OnlyFans’ amazing success inspired other platforms to follow a similar path! One such platform that has found its stroke of luck is Fansly! It attracts around 29.06 million monthly visits within a short span of five years. Are you inspired by Fansly’s success? And are wondering — how to build a website like Fansly, then you’re in the right place! This guide sketches a complete roadmap from discovering a befitting niche to the right development approach!
So, get ready to create your Fansly-like website and storm into the creator economy!
Table of Contents
What is Fansly? How Does it Work?
Fansly is an adult-subscription social media platform that connects creators with their fans through exclusive content. Founded in 2020, Fansly is a popular alternative to OnlyFans, but specifically popular among adult content creators.
Creators can post different content types like photos, videos, livestreams, audio clips, etc. They can offer exclusive content through perk-based subscription tiers. Fans subscribe to these tiers and get exclusive content at a fixed subscription fee.
OnlyFans offers a basic subscription, Fansly offers a multi-tiered subscription. Creators can earn money from subscriptions, PPVs, livestreams, direct messaging, custom content, tips, etc. Like OnlyFans, Fansly charges a 20% commission on platform transactions, and creators keep 80% of their earnings.
💡To understand how Fansly works, read our detailed guide on What is Fansly? Angling to Be the Next OnlyFans
Why Build a Website Like Fansly?
Following are the key reasons for developing a website like Fansly:
Market Demand
The adult entertainment industry is projected to reach $118.14 billion by 2030 from $76.17 billion in 2024. Adult-content subscription platforms like OnlyFans, Fansly, and FanCentro have inspired a new bandwagon of creator platforms. More people are eager to pay for exclusive adult content experiences.
Diverse Monetization Streams
Adult subscription platforms offer significant revenue potential. Beyond the subscriptions, creators can monetize from PPVs, tips, livestreams, and custom content sales.
Democratizes Content Creation
Creators can monetize from different content types, including photos, videos, audio files, and livestreams. This offers greater flexibility! Likewise, creators often prefer platforms that impose minimal restrictions. Beyond traditional revenue streams, they can monetize like advertising, live shows, merchandise, etc.
Convenience
Adult content websites are convenient for both users and creators. Fans can tune in to these platforms from the comfort of their homes, and creators can monetize their exclusive content from these subscription platforms.
Fosters Community Engagement
Creators can forge genuine connections through direct fan interactions. Live streams and direct messaging can engage to a great extent.
How to Build a Website like Fansly: Detailed Roadmap
Let’s dive into the steps for develop a website like Fansly:
Step 1: Find Your Unique Business Proposition
First off, find a unique business proposition for your platform to stand out!
Fansly is a social adult-content subscription platform monetizing from exclusive experiences. With its success, many players are eager to jump into the same category. But, if you want to stop the scroll and grab your audience’s attention!
Find a USP for your platform! Focus on a niche audience, exclusive content or experiences to distinguish your platform.
Here are few profitable niche ideas for your Fansly-like website:
- Fetish-specific or kink content – Feet, latex, or BDSM
- Age-specific – MILFs, Sugar daddy kinks
- Category-specific – Roleplay, sensory & audio experience-based
- Broad, inclusive platform – Includes creators from fitness, gaming, fashion & beauty
- Exclusive content experiences beyond the basics – Premium memberships, custom content requests, creator communities
Step 2: Perform Market Research & Competitor Analysis
Once you have found your platform’s USP, it’s time you dive into some market research.
Identify Target Demographic
Understand your audience’s basic demographics, such as age, profession, gender, location, etc. Step beyond the basics and analyze their behavior, preferences, and interests, such as a preference for a specific content type or experience.
💡 Pro Tip: Build buyer personas for detailed insights on your consumer preferences and expectations.
Perform Competitor Analysis
Identify 2-3 key players with similar audiences & service offerings. Assess your competitor’s website. What do they offer? Evaluate their service offerings, price points, and marketing messages. Use tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to get insights into content & marketing strategies.
Look at their platform reviews and testimonials. Consider their strengths and shortcomings for potential industry gaps. Capitalize on them and build your empire!
Spot Trends & Opportunities
Need to stay ahead of your competitors? Spot the current trends that are popular among your target audience. Different content experiences are shaping the adult industry, from VR to streaming and AI-driven content. Google Trends, Exploding Topics, and Semrush are popular trend-spotting tools.
For instance, AI sexting, VR porn, and NSFW with lifestyle content are emerging trends.
Step 3: Navigate the Legal Considerations
If you are planning an adult website like Fansly, consider specific legal considerations. Age verification, age privacy laws, content restrictions, privacy and local laws are a few legal aspects to consider.
Seek legal consultation to craft transparent terms of service and privacy policy. This ensures your platform will incur minimum legal risks and function successfully.
Content laws differ for each country. Ensure you check the region-specific laws before starting your adult website. For example, data protection laws like GDPR for the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) lay laws for data collection, storage, enhanced security measures, etc.
Ensure your platform complies with these global privacy laws while handling consumer data. Set up a fair and transparent cancellation and refund policy that covers eligibility, timeframe, and refund process.
Step 4: Adopt a Business Model
A business model involves processes and revenue streams for successfully running your adult website. It essentially drives revenue to the platform.
Commissions are a crucial part of the Fansly revenue model. The platform adopts an 80%-20% commission structure. That said, creators earn a massive 80% of their earnings, while the platform retains the 20%. Consider factors like customer demand, scalability and your target audience for choosing a revenue model.
Popular revenue models for adult website are:
Pay-Per-View
Fans love exclusivity! And are willing to pay for high-demand content or unique experiences. While subscriptions incur an ongoing recurring cost, some fans might feel obligated to pay monthly. That’s when one-time purchases like PPVs work their charm!
These include premium content, custom messages, or live event access. Moreover, the targeted content offerings appeal to niche audiences.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing and adult websites are an excellent revenue generating combo! Once your adult website starts driving traffic, you can partner with relevant brands and promote their products. You get paid each time someone buys from your website.
Besides an actual sale, you can earn commissions for free trial signups, product installations, or even when signing up for a form and generating a lead. There are several adult-based affiliate networks; find something that works for your audience!
CrackRevenue, AdCombo, Adsterra, and Golden Goose are some profitable affiliate networks.
Advertising
Place your ads on your adult website and earn money through CPC, CPI, or CPM payment models. Experiment with video ads, direct ads, shopping ads, pop-ups, etc.
Adsterra, JuicyAds, ExoClick, and TrafficJunky are some popular adult ad networks. Consider payment methods, traffic quality, and demographic targeting options to choose one.
Earn From Merchandise
Besides earning through affiliates, set up an e-commerce store for your adult website. Consider selling adult toys, apparel, or niche accessories. For instance, Fansly has an official store selling clothing like sweatpants, hoodies, boxers, and bodysuits.
Donations
You can also integrate a donation model that gets raving fans to pay for their creators. Like Patreon, fans can make pledges and encourage their favorite creator.
Donations are often an underestimated monetization stream, but they often earn you money. Cryptocurrencies are a great way to attract contributors who desire anonymity!
Step 5: Determine the Key Features of Fansly-Like Website
Want to create an adult website that appeals to your audience? You can strike the right chord by building a website like Fansly with unique features.
Let’s take a look at the essential features of your Fansly-like website!
Key Features for Creators
- Secure Login / Social Login
A secure login with adequate access controls ensures creators & users can access the platform. Integrate social login or multi-factor authentication to level up the platform security.
- Profile Management
Ensure creators can customize their profile by setting the username, profile pic, and captivating bio. Provide social media integration to link their profiles. Include custom profile tags to increase profile discoverability.
- Unique Perk-Based Subscription Tiers & Management
Offer platform features to create perk-based subscription tiers and set pricing.
- Content Management
Provide a user-friendly interface to create, upload, and manage media. This could include different content types like photos, videos, audio files, and hosting live events.
- Direct Messaging
Intimate DMs forge genuine creator-fan connections! Media bundles, locked text, and audio files allow creators to monetize their interactions. Creators can also set permissions, such as DMs only for subscribers, tipping and PPV limits.
- Livestreaming
Exclusive live events bring real time interactivity! Creators could host a live performance, virtual party, or behind-the-scenes sneak peek. Stream goals, tips, and entry fees help to monetize livestreams.
- Payout Requests
Offer a seamless payout process with convenient payout methods, fixed payout tenure, minimum withdrawal limits, etc.
- Content Analytics
Creators analytics help track content performance, audience engagement, and earnings reports over time.
Key Features for Users
- Extensive Search & Discovery Filters
Unlike OnlyFans, Fansly provides an effortless search! Fans can easily discover their favorite creators with usernames, location, or niche hashtags. Tagging their accounts with accurate profile tags helps creators increase their visibility. The FYP page (Fansly content discovery system) recommends creators based on user behavior.
- Subscription Access
On subscribing, fans have access to the creator’s feed depending on the chosen subscription tier. Moreover, they can downgrade, upgrade, or even cancel their subscriptions.
- Tipping
Tipping is a fantastic way to encourage and appreciate your creators! Fansly allows fans to tip on posts, directly on profiles, or set tipping goals (fundraising or special project).
- Engagement with Creators
Fansly has three types of audience: followers, subscribers, and users. Subscribers and followers can like, comment, or tip on posts.
- Payment Methods
Do you wish to draw maximum conversions? Support payment methods like debit or credit cards, wallets, crypto, bank transfers, etc.
Key Features for Admin
- User & Creator Management
As your platform grows, managing all your users and creators becomes challenging. A user-friendly interface helps create, edit, and even manage subscription information. For creators, managing passwords and approving creator profiles is crucial.
- Payment Management
Some popular PCI DSS-compliant payment gateways are Stripe, CCBill and PayPal. The first criterion for choosing gateways for adult websites is managing high-risk transactions. Before choosing your payment gateways, look for competitive pricing models, payment methods, and 24/7 customer support.
- Commission Management
Commissions are the primary revenue stream for your adult subscription platforms. Admin can set a standard commission percentage and track commissions based on creators and transactions.
- Analytics & Platform Settings
Admin can access detailed analytics reports on subscription, payments, user and creators. This helps to analyze and grow your platform performance!
- Content Moderation
Given the platform’s nature, content moderation is an essential feature. Content must adhere to platform guidelines and doesn’t include prohibited content, violence, minors, or weapons.
- Age Verification
Follow strict age verification, ensuring all platform users and creators are over 18. Jumio, Veriff, Onfido, and ID.me are some popular age verification platforms.
You can’t skip on these essential features. Also, come up with out-of-the-box ideas to gain a competitive edge!
Step 6: Choose the Right Development Approach
Choosing the right development approach is essential for the success of your Fansly-like website.
The two popular approaches are: readymade scripts and custom development.
Using Fansly Clone Script
Are you looking for a market-ready product? Several players are building their content subscription platforms, like Fansly and OnlyFans. So, building a next-level Fansly-like website embedded with essential and unique features is the need of the hour!
A readymade Fansly clone script offers all the essential features along with necessary customizations. Most importantly, you can skip the groundwork as you have tried-and-tested solutions with proven industry experience!
The development cost of building your Fansly clone depends on your business needs. Determine a solid niche, choose the essential add-ons and tailor the solution to your industry!
Building from Scratch
Let’s move to custom development. It is time-consuming and resource intensive! You need a dedicated development team to build your Fansly website from scratch. From requirement analysis to maintenance & support, the development spans over 6-12 months!
The development cost comes around $50,000 to $70,000. The extensive timeline and high cost make custom development challenging!
Step 7: Content Creation & Management
So, you are looking for traffic to your website?
The adult industry is a competitive game, and every adult webmaster is looking to relinquish traffic! However, more content doesn’t always assure traffic! There are several adult websites that create content tailored to the preferences and interests of your niche audience.
Explore content formats relevant to your audience. This could be story-posts, videos, photosets, audio content, etc. Instead of adding a simple video to your adult site, add genuine scene descriptions that capture the behind-the-scenes narrative!
Now, let’s move on to content management! A robust content management system (CMS) can effectively manage massive amounts of content. Admin can upload images, videos, and all sorts of content without a second thought!
WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are a few CMS great for adult websites. Look for a CMS with a user-friendly interface, scalability to handle high traffic, enhanced security features, etc.
Step 8: The Final Launch
Now, your website is all set to head for a grand launch, so grab some eyeballs! You can team up with influencers or create some buzz with a planned press release. The choice is entirely yours!
If you’re aiming for a strategic launch, you could look for industry events, creator conferences, or virtual meetups. By participating in such events, you can highlight your platform features and draw in some investors. Thus, hitting two things straight with one strategy!
Here’s a quick list of important adult industry events to watch out for:
- XBiz Retreats
- AVN Adult Entertainment Expo
- The European Summit
- Internext Expo
Step 9: Promote Your Fansly-like Website
Navigating the adult website marketing maze holds its unique challenges. Here are some key promotional strategies to thrive in the adult landscape:
Engage with Social Media
Create an active social media account on X(Twitter), Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, etc. Post relatable content that engages your audience.
For instance, Fansly plays the social media marketing game pretty well! With its hilarious and naughty content, it resonates well with the audience. From funny memes to engaging one-liners, Fansly has garnered a lot of followers !
Use popular hashtags to increase visibility and draw in more engagement to your posts.
Referral Marketing
Referral marketing could be your win-win strategy! When your existing creators have a great experience with your website, they’ll share it with others!
Fansly offers two referral programs: creator and fan referral. The fan referral program earns you 1% of their purchases, the creator referral gets you 5% of their sales for the first year.
Email Marketing
This age-old marketing hack is a powerful tool for nurturing direct, genuine relationships. Whether you’re sending promotional emails, launching your new merchandise collection, or insightful newsletters, emails convey the right message!
Promote on Subreddits
Find relevant subreddits with horny members looking for some naughty content. But don’t spam the subreddit with pushy links!
That’s a wrap! We have covered all the steps on how to build a website like Fansly
What is the Tech Stack for Developing a Website like Fansly?
Choosing the right technology stack for your Fansly-like website is crucial. Each technical aspect plays an essential role in defining the platform’s scalability, security and functionality.
Given is the essential technology stack for building a website like Fansly:
- Front-end – React.js or Angular
- Back-end – Node.js or Ruby on Rails
- Database – SQL, MongoDB, Redis
- Cloud Services – AWS or Google Cloud services
Final Thoughts
Creating a website like Fansly is a great way to step into the creator subscription landscape. This guide covers everything on how to build a website like Fansly so you become the next market leader! Most importantly, a unique business proposition and business model offers a competitive edge!
Fansly Clone Script is a highly customizable white-label clone script to launch your adult-based subscription marketplace in no time! Cut to the chase — no hassles of coding, extensive research, or long development cycles. Focus on your business growth and building your brand!
If you have a million-dollar business idea and are ready to take the entrepreneurial leap, schedule a 15-minute discovery call with us! And start your journey to launch your adult marketplace with us!
FAQ-Related to How to Build a Website Like Fansly
1. How do you attract creators to your Fansly-like platform?
Here are the strategies to find the right creators to your adult subscription platform:
- Highlight creator-friendly features for your platform
- Offer a higher revenue share to creators
- Share success stories of creators earning profitable revenue
- Integrate privacy and security features, such as data encryption, 2-factor authentication, identity verification, etc.
- Use powerful marketing strategies, such as influencer marketing, paid advertising, email marketing, etc.
- Offer diverse monetization streams & analytics.
2. How to build a website like Fansly?
Here are the steps to build a website like Fansly:
- Find your unique business proposition
- Conduct market research & perform competitor analysis
- Navigate the legal landscape
- Adopt a business model
- Decide the key features for Fansly-like website
- Content creation & Management
- The final launch
- Promote your Fansly-like website
3. What are the legal considerations for starting your adult-content subscription platforms?
Age verification, data privacy laws, and content regulations are specific legal considerations. You need to get required licenses or permissions for running your adult subscription website. As a subscription platform create a transparent TOS and privacy policy.
4. What are the essential security features for your Fansly-like website?
To create a secure subscription platform, integrate the following security features:
- Identity & age verification
- Data encryption
- 2-factor authentication
- Copyright and fraud management with digital watermarks
- Secure payment gateway processors like Stripe and CCBill
- Authentication & Access Control