A canoeist for Britain has learned the hard way that what happens at 30,000 feet doesn’t always stay up there. Rozentals was set to compete for Britain in canoe slalom until a video shot on an airplane was uploaded to Instagram and caused quite the stir. That particular post should maybe have been saved for his OnlyFans page, where it could have remained safely behind a paywall instead of on a public feed.

So who the hell am I talking about here? Glad you asked! Canoeist Roberts Rozentals is a Latvian-born athlete who has been training in the UK. He competed for Team Great Britain in canoe slalom (a whitewater Olympic event) and won a silver medal at the 2023 U23 World Championships. He’s known for his precision paddling and for having an intense training regimen. He was training in the UK’s elite World Class Programme, which is funded by the British Sports Lottery and supports athletes working toward the Olympic Games between 2028–2032. His image was your standard “clean-cut poster boy” until Instagram’s algorithm got a little spicier than it was prepared for.

In March of 2025, Rozentals posted a video to his publicly available Instagram showing him engaged in… the kind of spicy act that people pay to see on OnlyFans. British Canoeing called it “seriously discrediting conduct,” which is rich coming from a group that’s literally called “Paddle UK,” the sneaky kinksters. Anyhow, Rozentals was expelled from training and competing, and all of his funding for the elite UK-based program went poof. He was banned from all official UK teams while the disciplinary review was conducted.

Rozentals has suggested that his ban “might be connected” to his OnlyFans account. The incriminating video’s tone, editing, and framing all resemble content that he’s promoted on the adults-only platform, and upon some self-reflection, he’s admitted, “In hindsight, I probably wouldn’t have posted anything like that.” Athletes in traditional sports have this super fun tension to deal with, where they’re facing pressure from their industry to maintain “respectability” for the company brand, but they also need to make more money to live on — and sex-positive subscription models make that possible. While Britain’s sports agencies love diversity, apparently that love ends where the shine of the ring light begins. OnlyFans has become a legitimate income stream for several athletes, both current and former, so you’d think the powers that be would get with the times already.

Rozentals is young and understandably isn’t ready to give up his athletic career just yet, so he’s decided that it’s time for a little reinvention. He’s applied to compete under the Latvian flag through the Latvian Canoe Federation (LKF). The president of LKF, Lelde Laure, has confirmed that both countries are okay with the switch, but they have to wait for a decision from the International Canoe Federation before anything official can be announced. Laure was careful to point out that Latvia doesn’t have the same expensive training infrastructure available that the UK does and that Rozentals’ “previous conditions were far beyond what most Latvians can access.” That ill-thought Instagram video may have cost Rozentals a funded Olympic pipeline, but he’s got a DIY paddle comeback arc waiting for him in Latvia.

There’s a growing overlap between professional athletic influencers and adult content creators. The line between organizational sponsorship and needing to operate off a subscription model gets thinner every month, with several athletes turning to OnlyFans to fund their careers. Basketball players, swimmers, track stars, and even tennis players are all utilizing OnlyFans to underwrite their training and their income. Most of them, however, keep some pretty firm boundaries between what content is publicly available and what gets to stay hidden behind an 18+ paywall.

There’s nothing wrong with making money and building a platform on OnlyFans — everyone has to hustle somewhere. But maybe, if your day gig involves national sponsorships and Olympic trials, you might want to keep all shenanigans that can be rated on a spice scale off Instagram. Rozentals may have lost a paddle, but the current can still be moving in his favor if he leans into it — and if someone shows him how to put his phone into airplane mode.

Every now and then, getting a pink slip at work is the best thing that could possibly happen to you. Meet Sarah Jayne Dunn, a former Hollyoaks star who is now a self-made millionaire courtesy of OnlyFans. The powers that be at Hollyoaks may have sacked her for being “too spicy,” but it turns out they did her a favor. Dunn’s reportedly made somewhere in the neighborhood of £1 million since departing the show. If you’re wondering if that’s more than she made on the show—yes. Yes, it is. Turns out that if studios want to keep their actors out of the spicy corners of the internet, they need to add a zero to their checks.

Sarah Jayne Dunn was born in Leigh, Greater Manchester, and trained as an actress from a young age. She rose to fame in the role of Mandy Richardson on Hollyoaks, making her first appearance in 1996 (y’know, back when the Spice Girls were still at the top of all the charts). She instantly became a fan favorite and was one of the longest-running cast members on the soap. She built a reputation for being down-to-earth while having the looks of a runway model, playing a key part in making Hollyoaks racy before OnlyFans was even a thing. She left the show multiple times, once in 2006 and then again in 2017, but she kept being brought back, proving that she was the sex-appeal glue that held the show together.

In 2021, Sarah decided to launch an OnlyFans account where she shared “tasteful lingerie and pin-up style photos.” The Hollyoaks producers didn’t like that and informed Sarah that her presence on an adults-only platform didn’t align with their “family audience.” They told her to delete the account. She refused. She was cut from the show in November of 2021. Public opinion was divided, but many of her fans pointed out that the soap ran storylines infinitely more explicit than anything she’d posted. According to Sarah, she finds OnlyFans to be a source of empowerment that gives her a place to embrace her own brand of feminism. Said Sarah, “I wasn’t doing anything shameful. I just wanted control of my image.”

Currently, Sarah’s earned at least a seven-figure sum since leaving Hollyoaks. Catpig Ltd (her company that operates as the vehicle for her OnlyFans platform) made roughly £500,000 in just two years, with assets totaling somewhere around £369,000, give or take. Dunn was even able to launch Catpig Properties Ltd, a separate company dedicated to buying rental and investment properties (i.e., the company bought a £250,000 home in Cheshire purely as an investment). According to Dunn, she’s made more money in two years on OnlyFans than she ever did in 25 years on television.

Looking beyond the money, Sarah Jayne Dunn’s her own boss who is fully in charge of her image. She doesn’t have to use a script someone else has written, doesn’t have to dance around censorship rules, and because she is the wardrobe department, there’s nobody vetoing her lingerie choices. It turns out that Mandy Richardson’s biggest plot twist was learning how to capture and monetize her own angles. Since finding success on OnlyFans, Dunn’s become a bit of a spokesperson for creator independence, openly discussing empowerment and bodily autonomy on her mainstream social media channels.

Her journey to owning her image isn’t without its sticky patches. Dunn is the mother of an 8-year-old little boy and has acknowledged that deciding how to talk with him about what she does was a tricky business. She says that she frames her work as owning her choices and working hard to provide for her family—something many moms with OnlyFans pages can relate to. During lockdown in 2020, countless women joined OnlyFans as creators in order to make ends meet while they were unable to work or access childcare. Dunn may be a celebrity on the platform, but her openness about how motherhood informs her content creation business proves that she isn’t an outlier—she’s just one of the few women who can be open in public about what she does and why. Moms on OnlyFans aren’t the real scandal here. The fact that so many full-time jobs in vanilla industries don’t pay a living wage is. You can’t exactly blame a mom for paying for groceries via ring light when (A) her previous job didn’t pay the bills and (B) there are subscribers showing up in droves to see her content.

Getting sacked from Hollyoaks was a bummer, but it made Sarah Jayne Dunn richer than she ever was while under contract for the network. She’s not alone in her choice to join OnlyFans as a means of controlling her image and finding financial security. Athletes, reality stars, and even some of her fellow actors have all made the move to OnlyFans. Denise Richards, Megan Barton Hanson, and Kerry Katona are all running pages on the adults-only platform and cashing in big on having full control of their image. If studios want loyalty and exclusivity from their actors, then they need to be ready to pay up. If you don’t pay your talent what they’re worth, then there’s a platform ready and waiting for them where they can find a better angle, better lighting, and a much better paycheck.

For solo creators on OnlyFans looking to make more money, they’re all hearing some variety of the same thing. “Just do boy/girl content, that’s where the real money is.” Yes, b/g content may consistently pay better across the board, but there isn’t exactly a Tinder service for finding dick owners that are going to be trustworthy and reliable. Meet Kit, a top-earning OnlyFans creator who is known for the content she creates with her Stunt D. She went from being a successful solo creator, to consistently sharing boy/girl content with the assistance of her Stunt D. 

Kit was doing well as a solo creator when a male friend of hers asked her if she might be able to make more money on boy/girl content. When Kit said that yes, she would probably make more money if she could offer content that featured her “getting fucked by a penis,” her friend graciously offered his services. And before you get the wrong idea and think he was just some guy looking to get to have sex with his beautiful friend, they’d already crossed that bridge together. Anyhow, since he made the porn-posal, Kit had to give him “the talk.” The one where men who are new to the industry hear about the potential ramifications of being involved in the porn industry. Social and familial stigma, difficulty finding jobs, exhaustive physical demands on men, and emotional burnout are all on the list of fun side effects that men in the porn industry frequently experience as a result of their participation in the creation of adult content. Kit says he took a few weeks to think things over, then told her that he really did want to be her collaborative partner, and thus a Stunt D was born. 

The duo created and shared adult content together for about a year before Kit did a study abroad in the Land Down Under, where she met someone on Bumble. They hit it off and were happily dating… when she came across his FYP. She hadn’t told her Aussie dude that she earned a living on OnlyFans, but when he found out, he wasn’t upset. Quite the opposite, actually. He enthusiastically proposed being her new collab partner, and after receiving “the talk,” the pair created content together for Kit’s remaining 6 months in Australia. 

When it comes to telling other creators how to go about finding a content creation partner, Kit says that organic partnership is the secret sauce to finding a trustworthy collab partner. Kit feels that knowing someone as a friend first, and then letting the conversation around whether to create content together come up on its own is the best way to go about a content partnership. She did also say that when she’s single and using dating apps, she’ll frequently mention her OnlyFans work in her bio and men will just… volunteer themselves. That doesn’t make them reliable or safe, however, and the best collabs come from partnerships where there is genuine friendship, trust, and established chemistry between the pair on screen. Some rando swiping right and liking what he sees does not a reliable adult content creation partner make. 

When it comes to the adult content end of the creator economy, what female creators profit from most differs vastly than what male creators make their money on. Women typically thrive on content that sells an emotional connection with their audience that gives the viewer a sense of intimacy with the creator. Men? They make their money off of the quantity of collabs that they create, or off of a novel aspect to the content they create. Where men thrive off of just selling sex on Pornhub, women make their money on OnlyFans due to the ability to create a fantasy of closeness with the person viewing their content. Viewers are craving relationships that feel authentic, which is why Kit feels that prioritizing genuine connection prior to seeking a collab partner is the key to a successful partnership in adult content creation. 

Kit began as a solo performer, and her solo stuff is still incredibly successful. Her boy/girl content isn’t even her top seller! Currently, her sexting sets are the money maker. “Having a back and forth with a subscriber, then a [pre-recorded] video response, feels live. It feels intimate, and that’s what most of her audience is after. That’s what OnlyFans offers over Pornhub.” Does boy/girl content typically bring a spike in revenue for the hottest OnlyFans creators? Absolutely. But for Kit and many other female creators, sustained income comes from emotional engagement rather than content that is just sex for the sake of sex. You can find your own Stunt D, but without a genuine connection with the person on the other end of the penis, that content won’t take you as far as a little emotional investment in your audience does. Collaboration may help creators meet short term financial goals, but learning to foster a sense of connection with ones’ audience is what will really keep the money flowing. 

Camilla Araújo may not have won MrBeast’s Squid Game, but she walked away with something even better — a thriving business as a content creator. Araújo’s a Brazilian-American influencer who stumbled into viral fame and immediately figured out how to cash in and build something sustainable. Not everyone can turn a YouTube cameo into a full career pivot, but hoo boy, has she ever successfully landed the plane on that one.

Her origin story is… unique. She appeared in MrBeast’s 2021 “Squid Game” recreation video, and it hit hundreds of millions of views. Overnight, Camilla’s face was everywhere, and she wasn’t even the main star. Instead of fading into the ether after those 15 minutes of fame, she quickly built a fanbase off the exposure that video gave her. The internet may have been debating who got to enjoy the $456K prize, but she was quietly building a way to make sure she never needed it.

Just months after the viral video, she launched an OnlyFans page, branding it as a premium experience. She immediately treated her page like a full-time job — hiring a management team, curating content tiers, and cross-promoting on TikTok and Instagram. She thinks of her career as a source of “women’s empowerment,” making sure she maintains full control over her body and image instead of letting an algorithm take charge. She didn’t need to play Red Light Green Light to make her sexy move, and she doesn’t see those moves as shameful but rather as owning her narrative on her own terms.

Her success has a price. Araújo admits that the fame and online scrutiny had an effect on her and that the virality was overwhelming. Handling the DMs, the press, and all the rumors put a lot of pressure on her that she wasn’t necessarily anticipating. Learning to navigate being young and hot while being business-minded in public is a tall order, but Araújo’s had a sense of both professionalism and humor about the whole thing. And why not? Learning on the job that the internet can build you in a day and source your bikini in less than an hour is… a lot.

Araújo isn’t just a sultry OnlyFans superstar. She’s a first-generation American who knows firsthand how hard the hustle for survival can be. She was born to Brazilian immigrants and grew up translating bills, bank letters, and school notices for her parents. Her experiences as a child forced her to grow up early — becoming resourceful, adaptable, and honing her negotiation skills when most children were still clinging to Hank the Cowdog. To say that she’s adept at handling pressure is an understatement since she spent her childhood breaking down the power bill in multiple languages. Araújo’s been vocal about how her family background helped shape her sense of hustle, emphasizing in no uncertain terms that while there was a lot of pressure to keep things afloat, she was loved beyond measure by her entire family. She may have had a more conservative upbringing, but her modern digital career is anything but. Managing that duality requires a balance of respect for her family and her own boundaries, and safeguarding her independence as a creator.

Araújo isn’t one to put all her eggs in one basket. She may make a lot of money by stripping down on camera, but she’s building her “clothes-on empire” too. She’s creating a brand outside of OnlyFans that extends into fitness, lifestyle content, and business mentoring. She’s been branching into podcasting and fashion partnerships and might even be building toward a brand line or a YouTube show of her very own (y’know, like the one that launched her into stardom). Camilla’s not hanging her hopes on influencing and algorithms — she’s carefully nurturing them in the form of merch, podcasts, and quite possibly even your next custom gym routine.

Camilla Araújo may not have won the Squid Game, but she’s clearly become an expert at running her own. Is she the new blueprint for influencer evolution? You tell me — she’s got the brains, the branding, and shows just enough skin to politely break the internet. If hustle were a sport, she’d be standing on the gold-medal platform in heels.

While some grannies may be sitting down to bingo or knitting booties for their newest grandchild, some are also selling images of themselves flaunting lingerie for rent money. Welcome to OnlyGrans — yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Women 50 and over are lighting up OnlyFans, and they’re proudly owning it. For the grans of OnlyFans, it’s not about the shock value of being an older woman on an adult content platform. For these women (and many others on the platform), they’re on OnlyFans because they need money to survive, have found that modeling improves their sense of self-worth, and honestly, seeing them flip the societal script on female desirability and aging is a joy in itself.

For many women in the 50+ age bracket, they’re realizing that their pension isn’t enough to pay the bills. Numerous older women face financial instability from insufficient social security, inflation, and the echoes of the gender wage gap that sting well into retirement. Some women can’t re-enter the traditional workforce for a host of reasons — ageism, outdated résumés after years spent as homemakers, or physical limitations that often come with the privilege of growing older. OnlyFans is built on a direct-to-consumer model, meaning creators have full control over their schedules, content, and earning potential. They can create content, connect with their fanbase, and cash out on their own terms. While many of the women fueling the OnlyGrans trend began in the name of survival, they’ve stayed because they realized they had an opportunity for more than just survival — they’re having full-blown reinventions over there on the naughty senior corner of the internet.

These women have still got it, and they know it. While seeking financial independence, they’re finding a sense of body confidence they’ve never had before. The grans on OnlyFans are reclaiming ownership of their beauty and sexuality, often for the first time in decades, if not ever. Youth and fertility shouldn’t be the gatekeepers of female sexuality — and Wi-Fi everywhere can handle a few more wrinkles showing up online.

When men age, people often refer to them as “silver foxes.” Hello, I still have a crush on Sean Connery (don’t remind me he’s dead, please), but you’ll notice that many of the actresses he worked with in his prime faded from the silver screen long before he did. That’s because women are expected to quietly make themselves smaller and smaller as they age. The “OnlyGrans” have given a firm “nope” to that, and they refuse to go quietly. They’re still viable sexually, so they’re being visibly sensual — and they’re proud to be doing so.

Platforms like OnlyFans give women of all ages the power to control their own narrative while setting their own rates, so they can literally charge others for access to that narrative. Younger women benefit from OnlyFans, so why not older women? We — meaning society at large — act scandalized when older women show some skin but pay hand over fist for magazines with young women in bikinis on the cover. The OnlyFans grans? They’ve decided they don’t have to conform to the societal definition of “aging gracefully” (i.e., pretending they’ve stopped having orgasms).

For women the world over, sexual agency and emotional freedom are intrinsically linked, and the “OnlyGrans” are proving that. They’re finding and building community, learning new ways to express themselves, and discovering confidence they never knew could be theirs — all while teaching other women to unlearn shame. Whether they’re doing it to pay the mortgage or just to feel desired again, OnlyFans makes sure it’s theirs to own, and that right there is the whole point. The empowerment women find on OnlyFans isn’t just for the twenty-somethings — it’s for women across all age brackets; nana included.

It turns out that for many women, the real glow-up comes after 60 — and it has good lighting. These women aren’t trying to chase or hold on to their youth. They’re rewriting what aging looks like. So the next time someone mentions wanting to “age gracefully,” remind them that aging boldly is also an option — thanks to the OnlyGrans.