The ‘E-Pimps’ of OnlyFans
Clever marketers have figured out how easy it is to simulate online intimacy at scale, ventriloquizing alluring models with cheap, offshore labor.
On a warm January afternoon in Miami, Jayson Rosero sat by the pool and stared at his phone. He was spending his day as he often does: trying to grow his business, Think Expansion, which is a marketing agency — sort of. Rosero has called his line of work “e-pimping,” and it’s a pretty apt name. Think Expansion manages OnlyFans pages on behalf of more than 30 women, and as a full-service agency, Rosero and his employees handle every aspect of running the accounts. They market them on social media; they write all of their daily posts; they even handle direct messaging sales, impersonating the women in conversations with their subscribers in order to sell erotic videos. That afternoon, Rosero was looking to expand his roster. Wearing a snug short-sleeve hoodie, he scrolled through numerous Instagram messages he’d sent to women that day. All of them said essentially the same thing: I know you’d make a lot of money with me; I want to work with you.
Spend enough time on social media, and you’ll encounter young people engaged in all sorts of schemes: running drop-shipping companies, minting NFTs, pumping crypto, selling real estate in the metaverse. Many are based in Miami. It’s a place where young marketing types have embraced a vision of what the internet is actually for that is at odds with Silicon Valley’s: less a utopian escape from reality than an infinite expansion of its strip malls. Rosero, 27, is an exemplary member of this burgeoning class. He pregames his daily gym session with a smoothie made from egg whites and whey protein, then spends his day bouncing between OnlyFans and WhatsApp, where he manages his employees. He likes working from his downtown apartment building’s 27th-floor pool deck, looking out over the blue-gray expanse of Biscayne Bay.
