How Age-Verification Laws Are Cutting Into Creator Income
Is the boom over? Creator economic sentiment shifted downward last year as consumers faced greater hurdles in accessing content.
More creators are earning less.
In the most recent State of the Creator survey, nearly half of adult creators (45.2%) reported their adult income decreased over the past year.12 If you’re a creator struggling to earn money in adult, you’re not alone. More creators say their income has gone down than gone up. Which leads us to ask: is the boom over?
The increase in decreased income is new. When we asked the same question in 2024, creators were optimistic: more creators reported their income increasing (40%) than decreasing (38%). Those numbers are now reversed. Only 29% of creators say their income is rising, a significant drop.3
And about two-thirds of creators (63%) surveyed also said it’s gotten harder to earn money in the past year. 4 They’re not wrong. Since 2022, the first year we ran the State of the Creator survey, the average monthly income estimated by creators has trended slightly downward.5
What’s behind it? Certainly larger macroeconomic factors, such as inflation, increased competition and a maturing market for adult content, may play into consumers’ willingness to spend money on adult content. But this seemingly dramatic year-over-year swing in creators’ ability to earn doesn’t seem to correlate too closely with any of those factors:
While prices remain elevated, the rate of inflation has slowed over this same period.
The growth of consumer accounts has outpaced the number of creators entering the industry.6
Creators themselves are pretty clear where to lay the blame, however: the so-called “War on Porn.” According to our survey of creators, age-verification laws, banking restrictions and social media censorship are taking a significant toll on the creator economy.
Nearly all (98%) of creators experiencing income decrease said they’d experienced difficulties related to the War on Porn. Of creators experiencing income decreases:
78% said antiporn campaigns had hurt their revenue
74% said they’ve experienced increased censorship on social media
61% said they faced increased restrictions on what they could sell
54% said they had trouble with fans being able to access their content
25% said they’ve seen increased piracy
If you’re a creator struggling to survive in a more restrictive environment, you’re not alone. Last August, in an interview with Wired, adult creator Siri Dahl estimated that age-verification laws had cut her revenue by 30%. Creators in the survey repeatedly cited fan discomfort in handing over IDs, sharp declines in traffic following AV laws and, for creators living in states with age-verification laws, difficulty in accessing platforms themselves.
Nearly half of US states now require residents to submit to a facial scan and/or upload a passport or driver’s license to access adult sites. So does the UK’s Online Safety Act. While proponents of these laws said it would only impact minors, data have shown that the vast majority of adults are simply unwilling to sacrifice biometric privacy to access adult content.7
The income decrease among creators reinforces this. Minors, most of whom either have no credit card or are on their parents’ account, generally can’t purchase adult content. A drop in sales shows impact AV laws are having on legal adults’ willingness to access sites with age-verification.
Perhaps not surprisingly, creators dependent on the US and UK markets were more likely to report difficulties for fans accessing adult content.8 They were also more likely to report increased piracy, as fans who can no longer access content on a paysite due to age-verification are incentivized to find it on pirate sites.
Certain sectors are harder hit than others. Creators dependent on fan subscriptions, clip sales and sexting were significantly more likely to report fan-access issues than those who cam or live stream for a living. (Live streamers were also the least likely to report an income decrease.)910
Falling incomes appear to be impacting smaller creators the hardest. Creators earning $5,000 or less from adult work each month were far more likely to report decreased incomes (50%) than creators earning $10,000 or more (29.6%).
While more study is needed, attacks on the adult industry, often done in the name of stopping exploitation, appear to be having the opposite effect: pushing economically vulnerable populations toward greater economic peril.
Of course, data only tells part of the story. Let us know how these laws have (or haven’t) affected your business in the comments or direct message.
This percentage calculation excludes respondents for whom 2025 was their first year in adult.
SWR Data’s 2025 State of the Creator Survey of over 500 adult creators, conducted in the fall of 2025. As we’ve noted before, the survey more heavily reflects the experiences of creators in the US and UK. More about the study, including our methodology (and its limitations) here.
The number of creators saying their income has remained “about the same” has grown slightly as well, from 22% in 2024 to 26% in 2025. We address creator incomes more directly in a previous post.
The percentage of creators who say “earning money has gotten harder in the past year” has remained fairly consistent, around 63%.
In 2022, 6.0% of creators said they earned more than $25K monthly, 19.1% said they earned more than $10K monthly and 62% said they earned $5K or under monthly. By 2025, those numbers were 4.9% ($25K+), 13.9% ($10K+) and 69.3% ($5K or under).
Fenix International Ltd (the parent company of OnlyFans) is one of the only adult platforms to report earnings and creators/consumer growth. The number of new consumer accounts has remained steady over the past several years, showing between 24-27% growth year-over-year. However, the growth in creator accounts has slowed significantly. Their most recent annual report states that the number of consumer accounts grew 24% year over year, while the number of creator accounts grew just 13% YoY. In 2023, the ratio of creator accounts to fan accounts was 1:74. In 2024, it was 1:81.
While there is good reason not to regard this data as definitive (it’s one company; it’s only updated through November 2024; it does not break out active accounts), it does not appear to indicate a significant shift toward a more competitive market.
Traffic declines in states that pass age-verification laws vary based on state, type of verification required, and type of platform, but publicly available data has generally shown traffic drops of 80-95% where AV laws have gone into effect. While many consumers go around laws using VPNs, others simply shift to platforms without age-verification, often pirate or foreign tube sites, or to social media sites such as Discord or X less impacted by the laws.
UK creators saw the largest effect on traffic and sales, followed by the US and Canada. Unlike the state-level AV in the US, the UK’s regulations are nationwide and impact both adult sites and social media sites. While Canada does not yet have an age-verification requirement, creators tend to be dependent on US and UK markets for sales.
While “freemium” cam platforms have no doubt taken a hit from age-verification laws, strong internal traffic may be offsetting at least part of this.
This could be a statistical mirage: cam site creators are generally less dependent on social media and thus may be less likely to hear directly from fans who can no longer access their content. More investigation here is needed.
Like I said a few months ago in my Substack article what a joke