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One Year In: The Year We Built Our Own Press
What Only Fans Insider Magazine learned from 40.3 million readers, platform silence, creator distrust, and the overlooked influence of adult content creators.
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ANNIVERSARY EDITION
One Year In: The Year We Built Our Own Press
Joseph Haecker
Editor-in-Chief of Only Fans Insider Magazine
8
5/1/26, 12:28 PM
From The Editor's Desk
Built on conversations, relationships, and proximity to the people shaping the industry.
Every industry has a place where the real conversations happen. Not the polished version that makes it into press releases, and not the surface-level takes that get recycled across social media—but the quiet, unfiltered conversations where ideas are tested, deals are shaped, and direction is decided. In the creator economy, that place isn’t a newsroom. It’s a network—built on relationships, proximity, and trust. It lives in late-night conversations, private messages, small group dinners, and the moments in between the moments, where people speak more honestly about what’s working, what’s breaking, and what’s coming next. From The Editor’s Desk exists inside that network. As Editor-in-Chief of Only Fans Insider Magazine, I operate at the intersection of creators, agencies, platforms, and the operators building the infrastructure behind them. This isn’t commentary from the outside looking in—it’s perspective formed from being in the room, in the conversation, and often, in the middle of it. What gets written here is shaped by access that most people don’t have, and by patterns that only become visible when you’re close enough to see how the pieces actually connect. What you’ll find here isn’t just information—it’s leverage. It’s the context behind the moves, the timing behind the shifts, and the patterns most people don’t notice until it’s too late. This is written for creators and operators who understand that attention is easy to get—but positioning is what actually changes outcomes. Because by the time something becomes public in this industry, the people who matter have already moved.
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From The Editor's Desk
Where It Started — And What We Got Wrong
On May 31, 2025, we published our very first article: “The Texas Latina: A Lone Star Love Story on OnlyFans,” featuring @Texaslatina95.
At the time, I was in Tijuana, Mexico.
No team. No infrastructure. No investors. No validation from the industry I was stepping into. Just a laptop, a belief, and a question that wouldn’t leave me alone: why is there no real press for the people who are actually building this space?
Because when you look at it closely, it doesn’t make sense. Millions of content creators. Billions of dollars flowing through platforms. Entire subcultures being formed in real time. And yet, no real media layer built for them. No consistent storytelling. No system for creators to own their narrative. No place where the person behind the content actually gets to speak in their own voice.
So I built one.
Not because I had the perfect plan, but because I couldn’t ignore how obvious the gap was.
Looking back now, what’s most interesting about those early days isn’t what we got right. It’s what we misunderstood.
When the machine officially launched on May 14, 2025, I genuinely believed that agencies would be the first to lean in. It seemed logical. Agencies represent creators. Creators need visibility. Visibility builds brand. Brand builds leverage. Leverage builds income.
So I structured the offering around them. I created a wholesale-style pricing model that allowed agencies to essentially guarantee their creators press. Not hope for it. Not pitch for it. Guarantee it. A predictable, scalable way to say to their talent: “We don’t just manage your account—we build your brand.”
On paper, it felt like a no-brainer.
If you’re an agency, why wouldn’t you want that? Why wouldn’t you want your creators to have published features, indexed articles, searchable press, and something that lives beyond a disappearing post or a paywalled feed?
But something interesting happened.
They didn’t just hesitate.
They didn’t engage at all.
At first, I thought it was a messaging issue. Maybe I hadn’t explained it clearly enough. Maybe the value wasn’t obvious. Maybe I needed to position it differently.
But over time, it became clear that the problem wasn’t the pitch.
It was the model.
Because most agencies in this space are not structured to think about long-term brand equity. They are structured to maximize short-term output. They operate on volume—more accounts, more content, more distribution, more monetization cycles.
They are not asking, “Who is this creator becoming?”
They are asking, “How much can this account produce?”
And once you understand that, everything starts to make sense.
Shadow accounts. Replica profiles. Content duplication. Aggressive posting schedules. All of it is designed to increase exposure as quickly as possible, often without regard for identity, narrative, or sustainability.
It works—until it doesn’t.
Because what it rarely builds is something durable. Something recognizable. Something that exists beyond the algorithm or the platform it’s tied to.
That realization changed how I looked at the entire ecosystem.
But it wasn’t the hardest lesson.
The hardest lesson came from the creators themselves.
“Creators don’t trust easily. And they shouldn’t.”
That line didn’t come from a strategy session. It came from conversations. Real ones. Late-night messages. Off-platform calls. Stories that don’t get posted publicly.
And the more I listened, the clearer it became: this isn’t just a fragmented industry. It’s an exposed one.
There are no real guardrails. No meaningful regulatory body. No standardized protections. Limited platform accountability. Almost no centralized education. And very little community infrastructure designed to actually support the people doing the work.
What that creates is an environment where creators are constantly navigating risk.
Who can I trust?
Is this opportunity real?
Is this agency legitimate?
Am I being taken advantage of?
And in that kind of environment, skepticism isn’t a flaw.
It’s survival.
Then you layer in traditional media, and the picture doesn’t improve.
Because even when creators do get featured, the process often works against them. They’re asked for exclusive images. Personal stories. Access. Vulnerability. And in return, what do they get?
A rewritten version of themselves.
Headlines they didn’t choose. Narratives they didn’t shape. Stories optimized for clicks, not for accuracy or authenticity. Articles that may generate traffic—but don’t necessarily build the creator’s brand in a meaningful or lasting way.
So I had to sit with a question that felt both simple and uncomfortable:
Why does press work this way?
Why is the person with the least ownership over the story the one who actually lived it?
And more importantly—what happens if you reverse that?
What happens if the creator writes the story?
What happens if the narrative isn’t filtered, edited, or repackaged to serve the publication—but instead exists to serve the person behind it?
What happens if press becomes a tool for the creator, instead of a tool used on them?
That question didn’t just reshape the magazine.
It became the foundation of everything we built.
Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
This industry doesn’t just need more visibility.
It needs ownership of narrative.
And that starts by giving creators something they’ve never consistently had before:
A voice that isn’t rewritten.
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The Industry Today — And the Truth No One Wants to Say
Over the past year, I’ve spent a significant amount of time studying the platforms—not just from the outside, but from within the ecosystem. I’ve looked at their business models, their product decisions, their public narratives, and more importantly, the patterns behind those decisions. When you step back and look at the full picture, a very clear story starts to emerge.
And the conclusion, once you see it, is not complicated.
The platforms are not building for creators.
They are building for profitability.
Now, that might sound obvious. Every business needs to be profitable. That’s not the issue. The issue is what gets prioritized when profit becomes the only lens through which decisions are made.
Because when you look at the creator platforms—especially the ones that dominate this space—you don’t see a lack of revenue. You see the opposite.
OnlyFans, for example, has become one of the most financially efficient companies in the world. Billions in gross payments flow through the platform annually. Millions of creators. Hundreds of millions of users. And an operating model so lean that it has been widely reported to generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue per employee.
That is not just success.
That is extreme efficiency.
But efficiency alone doesn’t tell you what a company values. It tells you what a company has optimized for.
So the real question becomes:
Where has that efficiency been reinvested?
Has it gone into building community infrastructure for creators?
Has it gone into protecting creators on social platforms where they face bans, shadowbans, and inconsistent enforcement?
Has it gone into legal advocacy, policy work, or industry-wide standards that make this space safer and more sustainable?
Or has it gone into repositioning the brand?
Because when OnlyFans launched OFTV—a safe-for-work streaming platform—it signaled something deeper than diversification. It signaled intention.
On the surface, OFTV is framed as expansion. Fitness content. Cooking. Comedy. Music. Lifestyle. A broader, more mainstream-facing content strategy.
But if you zoom out, it raises a more uncomfortable question:
Why build away from the people who built you?
Because the reality is simple.
OnlyFans was not built by celebrities.
It was built by everyday creators—many of them women—who took real risks. Who dealt with stigma. Who faced social consequences. Who built audiences from nothing and turned those audiences into paying communities.
They didn’t just use the platform.
They defined it.
And yet, when it came time to evolve the brand, those creators were not positioned as the future.
They were positioned as the past.
Something to move beyond.
Something to distance from.
Something to reframe.
That’s not a small shift. That’s a foundational one.
And it’s not isolated.
When Tim Stokley launched Subs in May 2025, he had something rare in business: a second chance with full context. A new platform. A clean slate. A deep understanding of what worked, what didn’t, and what was missing.
He had the opportunity to ask a different question:
What would a creator-first ecosystem actually look like?
Would it include stronger community layers?
Better transparency?
More direct creator ownership?
More control over narrative and distribution?
Instead, what we saw was a familiar pattern.
Better tools for agencies.
Stronger retention mechanisms.
A product designed to keep users inside the platform longer.
More control. More monetization. Same foundation.
And then there’s Fanvue.
A platform that entered the space positioning itself as more forward-thinking, more experimental, more aligned with where technology is heading—particularly around artificial intelligence.
And to be clear, this isn’t an anti-AI argument.
AI, as a tool, has enormous potential. It can enhance workflows. Improve efficiency. Expand creative possibilities. It can help creators do more with less.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is how it’s being used.
Because what we’re seeing now is not augmentation.
It’s substitution.
AI-generated creators—fully constructed digital personas that can produce content, interact with audiences, and generate revenue—are no longer theoretical. They are operational. Some are already earning at levels that would take human creators years to reach.
From a business standpoint, the appeal is obvious.
AI doesn’t sleep.
It doesn’t negotiate.
It doesn’t burn out.
It doesn’t change direction.
It doesn’t push back.
It is consistent, scalable, and controllable.
It is, from a platform perspective, the perfect product.
But from a human perspective, it forces a much harder question:
What happens to the real creators?
What happens to the people who took the risk early?
Who built audiences when there was no roadmap?
Who normalized this space through sheer persistence?
What happens when the system they helped build begins to replace them with something more efficient?
Because once you cross that line—from supporting creators to substituting them—you are no longer building a creator economy.
You are building a content economy.
And those are not the same thing.
The creator economy is built on people. On identity. On story. On connection.
A content economy is built on output. On optimization. On scalability.
One is human.
The other is mechanical.
And right now, the industry is drifting toward the latter.
What makes this even more interesting is how the industry positions itself.
It talks like tech.
It markets like innovation.
It frames itself as the future.
But underneath that language, the structure hasn’t changed as much as people think.
At its core, this is still an ecosystem where a small group benefits disproportionately from the labor of a much larger group.
Where platforms capture the infrastructure value.
Where agencies capture operational leverage.
And where creators—despite being the core of the entire system—are often left without the same level of protection, ownership, or long-term upside.
And yet, in the middle of all of this, the creators themselves remain the most remarkable part of the equation.
Not “models.”
Not just “content creators.”
Influencers.
And that distinction matters.
Because influence is not measured by views.
It’s measured by willingness to pay.
If a traditional influencer on TikTok or YouTube suddenly charged even $1 to access their content, their audience would collapse. Not because the content isn’t valuable, but because the expectation of those platforms is free access.
That’s the model.
But adult content creators operate in a completely different environment.
Their content sits behind a paywall.
And people still subscribe.
Not casually. Not occasionally. Consistently.
Subscriptions that average between $7.99 and $10.99 per month. Creators with 100, 200, sometimes thousands of paying subscribers. People choosing, actively, to spend money to access a person’s content, their presence, their world.
That is not passive attention.
That is active commitment.
That is trust.
That is influence in its most direct and measurable form.
So when you step back and look at the full picture, you have to ask:
Why is the most powerful form of influence in the modern creator economy still the most misunderstood?
Why are the people generating the deepest forms of audience commitment still treated as interchangeable?
Why are the systems built around them optimizing for everything except them?
Because until that question is answered—and answered honestly—the industry will continue to grow in revenue, in scale, in visibility…
While missing the one thing that actually makes it sustainable.
The people.
What We Built — And What Happens Next
Over the past year, despite the noise, despite the skepticism, and despite the lack of alignment from the very industry this was built for, something real has happened.
We didn’t just launch a magazine.
We built infrastructure.
And that distinction matters more than anything else.
Because infrastructure is what industries are built on. It’s what allows something to scale beyond a moment, beyond a trend, beyond a single platform or personality. Infrastructure is what turns scattered activity into a system. It’s what turns individual effort into collective momentum.
That’s what this past year has been about.
Not content.
Not features.
Not even growth, although the growth has been real.
It’s been about proving that a different model can exist—and that it can work.
When we featured our first cover model, Viktoria Winslow, it wasn’t just another article. It wasn’t just another interview. It was a signal. A signal that a creator could step into a space and tell her story on her own terms—unfiltered, unedited, and unmanipulated.
Her story wasn’t rewritten to fit a narrative.
The narrative was built around her.
That may sound simple, but in an industry where stories are constantly reframed for clicks, attention, and monetization, it’s not.
Then came our one-year anniversary cover featuring Dixie Ann. And what that represented was something equally important—what happens when real-world presence, personality, and energy translate into digital momentum.
Not manufactured. Not optimized. Not engineered.
Real.
And that’s the pattern that started to emerge.
These weren’t just features.
They were proof points.
Proof that creators don’t need permission to be seen.
They don’t need to wait to be chosen.
They don’t need to fit into someone else’s editorial framework in order to be validated.
What they need is a platform that respects them.
That’s what a user-generated content digital magazine is.
And it is fundamentally different from anything that came before it.
A traditional digital magazine is built on control. It decides what gets published, who gets featured, how the story is framed, and how the audience is meant to interpret it. It operates as a gatekeeper—filtering, shaping, and often rewriting narratives to serve the publication’s goals.
But a user-generated content digital magazine flips that model entirely.
It removes the gatekeeper.
It gives the control back to the creator.
No rewritten headlines.
No editorial spin.
No subtle manipulation designed to increase click-through rates at the expense of authenticity.
Just the creator, their voice, and the audience they’ve built—or are in the process of building.
And once you remove that friction, something interesting happens.
Distribution changes.
Because creators don’t just publish—they share.
They bring their audience into the story.
They activate their network.
They become part of the distribution engine.
And when you multiply that across hundreds, thousands, eventually millions of creators, you don’t just have content.
You have a system.
A distributed, creator-powered media system.
That’s how you scale press.
Not through centralized editorial control.
But through decentralized participation.
And when you scale press, you do something much bigger than generate traffic.
You change perception.
You change how an industry is understood.
You change how people inside and outside that industry see it.
We’ve seen this before.
In 1953, Playboy released its first issue featuring Marilyn Monroe. At the time, the adult space was largely dismissed as something fringe—something hidden, something not openly discussed. Playboy didn’t eliminate the content. It reframed it. It humanized it. It introduced the person behind the image.
And in doing so, it didn’t just build a magazine.
It reshaped an entire category.
Now fast forward to today.
We have millions of creators across platforms like OnlyFans, Fanvue, and Fansly. Millions of individuals building businesses, communities, and identities in real time.
And yet, how many of their stories are actually being told in a way that benefits them?
Not many.
But they could be.
Because we now have the tools to do something Playboy never could.
Scale.
Not one magazine.
Not ten.
Thousands.
Thousands of publications, each powered by the creators themselves. Each telling stories from within the ecosystem, not about it from the outside.
That’s what we’re building.
And alongside that, we’ve focused on something the platforms have largely ignored.
Community.
Because without community, there is no ecosystem.
There is only a marketplace.
And marketplaces don’t protect people.
They facilitate transactions.
People protect people.
So we started building spaces for that to happen.
We launched our Chapters Program—creating local, in-person environments where creators can come together without pressure. No cameras. No performance. No expectation to sell. Just conversation. Shared experiences. Real learning.
Because when creators meet each other, something shifts.
The isolation breaks.
The misinformation gets corrected.
The trust begins to rebuild.
Then we launched the Agency Trust Index.
Because if creators are going to operate in this ecosystem, they need visibility into who they’re working with. They need a way to share experiences, to warn each other, to highlight who is doing things the right way and who isn’t.
Not as a review platform.
As a protective layer.
A creator-led system of accountability.
Because again—if the platforms aren’t going to build it, the community will.
And that brings us to where we are now.
One year in.
We’ve proven that the model works.
We’ve proven that creators will show up when given the opportunity to own their narrative.
We’ve proven that distribution can be driven by participation, not just algorithms.
We’ve proven that press doesn’t have to be controlled to be powerful.
So what happens next?
We don’t wait.
We don’t wait for platforms to change their priorities.
We don’t wait for agencies to rethink their models.
We don’t wait for the industry to suddenly decide it wants to be better.
We build anyway.
We publish anyway.
We connect anyway.
I’ve invited the CEOs of every major platform to Tulum, Mexico for a closed-door conversation about the future of this industry.
No cameras.
No press.
No performance.
Just real dialogue.
So far, none have committed.
But that doesn’t slow this down.
Because the next phase of this industry doesn’t belong to the platforms.
It belongs to the creators.
And if you’re reading this, you’re part of that shift.
You have the ability to shape what this becomes.
You can get featured.
You can tell your story.
You can join a chapter.
You can contribute to the Trust Index.
You can bring your ideas forward and help build something better.
Because this isn’t just about content.
It’s not just about visibility.
It’s not even just about growth.
This is about ownership.
Ownership of narrative.
Ownership of identity.
Ownership of the story you’re telling—and how the world hears it.
One year in, we’ve proven what’s possible.
Now we build what’s next.
And if you’re in Tulum on May 14, 2026…
come find me.
We’ll celebrate.
And then we’ll get to work.
Joseph Haecker
Editor-in-Chief of Only Fans Insider Magazine
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