Markuss Hussle wants his online students to understand one thing: he knows how to make money. There’s nothing subtle about it. In one video, he gives an hour-long presentation sitting next to his silver Lamborghini. In another, he mixes money-making tips with footage from a ski weekend with friends in Courchevel, in the French Alps, including shots of private jets, helicopters, and a girlfriend in a fur coat. He says the trip cost $100,000 (£75,000). He shows off his watches and his swimming pool, and talks about how his mother worked three jobs as a cleaner until he “retired her” and bought her a home by the sea.
If you weren’t paying close attention to the spreadsheets and presentations mixed in with the motivational lifestyle content, you might think he was giving advice on trading stocks or investing in cryptocurrency. There are lots of performance graphs and plenty of talk about account management, optimization, scaling, working smart, and tripling profits.
“It’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to make money online,” he promises viewers, adding: “Follow me or you’ll stay broke.” The business model, he says—while lounging on a white sofa next to a glass table that has bundles of $100 bills built into its design—is “embarrassingly simple.”
Hussle, 27, calls himself an OnlyFans manager. Others see him as an e-pimp, though he rejects that label as “cringe.” He says he makes money by taking a 50% cut of the earnings of women who sell videos of themselves doing provocative or explicit content on OnlyFans. Hussle, whose real name is Markuss Kohs, runs a digital marketing agency that encourages men to buy clips of the women he manages taking off their clothes.
“The lonelier men get, the more money I make. And men have never been lonelier than right now,” he writes in promotional material for his side business, which offers online training and advises newcomers on how to set up their own OnlyFans management firms. His coaching program costs $8,000, and based on recorded Q&A sessions, it’s aimed at young men, some of whom seem to have just left school.
“All right, boys,” the videos begin, before he tells his students how they too could buy a $350,000 custom supercar or spend $150,000 on a holiday in Cape Town—if they just commit to pushing women to perform better on camera. “We are potentially like the brains behind the beauty,” he says.
Mostly, he avoids talking clearly about what the women—whom he euphemistically calls clients or content creators—are expected to do on camera to earn all this money. On one podcast, he was asked if he would let his hypothetical daughter open an OnlyFans account. “Absolutely not,” he replied.
Hussle is part of an ecosystem that has quickly grown up around OnlyFans. The London-based adult content site directly employs only 42 people, but it generated $7.2 billion in revenue from its 377 million account holders in 2024.
Since it launched in 2016, OnlyFans has promoted itself as a fun, harmless platform that lets creators—mostly women—earn money by posting nude or semi-nude videos and photos of themselves. The creators’ “fans” subscribe to their content, message them, and pay extra for personalized clips. Founded by a family in Essex, the company has been hailed in the media as one of Britain’s biggest tech success stories and the country’s most powerful social media site.
More recently, as criticism has grown, the site’s supporters have shifted to defending it as a commendably safe platform where its 4.6 million creators—a large number of whom are filming pornography—can earn money from the safety of their own homes, without…Being exploited or bullied by shady middlemen or sleazy studio directors is a real risk. The platform takes 20% of earnings, and the creator keeps the rest. A few of the site’s biggest stars have made tens of millions of dollars by posting provocative content. British creators like Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips say they see themselves as feminists working toward financial independence. Other successful OnlyFans performers describe their work as “empowering” and “liberating.”
This story suggests that OnlyFans has completely shifted the power dynamics in the porn industry, putting control firmly in women’s hands. But it’s becoming clear that a new wave of middlemen have rushed in to take a cut of the $25 billion paid out to creators since the platform launched. A BBC investigation aired this week, OnlyFans: Inside the Machine, revealed that some OnlyFans managers have used violence to intimidate women into doing what they want. One woman told the BBC that her deal with her management agency ended with her being thrown down the stairs and choked by two masked men. Another said she was pressured into making extremely explicit content when she only wanted to post pictures of herself in underwear.
After reviewing the documentary’s findings, Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation, and Eleanor Lyons, the independent anti-slavery commissioner, called for a parliamentary inquiry into OnlyFans. They want to examine how the company handles things and how effective it is at spotting signs of trafficking, sexual exploitation, coercive control, and violence. “Platforms that profit from paid sexual content must have stronger safeguards,” they wrote in a joint statement.
The OnlyFans management industry includes a wide range of players, from talent management firms in Los Angeles to small-time operators—sometimes men who quit their day jobs to try to make as much money as possible from their wife’s or girlfriend’s account.
At one extreme, there’s Andrew Tate. The British-American national has been charged with rape, human trafficking, and other crimes in Romania, and faces criminal charges in the UK including rape, actual bodily harm, and human trafficking, as well as a civil case brought by four women. He previously ran Hustlers University, charging $49.99 a month for courses that included, among other things, tips on managing OnlyFans accounts. “The reason women need a man to do OnlyFans is the same reason a woman needs a man to do anything – because they’re incompetent and they’re very, very lazy and stupid,” Tate said during one of his classes.
Hussle’s approach to managing OnlyFans seems more respectful and doesn’t involve coercion. The Guardian is not aware of any allegations of misconduct against his operation. He declined a request for an interview and didn’t answer emailed questions, but transcripts from 249 of his instructional videos on YouTube reveal how he works.
First, he tells his students, they need to find a woman to represent. This shouldn’t be too hard, he promises: aspiring OnlyFans managers should just message women they already know from school, college, or university and see if they want to work on the platform. “If she’s like: ‘Oh no! I would never do that,’ all right, cool – like, who gives a fuck? There are like 8 billion people in this world, nobody cares, you just move on to the next one.”
He suggests looking for women who have posted lots of revealing photos on their social media. “If they’re already posting bikini photos left, right and centre on Instagram for free, these girls can make money on OF.” Getting women to sign contracts will also be easy, he says, because managers will typically be “dealing with girls who are your age, 18 to 25.”Here’s the rewritten version in fluent, natural English:
“Girls you might have even gone to university with,” who aren’t “business savvy” and “don’t really ask hard questions … It’s going to be pretty easy for you to get started.”
Eleanor Lyons (left), the independent anti-slavery commissioner, and Labour MP Antonia Antoniazzi have called for a parliamentary inquiry into OnlyFans. Composite: Toby Melville/Reuters; Chris McAndrew/UK Parliament
He promises that advertising their services will also be a breeze. Doing “marketing to make a half-naked girl go viral on social media – it’s not exactly rocket science, right? Attractive girls always get attention.”
His own language is quite careful, but he laughs when another manager he interviews for his YouTube show says the world they operate in is “a big group of … dudes pimping out girls and making money.” He interviews two women from Ireland who started posting on OnlyFans when they were teenagers. One of them was still in school when she turned 18, opened an account, and began filming content in her bedroom. She talks about the secrecy involved in the work, hiding upstairs from her parents, and the disapproval from her family. Meanwhile, the men he interviews talk about money, cigars, supercars, and trips to Marbella.
Hussle notes that most OnlyFans managers never have to show their faces. This is something men can do anonymously, keeping themselves a few steps away from the stigmatized industry. The women who sign up as creators don’t have that privilege. If a potential model says she doesn’t want to show her face on camera, that should be a red flag, Hussle tells students. “If she’s worried about her friends or family finding out – which I understand – maybe she’s not 100% sure about it,” he says. “In an ideal world, the ideal client shouldn’t be worried about whether they want to do it or not.” Women often have doubts about doing this work, but once their earnings hit $10,000 a month, their hesitations tend to disappear, he claims.
“For a model to have top earning potential, they need to be open to doing fully explicit content,” he tells his students. It’s one of the few clear references to the exact nature of the work he’s managing. “The bigger creators are the ones doing full-on pornos, full sex tapes.”
As the industry comes under more scrutiny, even the best-known performers are starting to raise concerns about the exploitative nature of the OnlyFans management sector. It seems to reproduce, in digital form, a familiar pattern of men making money from selling women’s services.
Ari Kytsya, 25, started posting content on OnlyFans when she was 22 and became one of the site’s highest earners. When she was just 18, she says, long before she considered pornography as a way to make money, she began getting messages on Instagram from men offering to manage an OnlyFans account for her. They promised “they can make me this much money, saying: ‘You can go on trips, it’ll be so fun and great, and you’re going to be famous, and I’ll help you,’” she says.
Ari Kytsya, an OnlyFans creator, says she is approached by managers several times every day. Composite: Guardian Design
She decided to sign up only when COVID disrupted her studies at a Canadian university. But the management approaches had made her aware at a very young age of the opportunities offered by online sex work. She still gets about half a dozen approaches a day from management outfits.
“It’s something we should be worried about,” says Kytsya. “Almost every girl I’ve talked to in the industry has had an experience – whether it’s being stuck in a contract they can’t leave, having management take advantage of them, scamming them, or forcing them to do something.”
Penny East, the chief executive of the women’sThe women’s rights charity, the Fawcett Society, is concerned about the rapid growth of the management industry. “It’s surreal how they talk as if they’re marketing a new soft drink—using business jargon about analytics, conversions, and audience engagement. But what they’re actually discussing is explicit pornography,” a spokesperson says. “It’s deeply troubling to see OnlyFans management companies becoming normalized. Men teaching other men how to market, sell, and profit from women’s bodies is not progress.”
In 2023, near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, Victoria Sinis started working for an Australian OnlyFans management firm as the industry was expanding quickly. More women were at home, short on money, and looking for new ways to earn income. More men were working remotely and could watch pornography privately from home. Part of Sinis’s job was to find new women to bring into the industry.
“The recruitment process is really simple,” she says over the phone from Melbourne. “You search the internet, TikTok, and Instagram for girls who fit certain criteria. Are they already posting provocative content? If they are, that tells you they either already have an OnlyFans or are more likely to try something like it. Then you assess: how old do they look? Because the younger they look, the more money they make. Then we’d message them: ‘Hey, I saw your Instagram! I love your vibe! Have you ever thought about OnlyFans?'”
Sinis says the agency would rent large houses where they filmed content and threw big parties to help convince women to sign up. According to Sinis, staff often created fake stories for the models: women who were 20 would be marketed as “barely legal” 18-year-olds because that made the most money. A woman who had never played sports might be rebranded as a college girl who plays volleyball.
After a few months on the job, Sinis began to worry that she was pushing people into an industry they might not have considered otherwise. She says she was disturbed that the models signed by the agency were regularly using dating apps to find men who would agree to have sex with them on camera. “We’re lying to these girls when we tell them this is the peak of success, the ultimate form of empowerment,” she says. “It’s not. It’s the porn industry. It’s exploitative, it’s grooming, it’s predatory. Telling you that your greatest value in the world is to get naked and sell yourself online—I saw the mental health consequences.”
Many of the women she met through the agency came from low-income, vulnerable backgrounds, she says. While creators usually started with a clear idea of what they were willing to do online, Sinis says there was constant pressure for them to do more.
“The girls who were willing to do the most degrading acts were the most celebrated on OnlyFans,” says Sinis. “Any boundaries they had when starting out were quickly broken down. There was too much competition for them to say no. Everything they thought they wouldn’t do, they ended up doing. It destroyed their self-confidence.”
Sinis left the agency, became a Christian, and now gives presentations to educate people about the industry. She says parents should know that girls in their late teens might be contacted by agencies through their TikTok and Instagram accounts. “It’s so hard for people to understand that pimping, grooming, and even trafficking are all digital now. I think we’re still in the very early stages of people understanding it,” Sinis says.
Some women are happy to get a contract with an OnlyFans management company. If a manager is good at their job, they know how to attract more paying customers. For such women,Successful performers who already have a large following often have managers take over the task of “chatting”—sending flirtatious messages back and forth to fans to encourage them to pay extra for the promise of more explicit content. The manager either pretends to be the performer or outsources this work to “chatters” in lower-income countries, like the Philippines or Nigeria, so the chatting—and those extra payments—can happen around the clock.
Management companies have popped up all over Europe and North America. Junior staff working for two OnlyFans management firms in LA and New York told me about the discomfort they felt watching their male bosses target vulnerable young women. In LA, Rita (not her real name) said her employer would recruit successful performers by offering to help them move from sex work to mainstream modeling.
“He would promise opportunities outside of OnlyFans, which feels really exciting to a girl who’s thinking about how to leave the OnlyFans space,” she says. This was especially appealing to women who wanted to start families or were worried about their careers lasting. “He was a master manipulator. He’d say, ‘Wow, you’re going to be a star. I’m going to put you in this room and introduce you to this person.’ It’s unethical, because we knew there weren’t going to be any paid brand deals or TV opportunities.”
In New York, at another agency, a junior employee described watching the agency’s owner pressure women to film what’s euphemistically called “boy-girl content” (having sex on camera). “There was this cycle of pushing the girls to do more and more because the last thing didn’t really boost their earnings. It got really weird really fast. He’d say, ‘Maybe it’s because you’re not doing enough kink videos.’ Sometimes he’d tell me to talk to her and say, ‘If you really want to make it in this industry, you have to do XYZ.’ Or he’d contact her directly and yell at her. Either way, she’d be pressured into doing it.”
Clara (not her real name) says she opened an OnlyFans account in 2021, when she was 19. Her university classes had moved online due to Covid, and she was living in Miami with free time. She’s well-educated, comes from a middle-class family, and didn’t urgently need money from the site. But she had a difficult relationship with her parents, who she felt were controlling, and she was eager to earn her own money to be independent. She says she was captivated by the huge sums promised by managers who constantly messaged her. “Their main tactic is Instagram DMs,” she says on a video call.
Clara quit after six months: “I was just uncomfortable.” She’s not asking for sympathy for her choices, but wants to educate people about the industry. “All the managers are young and super fun. They’re like, ‘We’re going to make so much money! It’s going to be so fun! You’re going to be so good!’ Once you start having issues with them, that’s when their true colors come out.”
A year later, she was still getting daily messages from managers. “There were a lot of stops and starts because I was very hesitant to join,” she says, reflecting on her decision to leave the site a couple of times. “I think I was so young that I was just trying to ignore my own gut feeling.” When she chose to reactivate her account for a third time, her new manager told her she’d need to do “boy-girl content” to get the contract. “He wanted that, because it makes more money.”Money was involved, so I did make tapes with someone. It wasn’t something I wanted to do—it made me anxious, and the next time he asked, I put my foot down. But of course, it’s already out there. It’s too late now. So that’s probably the worst thing.”
She now says she sees the relentlessly cheerful encouragement from management firms as a form of grooming. “They’re selling you a dream, a lifestyle: you’ll be able to travel, you’ll be able to buy things, it won’t matter what people say about you because you’ll be so rich. And I was able to do those things, but at what cost?”
Clara is one of the more successful OnlyFans content creators. She estimates she made about $2 million from the site over five years, but after the site’s cut and her management fees, she took home $400,000. She left the platform at the end of 2025 to take a more traditional brand management job and has since come to understand more clearly how the industry can be exploitative.
“I don’t find selling explicit content on the internet empowering,” she says. Early on, her parents had to pay $4,000 to help get her out of a contract with a management company. “It’s kind of like pimp behavior. It’s not like people are being forced onto the platform against their will—at least, not in my experience. It’s more like: now that I’ve done this, I can’t leave. Managers are very greedy: they always want your money, and if you try to leave them, they threaten to sue you, or they actually sue you, or they threaten to post all your content somewhere else and make money off you.”
Sole-trader OnlyFans managers who aren’t part of a larger agency often join informal online networks, swapping tips on Reddit or in large Telegram messaging groups. Data analysts from the Netherlands have been studying one of the biggest Telegram groups for OnlyFans managers, looking at conversations between more than 10,000 members over the past three years. They’ve documented how female OnlyFans performers appear to be bought and sold on the site.
Chris de Meijer, an online safety consultant for DataExpert and one of the analysts of the group, says: “They talk about models like they’re a product, something you can sell and buy.” He estimates the group is 95% male, with members mostly aged between 18 and 30. Much of the discussion is about the basics of becoming an OnlyFans manager: “They’re asking each other: how do I get my models, where do I find chatters? People respond: I’ve got an account, I’ve got a model.”
Documents examined by DataExpert reveal details about the women being traded. One message reads: “Hello gents, got a sweet little model from Switzerland you might be interested in … current price $1999 OBO [or best offer], 15 day warranty period.” Another begins: “What’s up gentlemen, I have a lovely young Russian lady I want to offer to you. She has agreed to take 30%. She’s 22 y/o, very responsive, and has already provided us with quite a bit of content.”
Members of the group advise each other on how to handle performers who want to leave their manager. Some discuss whether it’s best to call in lawyers or threaten violence. De Meijer notes that managers usually hold copies of the women’s passports—because OnlyFans needs them for ID verification—and know the logins for their social media. “Handling all this information makes it a grey area, which could easily become quite dangerous,” he says.
But he also suspects that some people in the forums have switched to selling instructional courses on how to succeed in this sector because they weren’t making money in the core business. “A lot of those agents are starting to sell training courses. That’s probably not because their modeling agency is doing so well. They need to earn money in other ways, and eventually they start selling training.”Moving from one to the next, it starts to look like a pyramid scheme. (There is no suggestion that Hussle is involved in anything like that.)
OnlyFans: Inside the Machine review – monumentally grim and unsexy TV
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An OnlyFans spokesperson says the site “was designed to empower creators to control and monetise their content” and stresses that the platform takes “the safety of our users seriously.” The spokesperson adds: “While some creators choose to work with third parties to help manage their online presence, OnlyFans does not endorse or have relationships with management agencies, and cannot review or influence any contractual agreements creators choose to enter into outside the platform, as we are not party to them. If anyone raises a concern about a creator’s account, we will immediately restrict the account, conduct an investigation, and take action to ensure the creator is in control of their OnlyFans account.”
Melinda Tankard Reist, founder of Collective Shout, an Australian grassroots activist group that campaigns against the sexualisation of girls, says governments should do more to regulate the sector. She is worried by how the industry is “normalising women as transactions, as commodified products for commercial, sexual exchange. It teaches young people that this is what women are for.”
In his videos, Hussle says he shares Tate’s belief that men should be breadwinners, while women are there to “build a beautiful family,” look after the children, and “clean the house.” He says these views are standard in Latvia, the country he grew up in until he was nine, when he moved with his parents to a council estate in Suffolk, England. He posts videos from his home in Dubai, criticising women’s driving skills, including the way his girlfriend parks his silver Rolls-Royce.
It’s hard to know how much of the lavish lifestyle footage he posts is genuine. Sometimes it pushes the boundaries of absurdity so far that it feels like satire. He tells beginners to take pictures of themselves in front of expensive cars at a dealership, or in the lobby of an expensive hotel, to project a high-status appearance. This makes it difficult to interpret the many pictures he posts of himself standing next to luxury cars.
His LinkedIn page says he attended the University of Cambridge, but elsewhere he boasts about achieving success without a university education. He talks about his tough upbringing and stresses that childhood poverty is a superpower because it makes you hungry for success. He is impressively committed to making a go of his life.
Promoting OnlyFans performers was not his first career choice. His earlier, more conventional entrepreneurial efforts – launching a social-media marketing agency in Essex and helping law firms boost their online presence – appear to have been disrupted by the pandemic, like the lives of so many women who began posting on OnlyFans during Covid. He turned to the adult industry as a plan B.
He knows that women may be suspicious of the men who offer to manage them, and tells his male students that paying women to pretend they are in charge of the business may be a good way to reassure future clients. He discusses whether it makes sense to pay women to record fake testimonials and concludes that it is worth a try.
During interviews with male podcasters, he defends his profession, pointing out that the work is not illegal and expressing confusion that it attracts disapproval compared with “real problems in the world” such as governments that are “spending hundreds of millions of dollars on weapons of mass destruction.”
His views on the industry are evolving. In more recent clips, he says he is against encouraging new women to start working in the sector in case they come to regret the decision. He stresses that it is easier to work with women who already have OnlyFans experience and that he simply wants to help them make more money from their work.In this world, loneliness is fueled by “the death of real dating” and the fact that men will happily pay $200 for an AI voice note from a girl who doesn’t even know their name,” he writes on X, urging people to sign up for his courses.
“The loneliness epidemic isn’t my fault, but it is my income,” says Hussle. “Men were spending this money long before I showed up. They’ll be spending it long after. I just learned how to stand in the middle and collect.”
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Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about the troubling growth of OnlyFans managers based on the description provided
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What exactly is an OnlyFans manager
An OnlyFans manager is someone hired by a creator to help run their account They typically handle messaging fans posting content and promoting the page The creator pays them a salary or a cut of the earnings
2 Why is this growth considered troubling or exploitative
Critics say many managers use highpressure sales tactics pretend to be the creator in intimate conversations and target vulnerable young people who are new to the industry The concern is that these managers prioritize profit over the creators mental health and safety
3 What does grooming mean in this context
Here grooming doesnt refer to predators targeting children Instead it describes how managers manipulate new creators They might encourage a creator to share increasingly explicit content work longer hours or cross personal boundariesall while making it seem like normal business advice The goal is to make the creator dependent on the manager
4 Is it illegal to be an OnlyFans manager
No its not illegal However the methods some managers uselike coercion fraud or taking an unfair cut of earningscan cross legal lines especially if the creator is underage or being forced to work against their will
5 How do these managers find creators
They often target new inexperienced creators on social media with promises of easy money and passive income They may also lurk in creator support groups or DM creators directly with offers of help
Advanced Nuanced Questions
6 Whats the difference between a legitimate assistant and a predatory manager
A legitimate assistant provides clear contracts transparent pay respects the creators boundaries and helps with tasks A predatory manager often demands a huge cut refuses to sign a contract pressures the creator to do things theyre uncomfortable with and controls the account password
7 Can a manager actually be grooming an adult creator
Yes Grooming isnt limited to minors
