On September 8, 2026 Daily Maverick published an account of University of Cape Town researcher Phiwokazi Qoza's Porn Studies paper, built on interviews with 17 South African OnlyFans creators asked a single deceptively simple question: do you identify as a sex worker? The answers reveal what Qoza calls "boundary work" — a set of strategies creators use to place distance between themselves and a label that carries heavy stigma and, in South Africa, criminal exposure.

Why It Matters

Academic research on the creator economy still skews heavily toward US and UK cohorts, which makes a peer-reviewed South African sample genuinely additive — and it lands on the question platforms, payment processors and policymakers keep answering by assumption. How creators self-classify has real downstream consequences: it shapes whether they seek out sex worker health and safety resources, whether they'll report harassment, whether labor protections written for "sex workers" reach them at all, and how tax and financial-services rules get applied. The concentration data is the sobering half. A platform where the median creator clears $15 a month while the top tenth of a percent takes three-quarters of the revenue is not a broad-based income opportunity — it is a lottery with a very long tail, marketed to a population facing near-50% youth unemployment. For anyone building creator tools, payment rails or financial products aimed at this market, that distribution is the actual addressable market, not the headline gross spend. And Qoza's finding that structural inequality — internet access, private space, devices, and algorithmic preferences favoring a US-facing aesthetic — determines who can capitalize is a reminder that the "democratized income" pitch has infrastructure prerequisites most of the world doesn't have.

The boundaries creators draw fall into recognizable patterns. Some define sex work by economic compulsion: a 25-year-old identified as Malaika told the researcher, "No, I don't think I'm a sex worker. I think a sex worker is someone who is dependent on sex work in order to survive. Someone who has no other choice. And I do it for fun…" Others draw the line at physical contact — one respondent in her late twenties said, "No. I am a content creator. An adult content creator. If I were meeting up with people and having sex with them, then that would be sex work." That boundary is under constant pressure from the audience side. A 23-year-old respondent described receiving direct messages offering large sums for in-person meetings: "It feels like… prostitution. Yeah… I get DMs from people offering me a lot of money [to sleep with them]… I'm really scared to go because I don't know what to expect…"

The economic context is substantial. Per Daily Maverick, South Africa's digital adult content economy across OnlyFans, Fansly and Telegram is valued at up to R6 billion annually, with local trackers estimating 10,000 to 14,000 active South African OnlyFans creators. Sign-ups peak in January as school leavers confront youth unemployment above 46.5% — more than 60% counting discouraged work seekers. On the spending side, the publication cites 2025 figures of roughly $32 million spent by South Africans on the platform, up 18% on 2024's $27.1 million, ranking the country around 34th globally and comfortably first in Africa. The South African Revenue Service has tightened enforcement: income is taxable regardless of legality under Section 1 of the Income Tax Act, in-kind benefits like ring lights and lingerie are taxable at fair market value, and offshore inflows routed through gateways such as Cosmo Payment and Paxum require Balance of Payments reporting.

Qoza's second paper draws a useful distinction between creator work and conventional gig labor: rideshare and delivery income is strictly tied to hours worked, while uploaded media keeps generating views and revenue afterward. One respondent described it plainly: "Since I'm uploading there, I am doing it so that even if I am sitting at home and relaxing, I'm still going to get money by people viewing." That residual-value argument, though, runs into the platform's brutal concentration. Daily Maverick cites Fenix International disclosures showing $7.22 billion in gross fan spending in FY2024, up 9% on $6.63 billion, with $5.8 billion paid to creators and cumulative payouts past $25 billion since 2016 — alongside estimates that the top 0.1% of creators capture 76% of revenue share at a monthly average near $147,000, while the median creator earns about $15 a month and 70% earn under $200.

Sources

Update — 2026-09-09

{Initial entry — story first created.}