls? One could argue about the exact time and period of it’s inception but I would argue that it all started with the mass-adoption of ‘‘functional’’ smartphones and the mass-adoption of dating apps like Tinder, let’s say the period of 2010-2012. From that period on it slowly creeped it’s way further into the mainstream ‘‘cultures’’ and ‘‘societies’’ while coming to it’s full culmination during the first period of the Covid-era, let’s say 2020-2021. This complete period (2010-2021) is really one and the same period on a macroeconomic level, a macroeconomic period that could be broadly characterised by steady (international) economic growth, low inflation rates, extremely low interest rates and thus an extreme supply of extremely cheap credit.

Yes, if it sounds, smells and reads like a ‘‘Boom’’, then it probably is a ‘‘Boom’’. Booms with seemingly infinite supplies of liquidity generally lead to all sorts of ‘‘malinvestments’’ and ‘‘bubbles’’ of many if not all asset classes. This is the most obvious during the final phase of the period, the bubbles will then reach their final and most volatile spike, best described as the phase of ‘‘mania’’. This phase of ‘‘mania’’ is generally completely driven by the extreme volumes of liquidity that have slowly been building up during the complete macroeconomic period of the Boom. Liquidity in the form of disposable income, savings, corporate or government liquidity and bloated asset values that only exist on paper. One only has to take a quick look at the stock markets and real estate markets (any market of any asset class will do) of 2020-2021 to conclude that in hindsight this period could definitely be classified as the ‘‘mania’’ or final phase of this latest macroeconomic boom.

The Covid-era also added unique conditions to the mix, suddenly everyone was sentenced to stay at home while free time suddenly wasn’t that scarce any longer. This also happend to coincide with the final phase of the boom, in which the accumulation of total disposable income generally accelerates even harder. The effects of the acceleration also got multiplied as a side-effect of all the lockdowns, it’s simply much harder to spend your money when you can’t go anywhere and thus acceleration ensues. This is the period in which the digital monetization of e-girls came into it’s full (and final) culmination, simply due to the fact that many men were sitting at home, feeling bored and lonely while the accumulation of their disposable incomes seemingly accelerated into infinity. This feeling of seemingly endless streams of cash, of course, is just a collective psychological state that only exists during the final phase of mania.


The Bust: base interest rate hikes, the beginning of the end

Every boom must come to an end, this is normal, but for those who didn’t anticipate the sure and final fate of the boom the ending might arrive as a very unpleasant surprise. Like many times in history before, the excessive accumulated liquidity started to cause serious inflation. Again multiplied due to the effects of the lockdowns, which led to many sorts of different problems in almost every imaginable supply chain. Which in turn leads to shortages of supply in almost every imaginable sector, which in a situation with excessive amounts of available disposable income and liquidity leads to inflation. Why you may ask? It’s simple, everyone wants to buy and actually is able to buy the goods under such conditions, but the good aren’t there, thus bidding wars on a macroeconomic scale ensue for the ‘‘scarce’’ goods that are still available. The solution for all of this? Yes, base interest rate hikes, rate hikes that were long overdue in my humble opinion. Most people don’t agree with Jerome Powell’s policy to keep hiking those rates until inflation is under control, but seriously, what else can you do to get inflation under control while being faced with such macroeconomic conditions? I honestly don’t think there’s any other real way out of this. Well, maybe except for simply not hiking that rate to allow the current inflation to transition into hyperinflation of course, that’s an option.

But with Jerome Powell’s rate hikes there comes lot’s of macroeconomic change and of most importantly, the definitive bust of the boom. The warning signs that we’re currently well underway and going through said bust are almost endless. Asset class bubbles are bursting, the seemingly endless supply of cheap credit and liquidity is long gone and people are eating through their accumulated savings in a rapid rate. Companies (and every market participant) actually have to deliver again instead of just having to make some vaporware-like promises about the ‘‘latest’’ and ‘‘hottest’’ trends to instantly get showered in millions of dollars.

A prime example of this is Netflix, everyone was bound to their homes and thus people watched whatever Netflix shoved in their face while it’s productions got funded with the seemingly endless streams of cheap credit. But now, about two years later, most of the bloated and aggressively boosted diversity productions and teams have been fired or phased-out. Lockdowns have ended and thus people’s free time is scarce once again while the inflation and drought up supply of cheap and seemingly limitless credit did the rest. The time of producing and boosting bloated vaporware promises and products that nobody actually really desires, is finally over, thanks to the iron will of ‘‘Dark’’ Jerome Powell. By now you might be asking yourself why I’m making a case of Netflix while this article is actually about OnlyFans and Twitch-like platforms? Well, Netflix, OnlyFans and similar platforms are actually quite closely related and correlated with eachother. It all falls within the lines of the same bloated, vaporwave-like subscription based and ‘‘low quality’’ digital entertainment industry. But there’s one very important (technical) difference, Netflix and similar companies are more transparant about their actual earnings, thus determing the real earnings of people on OnlyFans is hard and their future earnings projections are best approached by looking at the earning reports of ‘‘similar’’ companies in ‘‘similar’’ industries like Netflix. So what do we have in regards to the real earnings of people on OnlyFans? Voluntary small sample research and questionaries, anecdotal stories and the paid for and boosted top 0.1% earners who boast about their incomes on social media (see image below) is all what we have to show for I’m afraid, but really, that’s enough.

Can you see the trend? (Hint: the end of the lockdowns and the beginning of the rate hikes)

The average wannabe monetized e-girl and her bleak financial reality

I will maintain the focus on OnlyFans simply because OnlyFans really became the global cultural symbol for the global collective of average girls and women, who above all else seem to desire to become crazy rich and financially independant through being a ‘‘semi-pornstar’’ from within the safety of their own homes. But as I already remarked in the last chapter, there’s a serious lack of official, real and trustworthy data about the actual earning of content creators on OnlyFans. But the bleak financial future projections of companies like Netflix certainly also does apply on the business of e-girl monetization. So the boasted income reports of the very top earners that you will encounter on social media, the voluntary (boasted) provided data for the different small sample research and the (boasted) anecdotal stories can safely be assumed to be far above the real and actual ranges of their past, present and projected future earnings. After gathering some data, or better said, attempting to gather some trustworthy data I did find one tweet which perfectly summarized my broad findings and expectations of the market conditions for content creators on OnlyFans:

Well, first I would like to note that the ‘‘top 10% making 73% of the revenue’’ is more likely to be around the top 0.5% making about 60% of the total revenue. For example, if we had more data we could’ve approached the total population of OnlyFans content creators as the total ‘‘population’’ of a ‘‘regular country’’. By doing so we could’ve applied the Gini index on this population. I firmly believe that this would’ve generated an extremely high score on the Gini coefficient, meaning an extreme inequal distribution of revenue within it’s population. These top earners are mostly people who already had a personal clout before they started creating content on OnlyFans, think celebrities or popular streamers and influencers. There are some ‘‘unicorn’’ cases to be found who really gained extreme popularity from out of nowhere through this platform. Examples are immediatly made out of these extremely rare cases though, by the industry itself and by related social media outlets to cater to the idea that this could happen at any time to any girl out there, which is just a flat-out marketing strategy that comes down to: ‘‘What are you waiting for?’’. The earnings of this very small group will follow the general declining trend of the industry, but no matter how high Jerome hikes his rates, this small group will survive like roaches during a nuclear fallout. Their earnings were exorbitant to begin with and they have personal clouts. Even during times of economic hardship there will always be demand to some degree for these sort of activities, just not a degree of demand that would allow the average girl to making a living from it though.

But this is not and will absolutely never be a reality for the average girl, becoming a successful monetized e-girl means you have to do better than your competitors. Now we have a situation in which the amount of competitors for these average girls just keeps on growing while the total pool of their potential earnings just keeps on declining due to changing macroeconomic conditions. I do believe it’s fair to assume an average income of circa 150 USD per month for the total population of content creators on the platform. But this is including those very few top earners, and with such an inequal distribution of earnings it’s fairly safe to assume that the bottom 75% of earners probably don’t touch this monthly average income. Meaning, 75% of the content creators make less than 150 USD from their activities on the platform. But we’re still talking about averages here, which not only includes that top 0.5% but also the total earnings of the rest of the 20% top earners. The bottom 50% of earners in this totally inequal distributed eco-system probably don’t even touch income ranges above 10 USD per month. One doesn’t have to be an economist to conclude that there isn’t a single country in the whole world in which you can live and feed yourself off such an income. And like on the regular stock market, during times of economic hardship liquidity tends to dry out first on the bottom of the liquidity chain, meaning dead trading volumes on low market cap trading pairs. This market mechanism can be translated directly to the market of OnlyFans content creators. The girls at the bottom (who weren’t earning anything to begin with) will see an accelerated decline of their total pool of potential earnings with every occuring rate hike. All while the pool of their potential competitors just keeps on growing due to a combination of changing (worsening) macroeconomic conditions and aggressive ‘‘marketing’’ efforts with ‘‘success’’ stories by the industry.

So, what did we actually learn from all of this? I think there’s many apprehensive conclusions to be made from all of this. But given the fact that many people (and most certainly the average wannabe monetized e-girl) will not spend much time nor effort to read through this entire analysis I think it’s more than fair to end this analysis with a very blunt and clear statement. The average girl will never become a successful and fully monetized e-girl by selling pictures of her butthole to every interested stranger for the price of a Burger King menu. Every time you try, Daddy Jerome Powell will personally beat you down even further into the abyss of macroeconomic horrors beyond your darkest imagination.

Note: the images of Jerome Powell that I used are all generated by AI, source: Gabby / Gab AI

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