The creator economy has a discovery problem, and Max Anderson built the fix. Anderson is the CEO of OnlyFinder, the search engine that lets fans find OnlyFans creators by keyword instead of exact username. His data says niche creators monetize roughly 25 to 30 percent better per visitor than generalists, and that a single profile photo change can swing a creator’s click-through rate by as much as 10x.
I have spent 27 years as a celebrity portrait photographer, shooting for GQ, Vogue, InStyle and People. My whole career rests on one belief: a photo decides in about two seconds whether anyone clicks, books, or keeps scrolling. Anderson does not shoot portraits. He measures them, across more than 500 million searches. So I asked him what the numbers actually say.
Why doesn’t OnlyFans have discovery?
OnlyFans scaled to millions of creators and hundreds of millions of fans without ever building a real search engine. Its search bar only works if you are logged in and already know the exact username you want. Anderson saw the gap early.
“OnlyFans quickly scaled to millions of creators and hundreds of millions of fans,” he says. “However platform leadership has intentionally avoided adding a general-purpose discovery search engine to protect user privacy and limit unwanted visibility.”
He believes the restriction is deliberate on three levels. It keeps creators in control of who finds them. It fits a Patreon-style model where the platform is a checkout lane and content vault, not a social network, so creators do their marketing on Instagram, TikTok, X and Reddit. And it saves the company billions, because recommendation feeds are expensive to build, maintain and police.
“Given this, the need for a general-purpose OnlyFans search engine was obvious.”
A Google replica, scoped to creators
Anderson comes from SEO and growth, and he does not pretend the playbook is new. “100% of it,” he says. “OnlyFinder is essentially an exact replica of Google’s product and business model, both organic search and search ads with CPC-based bidding for keywords, just scoped to search against OnlyFans profiles only.”
The ranking system runs on behavior. OnlyFinder has powered search across its own site and more than 100 partner sites since 2020, collecting data on over 500 million searches. Every search is effectively a vote: creators users click get weighted up for that keyword, creators they scroll past get weighted down. On top of that sit platform metrics like subscriber count and media count, plus off-platform signals like social following and Google search volume for a creator’s name.
Do niche creators actually make more money?
Fans spent $7.8 billion on OnlyFans this year, according to OnlyFinder’s Wrapped 2026 report. Anderson’s niche data comes from the ad side of his business, where creators bid on keywords with strict return targets.
“Creators run ads on OnlyFinder with precisely-tuned ROI targets, so from a 25-30% higher CPC bid you can infer those niche creators earn ~25-30% more per visitor to their OnlyFans profile compared to creators targeting general audiences.”
Niche categories like trans and cosplay draw bids 25 to 30 percent higher than general categories like “best” or “free.” The conclusion for a small creator is blunt: the general audience is the most expensive audience to chase and the least valuable to win.
The photo decides
This is the part of the interview I cared about most, and the data is stronger than my own pitch. OnlyFinder lets creators A/B test profile photos against each other, so the effect is measured, not guessed.
“Massive,” Anderson says. “OnlyFans is fundamentally a visual platform so profile photos have a massive impact on a creator’s performance. In extreme cases, a change in profile photo can swing CTR by as much as 10x in either direction. But even for photos that were already ‘good’ and fairly well-optimized, we’ll routinely see A/B tests of new photos drive incremental lifts in CTR between 10-50%.”
Read that again as a working creator. A better photograph is not decoration. On the largest subscription platform in the world, it is a 10 to 50 percent raise, and occasionally a tenfold one. The camera is a business tool, and the person who understands light, framing and presence owns an advantage that no posting schedule can match.
The biggest mistake small creators make
Targeting the head terms. New creators chase “best onlyfans” and “free onlyfans,” the most competitive phrases in the category, while their operations are still too thin to convert the traffic. Anderson points at message response as the quiet killer: small creators answer fans slower and less completely, which lowers revenue per fan, which means they cannot afford to compete for expensive attention.
His advice to a creator starting from zero:
“Pick a niche. Test several different niches you could focus on one at a time to find one that performs the best, then go all in on that and reposition your profile and all your marketing messaging to focus exclusively on that niche.”
Then build the back end. Invest in CRM tools and chat automation to lift response rates. Grow revenue per subscriber into the $20 to $40 range, promoting in free venues like subreddits and social media first. “Once you can run paid ads profitably, you’re off to the races on scaling from there. This is the progression nearly all of the top earners on OnlyFans have gone through.”
Where discovery goes next
Not where most people expect. Anderson predicts discovery behavior in this category barely changes over the next two to three years. The major AI assistants block OnlyFans queries on policy grounds, and the category is a visual shopping experience that users prefer to browse in purpose-built interfaces. Search stays concentrated in Google and dedicated platforms like his.
What is changing is how his own engine reads creators. OnlyFinder is adding computer vision that reads profile photos and identifies attributes like hair color, ethnicity, approximate age, height, body type, clothing and accessories, so searches can match on what a photo actually shows.
Which brings the whole story back to the image. The next era of creator discovery will be machines reading photographs and deciding which creators surface. The creators who win that era are the ones whose photos were worth reading in the first place.
Max Anderson is the CEO of OnlyFinder. Interview conducted by written Q&A for David’s Guide.
