The famous names arrived with a bang. A surprising number have since drifted away — and the platform's biggest earner was never famous at all.

When Bella Thorne joined OnlyFans in August 2020 and became the first celebrity to earn a reported $1 million in under 24 hours, it looked like the start of a celebrity gold rush, as Deccan Herald noted. The record launch sent a clear signal to every famous person with an idle following: there was money here.

Nearly six years on, the picture is more complicated. Some stars stayed. Many quietly left. And the person actually topping the earnings charts isn't a celebrity in any traditional sense.

The launch that set the tone

Thorne's arrival didn't just break records; it broke something in the ecosystem. The move drew immediate backlash from veteran adult creators, and in the aftermath OnlyFans adjusted its rules. Thorne herself framed the account partly as research for a project — and, as of 2026, she hasn't meaningfully used it in years, per Deccan Herald's roundup.

The template she set — big announcement, record day, eventual silence — turned out to be the rule, not the exception.

Who came, and what they actually did

The range of celebrity accounts is wider than the headlines suggest. Cardi B joined in 2020 to share behind-the-scenes footage from her "WAP" video rather than adult content. Sopranos actress Drea de Matteo joined in 2024 for financial reasons, and her account reportedly turned things around for her almost immediately. Actress Jessie Cave set up a deliberately non-sexual page built around hair aesthetics, and even Lily Allen dabbled after discovering an unusual niche following — all documented in Deccan Herald's survey of celebrity accounts.

In other words, "celebrity on OnlyFans" was never one story. It ranged from lifestyle and comedy to genuine financial necessity — often nothing like what the tabloid framing assumed.

The quiet exodus

What's newer is how many have drifted off. Cardi B stopped updating her page after only a handful of posts. Thorne went dormant. The two biggest celebrity names that opened the era are, in effect, gone from it — and a string of other high-profile accounts have gone the same way, abandoned or unmentioned.

There's a structural reason fame alone couldn't sustain it. The platform doesn't reward a splashy launch so much as sustained, direct effort: messages drive 69.74% of all creator revenue, The Globe and Mail reported, citing OnlyGuider — meaning the money lives in ongoing, personal interaction, not in a one-time announcement. A star who posts six times and moves on captures the hype but never the economics. Fame is a superb way to open an account and a poor way to run one.

The twist: the top earner isn't famous

Here's the detail that reframes the whole celebrity narrative. The platform's biggest individual earner is a former restaurant worker with no prior mainstream fame. Sophie Rain has said she grossed roughly $82.9 million over the past year on the platform, according to Yahoo — a figure that dwarfs what most of the famous names ever reported. She isn't a celebrity who monetized existing fame; she's someone the platform built from scratch.

That's the deeper shift. In the early years, borrowed fame was the shortcut to the top. Increasingly, the biggest success stories are platform-native — people who treated it as a full-time business rather than a publicity stunt.

A market big enough for both

None of this means celebrities have vanished. The market is enormous — US fans alone spent an estimated $2.63 billion on OnlyFans in 2025, AOL reported, citing OnlyGuider — and there's room for lifestyle accounts, comedy accounts and working actors alongside the platform-native earners. The category is stable enough that directories track celebrities with onlyfans as its own listing, precisely because the famous names keep arriving and departing and someone has to keep score.

But the era when a celebrity name was a guaranteed jackpot is over. It ended not with a scandal, but with a lot of quietly inactive accounts.

The caveats

Read the money with skepticism. Most celebrity earnings figures — the "$X million a month" numbers that circulate — are self-reported or blog estimates, not audited, and even Sophie Rain's total is her own claim rather than a confirmed figure. The mainstream-reported facts are narrower: the record launch, the range of accounts, and the departures. OnlyGuider's spending figures are modelled estimates too. Where a number is a claim rather than a confirmation, treat it as one.