OnlyFans More Efficient Than Big Tech; Or Is It?

If someone told you a niche subscription platform outperforms the world’s most powerful tech companies in “efficiency”, you’d probably assume it’s a joke. Yet here we are, with data showing OnlyFans generates a stunning 37.6 million dollars per employee, a figure that makes even Big Tech look like they’re just warming up their laptops. It’s the kind of chart that makes Amazon, Google, and Microsoft collectively ask: “Wait, should we be doing something… attention-grabbing?”

But numbers can be deceiving. And this comparison is one of those places where the data is correct, but the conclusion is not as simple as “OnlyFans is more efficient than Big Tech”.

Let’s break down with this blog what OnlyFans actually does, how we got these numbers, and why comparing its efficiency with AI giants and trillion-dollar tech firms requires more nuance than the internet admits.

What is OnlyFans?

OnlyFans launched in 2016 as a creator subscription service. The original idea was simple: allow creators of any category to monetise their content directly from fans through monthly subscriptions, pay-per-view posts, or tips.

The platform became widely known not for cooking tutorials or fitness content, but because it became a major hub for adult creators during the pandemic. By 2020, its user base surged and revenue exploded. According to company filings cited in an article by hypebeast, OnlyFans generated over $7.22 billion in gross revenue in 2024, all with a very lean employee base.

In other words, OnlyFans is a digital tollbooth: creators generate the content, subscribers pay for it, and the platform takes a cut while maintaining a small operational footprint.

Why Does OnlyFans Have Such High Revenue Per Employee?

The simple answer: its product is user-generated, not built by engineers.

Let’s look at the comparison from the table that sparked this conversation:

At first glance, you’d think OnlyFans is a productivity miracle. One employee is generating more revenue than nine major tech companies combined.

But here’s the catch: OnlyFans employees aren’t building the product; its creators are. For Big Tech, employees are the product-builders. They design silicon chips, train large AI models, build cloud infrastructure, manage global logistics, and innovate at scale.

OnlyFans does not need:

• Massive R&D budgets
• AI training clusters
• Semiconductor engineering teams
• Multi-layer data centers
• Global supply chains
• Regulatory teams the size of small cities

It needs servers, moderators, support staff, compliance teams and not much else.

This is the business-model equivalent of comparing a food delivery app rider’s efficiency with the efficiency of someone running a Michelin-star restaurant. The output is different, the complexity is different, and the value-add is different.

Why is the Comparison Structurally Flawed?

1. Different value creation
Big Tech companies create hardware, software platforms, AI systems, enterprise solutions, and global cloud ecosystems. These require thousands of skilled employees.

OnlyFans simply hosts content created by users. It is a facilitator, not a builder.

2. Different cost structures
AI, cloud, robotics, search engines, social networks; they all need huge capital expenditure. OnlyFans mostly incur operational expenditure.

3. User-generated content models always look “super-efficient”
Facebook in its early years also had abnormally high revenue-per-employee because users generate the content.
YouTube? Same.
Airbnb? Hosts provide the inventory.
Uber? Drivers provide the fleet.

But none of them claimed to “beat Big Tech” in sophistication or value creation.

There’s also a deeper vulnerability in the OnlyFans model that often gets overlooked. The platform’s success is almost entirely dependent on its creators. They produce the content, attract the audience, and keep the subscriptions flowing. OnlyFans is essentially a marketplace where the sellers hold all the power. If those creators ever decide to move to a rival platform with better payouts, lower fees, or stronger features, OnlyFans doesn’t have a product of its own to fall back on. 

We’ve seen this play out before: Vine was once the hottest short-form video app on the planet, but when creators shifted to Instagram, Snapchat and later TikTok, the platform lost its appeal and quietly disappeared. User-generated platforms rise fast, but they can fall even faster when creators realise the exit door is wide open.

Where AI Companies Actually Shine

Even though OnlyFans tops the list, the interesting story hides below it.

The AI companies like Nvidia, Cursor, OpenAI, show incredibly strong revenue-per-employee efficiency for what they have built.

• Nvidia at $3.6M per employee reflects the unmatched demand for its AI GPUs.
• Cursor at $3.3M shows how lean AI tool companies can be.
• OpenAI at $1.1M is notable because training frontier models is extremely capital-intensive.
• Meta and Alphabet in the $2M range also show the power of scaled ad-tech platforms.

Compared with traditional tech, AI-first firms are creating massive value with surprisingly lean teams and unlike OnlyFans, they build the product themselves.

So… Is OnlyFans Really More Efficient?

From a pure revenue-per-employee standpoint: Sure.
From a true economic value standpoint: Well, not really.

Revenue-per-employee tells you how lean a business model is, not how innovative or impactful it is.

OnlyFans is efficient because:

• Creators make the product
• Platform overhead is low
• Content demand is high

Big Tech is less “efficient” because it is:

• Innovating
• Manufacturing
• Inventing
• Building infrastructure
• Employing researchers, scientists, engineers

In other words: OnlyFans doesn’t beat Big Tech; it simply plays an entirely different game.

One is an adult content subscription platform. The others are shaping global technology, AI, computing, and the future of work itself as we know it.

Final Thoughts

Revenue-per-employee metrics can create viral charts, but they require context. OnlyFans looks unbeatable here, but that’s because the metric rewards platforms with user-generated content and penalises companies that create real technological value.

If anything, the real story is how strongly AI companies now stand out for their lean efficiency while still building world-changing products.

So yes, OnlyFans wins this metric. But Big Tech, and especially AI, wins everything else.

Disclaimer:

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