Beyond the Gig: Selling Intimacy as Labour on OnlyFans

This article develops the concept of total self-commodification to account for a form of platform labour whose unit of extraction is the creator's continuous intimate self. The empirical case is OnlyFans, the largest subscription-based adult content platform. Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews with creators in France, Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland conducted between September 2024 and March 2025, and a documentary analysis of fourteen versions of the platform's terms of service across 2019 to 2025, the article makes three contributions to the sociology of platform work. First, situating the analysis within recent scholarship on relational labour and its economic-sociological genealogy, platformised sex work and payment-ecosystem governance of adult content platforms, the article specifies the value-form through which the self functions as enterprise: a single platform-mediated feedback loop in which subscriber dynamics, self-presentation and earnings become operationally indistinguishable. Second, the article reframes structural vulnerability as a mechanism of platform governance, anchoring the claim in the precarity-theory tradition and in recent work on the payment-processor regime that conditions adult platform operations. Third, the analysis offers an infrastructural intensification of the Foucauldian account of the entrepreneurial self: on OnlyFans the regulatory ideal of the enterprising self becomes operationally indistinguishable from the labour process itself, while creators' own recognition of their activity as work remains partial and oscillating: an incompleteness, we argue, that the platform's economic model actively exploits.