With Valentine’s Day this past Saturday, romance is in the air. Well, perhaps for some people. In case you haven’t seen it, there’s a new study that’s been making waves online over the past few days. Americans, it found, now spend more on the subscription-based pornography platform OnlyFans than they do on The New York Times and ChatGPT—combined.
It’s a dispiriting statistic, and one that encapsulates so many things going wrong in American society: People are spending more time alone and depressed, and are increasingly addicted to porn. The ubiquity of the internet has exacerbated many of these trends, as young people abandon the ups and downs of real life for the anonymity and instant gratification offered by a screen.
And so, even as artificial intelligence takes over the world, and The New York Times remains the most subscribed-to newspaper in the country, OnlyFans leaves both companies in the dust. As journalist Ed Elson reported, there are 378 million global OnlyFans users, who spent a total of $7.2 billion on the site in 2025. The top OnlyFans creator—usually meaning porn star—makes $43 million a year. Nelson summed it up well: OnlyFans “benefits from the only trend more impactful than AI right now: loneliness.”
