The crowd that gathers in Amsterdam is exuberant,Pornography use is more common than ever, so earnings for many here are through the roof,But there is trouble afoot, from AI to chronic illness …Brittany Andrews, a cheerful American porn star, cuts to the chase in her workshop on how to succeed in the adult industry,“Do you think about how much money you’re going to make before you make a clip? Do you know what stuff sells the best? Or do you just follow your creative spark?” she asks,She points to a young Ukrainian model in a gold sequined bra and denim shorts.

“I’m starting with you, girlfriend!”“We’re all here to earn money.That’s normal,” the model replies.Her main advice, she adds, is to be super organised about uploading content regularly, to prevent subscribers drifting away.“What matters is consistency.There are so many beautiful, amazing models … if you for a moment stop posting, people will forget you pretty fast.

”In a modern riverside hotel in central Amsterdam, about 1,000 adult content creators gathered last Tuesday for the biggest pornography conference in Europe.They had travelled from all corners of the continent for an event designed to help them navigate the industry’s high-pressure gig economy and maximise profits.A group of elderly Americans, waiting in the lobby for a windmills and Edam tour, watched them arrive with flustered bemusement.Most creators – the euphemistic term for people who record and upload explicit content to sites such as OnlyFans – were dressed down, makeup-free in jeans and trainers.But some came in nine-inch diamante heels, or on pink roller skates with flashing wheels, or with their hair tied in bunches, wearing the Hello Kitty backpacks more usually favoured by preteens.

The annual Xbiz conference lasts three days.It brings creators (primarily but not exclusively women) together with executives (primarily but not exclusively men), as well as model management agencies, online payment and traffic optimisation companies, and content-sharing platforms.There are panel sessions and workshops where creators are given advice on trends in the industry, algorithms and changes in government regulations.It kicks off with an invitation to down shots at a bar in the city’s red-light district to “discover the joys of day drinking”.The first full day begins with a speed-dating session at which creators can meet and organise “collabs” – recording explicit content together, so they reach each other’s followers and attract new paying fans of their own.

Between panel sessions, some pairs retreat to rooms upstairs to film themselves having sex.Guest speakers analyse why tentacles and aliens are so in vogue in porn, promise to explain how “independent creators can make millions” and give tips on how to use “charm, empathy and emotional intelligence” to “attract loyal fans and build lasting audience connections”.The atmosphere is exuberant.The sector is, after all, booming.But there is an undercurrent of anxiety about four looming challenges: the arrival of artificial intelligence; how to make money in a saturated market; the spread of age verification rules; and the very real risk of burnout for creators.

In the queue for the coffee machine on Wednesday morning, James, a computer programmer from Singapore, talks excitedly about his new AI company.He promises this will make models’ lives easier, by reducing the exhaustion and pressure inherent in producing a constant stream of pornography.(He is not keen to share his surname.)“It’s really about helping stars avoid burnout,” he says, explaining his plans to license images of well-established performers.Their AI avatars will then be able to perform sex on demand, all day, all night, for an unlimited number of viewers.

“Do you mind if I show you something? It’s quite explicit.” Without waiting for my reply, he plays a video on his phone of a couple having sex.The man has his hand around the woman’s neck, throttling her.It looks like it would be hard for her to breathe, if she were actually human.“You wouldn’t know it was AI!” he says, swiping left for more choking content.

“It looks so real.” (The British government this year committed to banning pornographic content that depicts strangulation; it is not yet clear if the ban will stretch to AI-generated content.)He speaks with the self-congratulation of a 1950s salesman presenting housewives with new labour-saving washing machines.“Fans want customised content.If you want to see her in ripped lingerie having doggy sex in a cave, the creators don’t have time to film that, so we leverage AI to help them.

We want to help creators unlock productivity and let them earn as much as they can,” he says, apparently unaware of how weird it is for men who are hoping to get rich from pornography to pretend they are nobly doing women a favour.A little later, British creator Lily Phillips arrives in the lobby.She became famous last year after filming herself having sex with 100 men in a day.“I’m just here for a good time!” she says, determinedly upbeat, dressed down in a cream tracksuit.Since her viral stunt, another British creator, Bonnie Blue, claims to have slept with more than 1,000 men in a day.

Phillips, 24, therefore has to come up with a new way to grab people’s attention.The answer? Widowers.Recently she revealed plans to film herself sleeping with large numbers of them.These extreme attempts to recruit paying subscribers can be risky.An Australian OnlyFans creator was hospitalised earlier this year after filming a challenge where she had sex with 583 men in one day.

She later put the hospitalisation down to stress, adding: “I think my body just finally had enough.”Phillips tells me she is contemplating creating an AI bot of herself, to create and sell photos to fans, to reduce her workload.“They [the fans] would know it was AI, but some men might want to see me in positions that I can’t get into myself.I’m not that flexible, but an AI bot could do the splits, and that might differentiate from the content that I have on my own page,” she says.“Who doesn’t want to make money from doing not a lot?”Some adult film producers are relaxed about the risk of AI making their work obsolete.

“We were all freaking the fuck out about this two years ago,” one says, adding that he is no longer so worried that AI will replace real humans on screen,“We sell serotonin, cortisol, dopamine,We are all about emotions,I think there’s no threat to creators,”Two well-spoken British entrepreneurs, Felix Henderson and Nic Young, want to talk about their new digital twins company.

This involves licensing celebrities’ voices and a portfolio of old photographs from their career heydays, and programming the resulting avatars to undress.The site will enable women to prolong their careers, Young says, mitigating the alarming threat of ageing.“Ultimately, a lot of the fans are relatively fickle.There are some creators who like the idea of having their image frozen in time.They want to continue earning money in this space, so they like the idea that they can effectively earn off how they appear today, and give themselves the career longevity they don’t necessarily have.

”He too tries to argue that his AI business will have the happy side-effect of liberating women from the still stigmatised business of taking their clothes off for money.“I would say it’s the most positive, ethical step forward that you could possibly make.”I last attended an Xbiz conference 11 years ago.In the gloomy basement of a faded 1970s hotel in London’s Edgware Road, I heard depressed executives discuss how the rise of free streaming websites was resulting in a rash of bankruptcies for businesses that had previously been flourishing.Since then, the industry has changed beyond all recognition, with the proliferation of smartphones and the 2016 launch of OnlyFans by the Essex-based Stokely family.

These changes mean anyone can now record themselves, upload the video or pictures, and charge subscribers a monthly fee to see what they’ve produced, have online chats and request individualised content.Creators take 80% of their earnings, while 20% goes to OnlyFans.The company does not describe itself as a pornography site.The CEO, Keily Blair, never uses the term, because she thinks it is pejorative, referring to it as “the P word” in a recent interview.She prefers to talk about “adult content” and has stressed that the platform also hosts yoga, sports and comedy videos, arguing that not all subscribers are interested in explicit content.

Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of uploaded material is pornographic.The OnlyFans revolution means more people are filming adult content for money than ever before.A referral scheme means current creators can sign up other people to take part, receiving a 5% commission from their first year of earnings.The number of users and creators soared during Covid.In 2021, there were roughly 2m content creators.

There are now 4.63m.The women at Xbiz argue the business model is safe and empowering, an improvement on the days when they were directed by studio producers, had little control over their boundaries and were routinely exploited financially.There is no doubt that unprecedented numbers of people are consuming pornography and the industry is turning a huge profit.In the UK, a third of men say they watch pornography at least once a week and the average age people first see pornography – often not on purpose – is 13.

Globally, more than 377.5 million people have an OnlyFans user account.Leonid Radvinsky, the Ukrainian-American who bought OnlyFans from the Stokely family in 2018, received $701m in dividends last year.Creators received $5.8bn for their work.

The largest market is in the US, but the company is based in the UK, where it paid £127m in tax last year.I ask Lily Phillips how she feels about Radvinsky earning $701m by taking a cut of the monumentally hard work she and other creators are doing (his net worth was estimated by Forbes magazine at $7.8bn).“I actually don’t know who he is,” she says, shrugging when I explain.“There’s always going to be someone higher up than you, who’s doing better than you, who’s got more power.

”The distribution of creator earnings is very uneven, according to industry analysts: the top accounts can earn over $100,000 a month, but the median account makes $180.The top 10% of creators make 73% of the money, while the top 1% make 33% of the money.(An OnlyFans spokesperson says this analysis is speculative, because the company does not release breakdowns of creator earnings.)Most of the creators at the conference are likely to be members of that successful minority, willingly championing the industry.Although content creators were given free tickets to the conference, they had to cover hotel costs and their travel to the Netherlands.

Gemma Kelly, the head of policy at Cease, the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation, says OnlyFans follows the same logic of any form of commercial sexual exploitation.“There will always be a small percentage of women, predominantly, who feel like this is working for them as a chosen career path.It’s the 90% of women that we don’t see that are the ones who are the most exploited, the most vulnerable.These women aren’t travelling to Amsterdam to party for three days.”Even the women who are successful on the site acknowledge it is immensely hard work to hang on to their subscribers when the internet is saturated with explicit content.

A male creator, who asks not to be named, says some people seem to think what they do is easy.“Some of my friends say: ‘I’m so strapped for money, I’ll just open an OnlyFans account.’ They think the only barrier to making money is just showing yourself naked.They think you just have to snap a picture of yourself, upload it and make $1m.A lot of people go into this without knowing how much time it takes.

”Kali Kingsley is a smiley 23-year-old creator from Hertfordshire,Two years ago, she gave up a job in motor sports to produce OnlyFans content full-time,She tries to take weekends off, but from Monday to Friday she works from the moment she wakes up – when she takes a photograph of herself in her underwear – to the moment she goes to bed at night,Her days are spent sending messages to her fans, who pay $30 a month to see her explicit videos and chat to her online; she aims to have sex with another creator (a collaboration) about once a week,She describes her content as “Valentine’s Day style” and says that for people who have grown up sexting friends, posting bikini shots of themselves on Instagram and becoming influencers, OnlyFans can feel like a “natural progression”.

“Every girl takes photos of themselves in pretty lingerie,” she says, “and then you find out you can actually make money from it … You’re making money you probably couldn’t in other fields.For our generation, it’s something that’s just done.It’s the older generation that see it as taboo or sensitive.There’s a huge misconception about the industry.Everyone is very lovely, the women are empowered by it