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A comedian used OnlyFans creator Rebecca Goodwin’s name as a rape joke on a podcast, weeks after she reported her own assault to police. She found out a year later, when clips went viral. Other comedians have apologized, but she says the apologies only came after the backlash. Daniel Sloss, whose 2019 special told men to call out exactly this behavior, admits he stayed silent and laughed along. Apologies posted a year later aren’t accountability. Speaking up in the room is.

The SBA just officially classified content creators as small businesses, covering an estimated 27 million of them, the first guidance to name creators specifically. That opens a path to federal lending for the 86% of creators who currently fund their operations out of pocket. The catch is that SBA rules still bar loans to businesses earning more than a minimal share of revenue from sexual content, so explicit creators are likely shut out regardless of which code they choose. Washington has recognized creators as small businesses. Banks and lenders still haven’t caught up.

After nearly two decades in adult entertainment, Teddy Bryce (Colton Long) is retiring from OnlyFans, and it’s not a scandal or burnout. His queer fetishwear brand, Strapp Metal, grew too fast to keep up with both. It’s a path other creators are taking too: Lily Phillips is moving toward TV, Isla Moon built a production company. Most creators don’t vanish. They convert an audience into something else. Long himself isn’t pretending it’s permanent: “I don’t believe any sex worker that says that they’re never doing it again.”

Boomers say influencers annoy them more than any other generation, and only 31% trust their recommendations. But marketing researchers found older creators often drive higher conversion rates, and brands rejected them anyway. Boomers hold 42% of spending in affluent U.S. households, and some follow a creator for up to a year before buying, a trust curve that doesn’t fit a two-week campaign. A generation that distrusts the format isn’t the same as one that can’t be reached.

U.S. creator ad spending is projected to hit $44 billion this year, yet plenty of brands still treat creators like billboards: send a product, set a hashtag, wait for the post. The creators have moved on. About 300 paid their own way to Cannes just to pitch for long-term relationships instead of one-off deals. The brands that get it pay on time, loosen the brief, and keep calling after the campaign ends. The rest are just renting trust by the post.

CAA, Live Nation, and Architect Capital are all pouring hundreds of millions into the creator economy, and individual creators still can’t get a loan. Most are running real businesses on brand capital, not financial capital: invoicing brands, hiring teams, and fronting costs without a paycheck. Lenders, like advertisers, reward whatever’s easiest to measure. The money on offer comes with strings, mostly equity in exchange for funding. The open question is whether creators can ever just borrow like any other small-business owner.

The OCC just released a 47-page report on banks cutting off customers for unexplained reasons, and the adult industry doesn’t appear in it once, even though an earlier version named it. The findings could have been written about creators: vague standards, no clear explanation, no recourse. Its lead example is a merchant selling MAGA merchandise. Creators like Isla Moon have lived this for years, liquidating retirement savings after a bank refused to lend against her own portfolio. If the standards apply to a campaign-merchandise seller, they should apply to a creator paying taxes and running payroll.

The American Film Market, where independent films get financed and sold, is adding a creator economy panel on November 10. It follows CAA’s $250 million creator venture, Live Nation’s Creator Nation, a FOX creator studio, and a Hollywood Reporter dealmaking event for creator IP. Hollywood isn’t treating creators as a novelty anymore. It’s treating them as a pipeline.

Syracuse now has a Center for the Creator Economy, joining Arizona State’s content creation degree and a Stanford course with a 110-person waitlist. Universities are treating the business of being online as a real discipline. But 67% of creators earned under $10K last year, and the syllabus leaves out OnlyFans, the platform that pays creators more than $30 billion.

Character. AI, once valued at $1 billion, has filed for bankruptcy, and its filings read like a case study in the economics of artificial intimacy. It spent $13.8 million a month on computing in 2024 and never earned more than $5.3 million a month from all sources, ads included. Meanwhile, OnlyFans runs on 47 employees, about $1.55 billion in revenue, and roughly $709 million in operating profit, with creators keeping 80%. The companionship business that's turned out to be sustainable is the one where a real person gets paid for being one.

Paralympian Catarina Guimaraes signed a $25,000 OnlyFans deal to cover training costs for the 2028 Games. Her page is gym routines and Broadway clips, and she says the only “racy” thing on it is a video of her doing power cleans. Instagram, meanwhile, has limited her reach for the association while paying her nothing. That’s the absurdity of the whole arrangement: the platform that funds her training is the one the rest of the internet punishes her for.

A Texas woman learned she’d been secretly filmed naked at her Planet Fitness only when Frisco police called her. She’s now suing the franchise operator for over $1 million. Her complaint alleges more than 55 women were recorded across seven locations, a figure from her filing that police haven’t confirmed. Her attorneys say the suit is meant to force change: “When a gym claims to provide a private room, customers have every reason to believe they will actually be private.”

X will freeze flagged accounts until their owners pass a “liveness check,” either a biometric unlock or a selfie video. The frozen account can’t post, follow, or DM, which means creators who earn through the platform lose income while they sort it out. X won’t say what counts as “unusual” activity, so scheduling tools and multiple accounts could be enough to trigger it. Brace yourselves.

Megan Fox’s new subscription page crashed within hours of launching, but the bigger story is who owns it. Fox is a co-owner of Subs .com, which was co-founded by Tim Stokely, the guy who started OnlyFans. Her pitch is that women should “own all three” of the platform, the audience, and the image. It’s a good line from a platform run by the original OnlyFans founder, and it’s a bit hard to ignore that this looks like a second shot at a company that went on to be worth $3 billion.

Live Nation just launched Creator Nation to buy up creator management firms, FOX is stacking its Creator Studios leadership, and Adweek is handing out a Power List for the executives behind the boom, not the creators. The 50 creators on Forbes' latest list earned $1.02 billion combined, so the money is real. The open question is who ends up owning the businesses being built around them: the creators, or the companies lining up to acquire the industry that grew up around them.

Saint Laurent just sent a clear, lace-up men's dress shoe down the Paris runway named "O. Fan." The designer's explanation: "Everyone knows that's the new obsession of gay communities, to show their feet on OnlyFans. So why not celebrate this?" A luxury house naming a shoe after the platform would've been unthinkable a few years ago. Now Natasha Zinko, Rick Owens, and LGN's founder are all treating OnlyFans as a business model, not a dare. The open question is whether fashion wants OnlyFans as an economic partner or just its aesthetic until the next trend arrives.

Instagram accounts are stealing working comedians' stand-up sets, running them through AI, putting them in a fake woman's body, and using the clips to funnel viewers to OnlyFans pages. One account hit 375,000 followers in under a month, and a PE exec called it "a genius OnlyFans marketing hack." The comics who recognize their material aren't laughing.

OnlyFans' new terms of service, effective November 1, let the platform suspend your account and freeze your earnings if you "have or may have" broken the rules, down from the old "seriously or repeatedly" standard. The notice requirement shrank to "reasonable efforts." AI-powered chat tools are in the crosshairs while OnlyFans reserves the right to offer its own. And the timing, right after the Architect Capital deal and IPO talk, isn't subtle: a company courting Wall Street is tightening its legal protection, and creators carry the risk.

Pete Davidson said creators making $40M a year prove "the world's broken," then joked about starting his own OnlyFans in the same breath. Sophie Rain's reply: "If it's really that easy, he should go do it." She's got a 12-hour-day workload, 15 million TikTok followers, and a pointed observation that Davidson, who quit social media because the comments wrecked him, probably isn't the guy to lecture anyone on online labor.