Stella Barey made a reputation for herself on TikTok in the course of the first months of the pandemic speaking about how a lot she beloved anal. “The extent of isolation pushed me there,” she says, recalling the second all the things began to alter for her.
Barey would go on to flip her TikTok fame into OnlyFans riches. In her first month on the grownup platform, she says, she made $8,000. The next month it skyrocketed to $40,000, and ultimately she bought so in style that she pulled in $300,000 in 30 days. “It was five-and-a-half years of posting on a number of completely different platforms each single day, a number of occasions a day,” Barey says. She appreciated the style of success. However the calls for of the trade additionally weighed on her, and by 2025, Barey, who felt she and her friends deserved higher working situations, determined to construct her personal platform.
In April, she launched Hidden, the primary grownup platform owned and operated by intercourse employees. Billed because the “anti-OnlyFans,” Hidden is out to show that fairer trade situations are doable when the folks in cost truly come from the world they’re profiting on.
Hidden is the TikTok model of OnlyFans—a seamlessly, and sleekly, designed creator-friendly platform the place, in lieu of Korean skin-care suggestions and Get Prepared With Me movies, you’ll discover a ForYou web page with movies that options all types of grownup content material: from oral and BDSM to dildo play and lingerie movies.
“On this trade, nobody expects that anybody’s going to have the ability to change something. Now we have to drive all of the site visitors from our social media to OnlyFans by ourselves. And we’re getting increasingly burnt out yearly, as a result of all the promotion depends on us.” To repair that, Barey constructed Hidden round discoverability. “Innovation like including a ForYou web page makes it simpler for women to construct up promo. It creates an ecosystem the place we’re all bringing followers which might be circulating to everyone,” which helps ladies who don’t have massive followings, she says.
Hidden is all about giving creators extra management, and plenty of of its options replicate that mission by creating avenues for “passive revenue and promotion,” Barey says. Hidden takes an 18 % minimize (in comparison with 20 % on OnlyFans). It additionally has charge-back protections as much as $2,500, which deters clients from falsely disputing funds with their bank card firms and getting refunds. There’s a creator retailer for individuals who could wish to “purchase 50 movies in the midst of the evening,” she says, noting that about 80 % of a creator’s revenue is “made within the messages, promoting long-form movies or particular bundles.” Each creator additionally has a liaison who’s conversant in their account and can reply inside 24 hours to any questions. All of those options exist in a single kind or one other on different grownup websites. Hidden simply occurs to convey them collectively for the primary time.
“I’ve made the big majority of my cash on OnlyFans, so I am unable to hate in any respect on it,” Barey says of Hidden advertising and marketing itself because the anti-OnlyFans. “They exist in the identical realm. However I assume Hidden simply affords issues that I’ve felt for a very very long time we have been all the time lacking.”
