How Rapper Iggy Azalea Is Making Money On OnlyFans

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on January 22, 2023.

Iggy Azalea is the latest celebrity to join OnlyFans. Once dominated by sex workers seeking to boost their brands and monetize their relationships to their fans, the subscription-based content service has seen a rise in mainstream stars joining its ranks, including Bella Thorne, Denise Richards, and DJ Khaled. Amber Rose, another celebrity on OnlyFans and a former stripper, has described the platform as “a digital strip club.” So it only makes sense that Azalea, an Australian rapper who has proclaimed that she is, in fact, the strip club, would sign up, too.

But Azalea’s OnlyFans isn’t just any old OnlyFans. It is a year-long, collaborative multimedia project entitled Hotter Than Hell that will feature music, photography, video, art, and, according to a press release, content from “her upcoming fourth studio album.” For $25 a month, subscribers will get a front-row seat to the project as it drops, before the rest of the world sees it. The concept was inspired by Pamela Anderson, 90s supermodels, and Madonna’s controversial book Sex and culminates with a coffee table book to be released in December 2023.

Curious to check out Azalea’s project, I signed up for OnlyFans and paid $25 to subscribe to her content stream. At the top of her feed, a small green circle appeared next to her avatar (which was an image of Azalea licking a cherry); next to her OnlyFans handle, it read: “Available now.” Was Azalea actually live on the site? Was I more proximate to her than I had been before handing over my money? It seemed possible.

The first post was the aforementioned cherry-licking photo and the words: “The sweetest angel”; below that, it noted how many likes the post had and the dollar amount of tips it had garnered from her fans. (Tips are another way OnlyFans creators can generate revenue.) At the time of this writing, that post had 2,501 likes and $233.20 in tips. There were more images to come: Azalea in green lingerie, Azalea getting her makeup done, Azalea posing seemingly nude next to a swimming pool while eating a cherry with her nipple discreetly hidden from view. One post featured a nine-second audio clip of Azalea — “Hey, babe,” she purred to me? us? her anonymous fans? — offering an enticement to be “a part of my VIP for a year by tipping $250 and receive a one-year link subscription and a free photo that’s just for my VIPS.” That post had 685 likes and a staggering $15,690 in tips. (OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of its creators’ revenues.) Maybe I should be on OnlyFans, I mused.

So it went over the days that followed. There were more images. There were more audio clips. There was a video clip of a scantily-clad Azalea that had been filmed through a window as if the viewer (me) was spying on her; the text with it read: “Working my angles [butterfly emoji, fire emoji].” When I didn’t check Azalea’s content stream, I got emails from OnlyFans telling me that I had unread messages from her, as if I had left her on read. When I logged back into OnlyFans, I discovered those messages contained locked content, another way the site’s creators can make money. With the Pay Per View feature, members must pay more to access locked content. One was $40. Another was $28. Yet another was $35. Each message had a come-hither note, but the visual content was behind an image of a padlock.

I thought about unlocking the rest of Azalea’s content, but I didn’t. By that point I had read that she had “sold her master recording and publishing catalog to Domain Capital for an eight-figure sum” late last year. She didn’t need the money, I figured.

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Data Baby in Fuchsia

Love this Instagram post from @bookswithbrady featuring my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. Buy my book here, order a signed copy here, and read what people are saying about it here.

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Death of a Pimp

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on October 18, 2018.

Dennis Hof was a pimp. Perhaps he would've preferred the term "brothel owner," for that he was, too, at the time of his death earlier this week at 72. He was found dead in bed at his Love Ranch Vegas brothel in Crystal, Nevada, on Tuesday morning by adult performer Ron Jeremy. An autopsy will be conducted to identify the cause of his death, but foul play wasn't suspected.

It was a busy time for Hof, who was in the midst of a campaign to get himself elected to the Nevada State Assembly. Ironically, he may well be elected, despite the fact that he's dead, because, according to the New York Times, in the 36th District in which he's running, 45% of those registered to vote are registered as Republicans, compared to 28% who are registered to vote as Democrats. His Trumpian political platform included lowering taxes and defending gun owners' rights.

In June of 2017, I interviewed Hof for an article I wrote for this website in the wake of a news report that former FBI director James Comey had used the term "hookers" in a Statement for the Record released one day prior to testifying in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Hookers" appears in Comey's summary of a March 30, 2017, call he received from Trump. "[Trump] said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia," Comey wrote. Was "hookers" Comey's word choice or Trump's? Interested to hear what sex workers and their minders thought of the high-profile disparagement, I reached out to Hof and his employees.

As it turned out, Hof had a Trump story of his own. "I met him 27 years ago," he told me. "I was in the timeshare business. He wanted to timeshare the [Trump] Taj Mahal, and he wanted me to come aboard to do that. I didn't do that. I said there's not enough money in the world to make me live in Atlantic City." It was hard to know whether or not to take Hof's claim seriously. Instead, Hof recounted, he became "the pimp master general of America," anointed as such by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. He'd voted for Trump and liked the guy—"We need a businessman," he said—but he preferred the term "working girls." Either way, Trump was good for business. "Business is humping," he told me. "We feel the difference with Trump in office."

It wasn't the first time I'd connected with Hof. Over the prior two decades, I'd encountered him at various events, from adult movie sets to X-rated conventions. The first time I'd met him was on the set of an adult movie being shot in the San Fernando Valley, the content of which was so outré that I won't detail it here. On another occasion, I talked with him at the Hustler Store in Hollywood. And he was a regular presence at the AVN Awards—the so-called "Oscars of porn"—in Las Vegas, Nevada.

He wasn't the first pimp that I met, and I'm sure he won't be the last, but he was like many pimps that I've encountered over the years. He was charismatic, likeable, friendly, a consummate showman, and the sort of person who could make you feel comfortable about anything, including, one presumed, showing up at one of his brothels in hopes of paying one of the women who worked for him a few hundred dollars, or more, to share some intimate time, in the parts of Nevada where that's legal.

In a way, he wasn't that different from sex workers I've known. For providing a service in demand across the country, they'd been publicly vilified and systematically ostracized. Hof was a larger-than-life character—a pimp, you bet—but he was also a businessman who knew well that if someone will pay for something, there's money to be made, and that's the American dream.

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