The Parasocial Economy
From Only Fans to Substack, what is really being sold online?
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I enjoyed this piece from Marie last week. As someone who has blundered into the world of “content creation”, I found it struck a chord. The proliferation of outlets and the fragmentation of how we consume everything have created space for individuals to hurl ourselves into the marketplace without needing the approval of the traditional gatekeepers. But with that opportunity has also come the burden of not just creating but constantly pushing our creations ourselves. And really, when you look at it, the marketing is probably the more valuable skill than creating. Volume and audience are where the money is.
Thinking on Marie’s column, there is another element to this – the parasocial. For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to the one-sided bond which develops between a person and someone they do not actually know. We’ve probably all experienced it as some youthful, unrequited crush. But it is increasingly the currency of modern entertainment and the relationship between fans and their idols.
Social media has been a major driver of this. The fan-star dynamic was always one-sided, but it was much more knowingly so. You saw your favourites on TV or in magazines. There was no pretence that they were looking back. Social media collapsed that and replaced it with an illusion of access and reciprocity. You can comment, and there is a chance your favourite might see it. A message might get acknowledged. And even if they don’t, the performing influencer lets you see the minutiae of their day; they are ever-present in a way that conveys a sense of intimacy. That feeling is also what they are increasingly monetising.
Marie’s OnlyFans star is perhaps the perfect example of that. The platform has become a financial and cultural behemoth in the last few years, ousting video sites as the genericised trademark for online smut and processing about £7bn of porn transactions a year. Yet, arguably, OF and its models are not really in the dirty-pics business; they are in the intimacy trade. After all, simply providing saucy pics shouldn’t be financially viable. The laws of supply and demand are not in the porn-vendor’s favour. Quite simply, there is already an abundance of free-to-view filth out there. The marginal value of another bit is pretty close to nil.
That is perhaps doubly true on OnlyFans. It is hard to verify how many people are trying to sell their wares on there, but the most credible numbers suggest it’s at least 4 million. Without getting too anatomical, there are pretty low limits on the variations of what they are selling. It is a flooded market, and like most creative professions, it ends up following a power-law-like distribution of success. A few people are making vast sums of money; many people are making very little. As a writer put it to me once about novels: “You might make a fortune, but you won’t make a living”.
The differentiator, I suggest, takes us back to our lady dancing on Marie’s Instagram. The success on OF is not the porn. Being hot is the price of admission, not the guarantee of success. Instead, you have to cultivate a brand and an identity. That ultimately leverages the parasocial relationship. You perform across platforms, selling your personality as much as your body. Indeed, the very conceit of OF compared with any other platform is that it sells access. Models sell the chance to talk to them (often farmed out to low-paid impersonators, or, increasingly, AI). The product isn’t the pictures; it is the thought that they might like you back. It is a market in availability, desire and intimacy. That may not be new, but social media has supercharged it and let it spread through society.
Alan Elrod has written two persuasive pieces about the parasocial in American politics. Various political movements seem to have co-opted the dynamics of fandoms. Manichean attachment to heroes and villains, emotionally investing in political figures, and, crucially, hanging on to the illusion that they might like you back. That latter aspect arguably lies behind the charm of Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn or even Donald Trump. More than that, the rise of parasocial relationships has changed our expectations of public figures. The public starts to demand the same access, the same friendliness from politicians as they do from their entertainers. If, thankfully, not the performed desire they want from their porn stars. Authority has yielded to authenticity – even if it is a manufactured one.
It feels very similar on this platform. The newsletter economy seems to run on the same logic – OnlyFans for pseudo-intellectuals. While big accounts have arrived with their authority already established, successful start-ups have tended to trade more on their personality. Confessional newsletters, hewn from their author’s personality and life, abound. Many of them are good and interesting. Often, they are placed in the context of a wider branding empire – spanning Instagram and other social media. There are probably some enterprising people with both OF and a newsletter who are bridging the gap between the two.
This dynamic skews success towards certain personality types. Cultivating access and performing your life for online fans is demanding, whether you do it intellectually or intimately. Doing it properly requires a lot of time. Until you reach the position of farming it out and faking it – which requires both money and making certain choices about authenticity and your audience – it takes time to cultivate and engage with an audience. It is also emotionally demanding. Tying yourself to your audience’s feedback, showing them more, can be mentally exhausting and make you vulnerable. Either you need to enjoy it, or it becomes a chore. You also, really, need the sort of personality an audience is receptive to, or to fake one.
AI is likely to compound this. Personalities are harder to generate than words. The most marketable qualities in a generative world are your personal brand and the sense of belonging you create. Sure, even that can be augmented by AI, using it as OF models do for the heavy lifting of engaging with fans, but the underlying person, the thing you are getting access to, is distinctly human. It is selling a form of friendship.
There often seems to be a gendered element to this, or at least the way that gender is performed. None of the deeply personal newsletters I can think of is written by a man. Indeed, most of the male writers I can think of on the platform are deeply impersonal. My own newsletters probably conform to this. Instinctively, I write in a tone that eschews personal notes and strives to be dispassionate. Peruse the entire archive, and you might pick up half a dozen or so personal asides disclosed in furtherance of an argument, but very little done in the hope of my audience “knowing” me or vice versa. Equally, I have little enthusiasm for turning this into a discussion forum – however more commercial that might make it.
This trend itself tells us something, I think, about how gender operates. Part of it is expectation. Women are expected, it seems, to be more comfortable displaying those traits of accessibility and vulnerability. They are also given licence to. A woman writing about her divorce, her body, her failures, is read as candid. A man doing the same is read as either self-pitying or, worse, a bit much. Audiences are more receptive to female candidness.
The parasocial dynamic favours them. Access to and intimacy with them are more readily commercialised than with men. More grimly, the line back to Marie’s dancer is shorter than anyone would like to admit. Some of what looks like loyalty to a newsletter is just desire wrapped in intellectualism. It is a reductive view of the people who write these letters, reinforcing negative stereotypes – that serious politics and policy with charts and graphs is for the men, and women write about themselves and frivolities. It also assumes that women are less able to write from authority. The women who do so on this platform largely arrived with credentials already established elsewhere, in journalism, in politics, or academia.
These are stereotypes reinforced by market mechanisms. However much individuals, both as creators and consumers, might try to push against them, the flow of money hardens them into a rule. The parasocial is where the profit lies, and it demands a certain type of performance. That, in turn, determines success – and who gets to be heard. Everything becoming content serves people who can act in a certain way; so too does everything become parasocial.
The promise of fragmented content was that the removal of the old gatekeepers would usher in a new era of meritocracy. Editors and commissioning desks would give way to a market that rewarded talent. But the market determines what that talent is. If the algorithms and consumers prefer access and intimacy, that will be more important than expertise or argument. The debate is not necessarily shaped by the most rigorous, but by the most available and the most adept at cultivating popularity. This, in turn, shapes how debates happen, who partakes, and how they frame their contributions. If parasocialism is here to stay, we had better get used to being led by whoever we love best.