What the Data Actually Says About the Adult Creator Economy with Mike Stabile
- MelRose Michaels
- May 8
- 10 min read
SWCEO Interviews Mike Stabile
Blog Post Written By: MelRose Michaels
Most of what gets written about adult creators falls into one of two camps: the fantasy version where everyone is making millions, or the horror story version where everyone is being exploited. The truth, as usual, lives somewhere in the data, and that's exactly what this conversation is about.
Mike Stabile has spent over a decade documenting, defending and decoding this industry, with bylines in the New York Times, Playboy and BuzzFeed and years of work at the intersection of media, free speech and one of the most misunderstood industries in the world. He's also my co-founder at SWR Data, our adult industry market research company, where we've been turning creator experiences into real numbers, real trends and real insights about where this economy is actually headed.
In a recent podcast conversation, we get into the data we've been releasing, what it means for your business and why knowing where you actually stand in this industry is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself right now.
MelRose Michaels: I've talked about SWR Data a million times, but I know a lot of people listening don't really know the full story of how this company came to be. Can you give them some background?
Mike Stabile: Sure. Back in 2022, I was working with you, and at the time the creator economy was exploding. There were so many people getting into the industry and you had just launched SexWorkCEO, and we realized that we genuinely did not know anything about who these people were, how their businesses were being run, what they were succeeding at, what they were struggling with, or even basic demographics like where they were living and working. We needed to map it. So we launched a survey that first year, had a little over 200 respondents, and it gave us and really the world the first real insight into what the adult creator economy actually looks like.
For me personally, it was fascinating because on one hand you had headlines about creators making a million dollars a month, and on the other hand you had headlines saying these people are exploited and only making a hundred dollars a month. We just started trying to figure out how to get in the middle of that and find out what was actually true.
MelRose Michaels: That's exactly how it started between us, and I think what people don't always understand is the value of this kind of data. Creators don't get the business insights that executives and platforms get. We might know our own revenue or our subscriber count, but we don't know things like average subscriber churn or the lifetime value of a fan. So when we started surveying creators, it started to paint a picture that made my own experience feel less like an outlier. It helped me understand that if I'm swimming upstream and it feels hard, maybe it's actually just hard out there, and it's not just me.
Mike Stabile: That's really the most important takeaway from everything we've done. There is no one way to be a creator. What you see on social media is the most positive-seeming version of everyone's life and business, whether you're a creator or not. It's easy to look at what's being shared on Twitter or Instagram or Reddit and think that everyone else is succeeding and you're the only one struggling.
But most creators are not working at this full time. Most are earning supplemental income, building a business on the side while working another job, or making a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month. The people who are doing better tend to be more established, have been in the business longer and are working at it full time, which are exactly the same things that correspond to success or sustainability in any other industry. Experience and time carry forward here too.
MelRose Michaels: And that's true on both sides of what we do with this data. We give creators the insights and context they're missing so they can make real business decisions and know they're not alone. And we provide anonymized reports to platforms and businesses so they can build better products for creators, because a lot of platforms genuinely don't know what creators need. Only Fans knows Only Fans data. They know what features their own creators are using or monetizing best. But if they want to attract a creator who has never been on their platform, they need to know what that creator actually wants, and that's a very different picture.
MelRose Michaels: Let's get into the data. Earlier this year we released what we called a platform hot list, looking at which platforms are winning and losing with creators right now. Can you walk people through what we found?
Mike Stabile: So the way we approached this was we asked creators three questions: what platforms are you currently using, which platforms do you generally have a positive view of, and which do you have a negative view of? Then we looked at both the overall sentiment across all creators and specifically how creators who are actually on a given platform feel about it, because that second piece is really the more important indicator. If the people using a platform love it, that tells you something meaningful that general buzz doesn't.
Looking at the top performers, LoyalFans had the highest positive ranking overall.
Creators in general have a good view of the platform and creators on the platform really love it, with very low negatives across the board. SextPanther was particularly interesting because creator satisfaction on that platform was higher than any other, meaning creators on SextPanther love it more than creators on any other platform love theirs. Fanvly also had strong positives both from general sentiment and from its own creators. Clips4Sale ranked very high, especially among its own creators. And on the cam side, Chaturbate had strong satisfaction among creators on the platform.
MelRose Michaels: And then there were the ones that stood out on the negative end, which I don't think will surprise too many creators who are plugged in right now. ManyVids ranked really low, not just with creators who aren't on the platform but with its own creators, which is a significant signal. And OnlyFans ranked low with its own creators in terms of sentiment and happiness, as well as with creators who aren't on the platform. Those two stood out to me for obvious reasons.
MelRose: Now let's talk about the clips data, because this was one of the most interesting things that came out of our latest survey. What did you see?
MelRose Michaels: So we ask creators two related questions: what sectors of the industry are you working in, and which of those sectors is most important to your income. For as long as we've been doing this, fan site subscriptions were the most important income source for creators by a wide margin. That was what drove the creator economy. But this year we saw a significant drop, roughly 25%, in the number of creators who identified subscriptions as the key part of their income. And alongside that drop, we saw clips surge. Clips and fan sites are now more important to the creator economy than cams, meaning more creators depend on clip sales for income than almost anything else.
I was presenting this data at XBIZ and I was honestly a little nervous about it because someone from a cam platform was in the room. But she came up to me afterwards and said she was glad to see it because they had been investing in clips and this confirmed what their gut had been telling them. That reaction alone showed why this data matters, because platforms are operating on instinct when they could be operating on information.
MelRose Michaels: And I think the reason this shift makes a lot of sense from a creator perspective is that clips are much more passive as an income source. I'll wake up to an email that a clip sold overnight and I didn't have to do anything to make that money. The traffic found me, someone purchased it and that was it. The fan site model is genuinely exhausting. Being available in DMs constantly, staying on cam for hours, always having to be accessible, it wears on you. So I can absolutely understand why creators are gravitating toward a model that has some passive income built into it.
Mike Stabile: And there's a corresponding data point worth adding here. When we asked creators what they value most in a platform, we've been through years of platforms competing on payout percentage, everybody racing to offer 80% to creators. But when you're paying out 80%, you don't have much left to spend on internal marketing or purchasing traffic. What we're seeing now is more creators moving toward platforms that may offer a lower payout percentage but drive significant traffic to them internally. The same way cam sites used to have an ecosystem of ready buyers that creators could tap into, these platforms are doing that work globally and delivering it to you. For content you've already created, that's an incredibly valuable and low-effort income stream.
MelRose Michaels: I want to make sure we talk about age verification because I think creators have suspected for a while that AV laws are impacting their income, and now we actually have data to support that. What did you find?
Mike Stabile: This year was the first year in the five-plus years we've been running this survey where we saw a clear majority of creators report that their income went down. Two years ago, about 40% of creators said their income had increased. This year, it flipped. Most creators said they made less money this year than they did the year before, and almost half reported decreased income overall. When we asked why, the overwhelming answer was the war on porn and the barriers age verification is creating for fans trying to access content.
MelRose Michaels: And I think what's happening with cams specifically ties directly into this. Cam sites used to let users browse rooms freely until they found someone they liked, and then they'd join or spend. Now users have to go through age verification before they can even see the rooms, which eliminates that discovery window entirely. Whereas someone going into a clip store already knows what they want and they're there to purchase, so the barrier is much lower. I think that dynamic is partly driving the shift we're seeing from cams to clips.
Mike Stabile: Exactly. And the creators who are least insulated from all of this are the smallest ones. Our data showed that creators earning $5,000 or less per month were far more likely to report decreased income, at around 50%, compared to creators earning $10,000 or more, where that number was closer to 30%. Higher-earning creators often have teams, multiple income streams, diversified platforms and the resources to buy traffic themselves. Smaller creators typically don't have any of that, and when something breaks, they feel it immediately and completely. So many of these laws get passed under the guise of protecting performers, but what the data actually shows is that they're hitting the most marginalized creators the hardest.
MelRose Michaels: I want to make sure creators walk away from this episode with something actionable. So here's how I'm internalizing all of this for my own business. If social media censorship is increasing and creators are losing accounts, losing their top-of-funnel traffic overnight, then the strategic move is to also be working on a platform that has internal traffic built in. Not instead of social, but in addition to it. So that if you wake up one day and your social is gone, you still have a business.
We had a creator join one of our recent Spaces who is based in Alabama and woke up to a message saying her creator profile had been removed because of where she lives. If your entire income was on one platform and that platform shuts you out, you are out of business overnight with no way to rebuild.
Having both pieces, a platform you drive traffic to yourself and a platform that drives traffic to you, is what keeps your business sustainable in the current climate.
Mike Stabile: And the data backs that up entirely. Creators who work with platforms that have internal traffic ecosystems are consistently less likely to report that social media censorship is affecting their business in a significant way. It doesn't eliminate the problem, but it gives you insulation and a place to rebuild from if the worst happens.
MelRose Michaels: Before we wrap up, I know you wanted to touch on where social media itself is trending for creators right now.
Mike Stabile: Yes, and this is one of the newer data points we have because we only started measuring for Blue Sky this past year. Blue Sky is now the third most popular social platform for adult content creators, behind Twitter and Instagram, and ahead of Reddit. That's a meaningful shift in a short period of time.
The caveat is that Blue Sky still lags as a traffic driver. What we're seeing is that it's really valuable for community, for information sharing and for peer connection, but it's not yet converting to sales the way Twitter does. And Twitter itself is declining. So the broader picture is that you want to be building presence on the platforms that are growing, not just the ones that are biggest right now.
MelRose Michaels: Which brings everything back to the same core principle: use data to make decisions, not guesswork. That's the whole reason we built SWR Data, and that's why we keep doing this work even when it's expensive and time-consuming and we have not yet figured out how to pay ourselves for it.
Mike Stabile: Truly. I love to not make money. It's become a real problem.
MelRose Michaels: As a sex worker, I really like to make money, so it's a happy marriage. But in all seriousness, if you have questions you want us to dig into with future data, reach out to us. Your questions inform the questions we should be asking in our surveys, and that makes the whole thing more useful for everyone.
Some parts of the above interview have been condensed or edited for clarity. For the full interview, listen to the entire podcast episode here
P.S. If this conversation made you realize you've been making platform decisions based on noise instead of data, come find us at SWR Data and follow along as we keep releasing insights. And if you want to talk strategy with other creators who are paying attention to what the data is actually saying, join us inside CEO Society. It's free and it's where the real conversations are happening.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the interview are those of the guest speaker and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of SexWorkCEO or MelRose Michaels. Anything said or written is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone else.
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