TikTok's Accidental Influence on the Adult Content Industry

TikTok has accidentally conquered the porn industry. The video-sharing app bans explicit content, but TikTok-style videos, often filmed and edited in the app itself, are finding fans on other platforms. The success of these videos speaks to a wider phenomenon – the profound influence TikTok is having on the sex industry beyond the app itself.

Viral Trends and Content Creation

When Gwen, a 25-year-old sex worker from Toronto, noticed a TikTok trend where people were personifying popular restaurant chains, she immediately spotted an opportunity. In her TikTok-inspired video, Gwen plays a waitress who works at Denny’s, and seduces a customer into impregnating her in the break room. The response was amazing, she says. Pornhub, for example, is filled with videos mimicking one of the app’s popular trends or challenges, or sexualised compilations of clips downloaded from TikTok. This phenomenon is partly down to TikTok’s ‘For You’ page – a mixture of trending clips and recommendations which makes it more likely for a video to go viral and to be posted elsewhere.

Superior Editing Tools and Crossposting

The demand for ‘TikTok-style’ porn videos, and the app’s superior editing tools, is fuelling the rate at which NSFW TikTok videos are crossposted to other platforms, such as Pornhub and OnlyFans. Transition edits – which allow users to suddenly change outfits, or go from fully clothed to nude – are made easy on TikTok, and have emerged as a particularly popular feature among sex workers using the app. Sam*, a 28-year-old sex worker from San Francisco, also uses the app’s editing features to make her videos. Gwen says that in the past she has created a video on TikTok, screen recorded it and uploaded it straight to OnlyFans – without ever posting to TikTok.

Marketing Growth and Platform Challenges

TikTok has allowed creators to connect with a whole new, diverse group of followers that they wouldn’t be able to reach through Twitter or Instagram. This use of unpaid social media as a marketing tool for paid work elsewhere is nothing new. However, since the introduction of FOSTA-SESTA, a US law intended to curb sex trafficking, it has been more difficult for sex workers to advertise their services online. Instagram and Tumblr, for example, were extremely popular platforms among sex workers, before they started clamping down on them in the wake of FOSTA-SESTA. Compounding this is the fact that platforms such as OnlyFans have ballooned in popularity during the pandemic.

Growth of Dedicated Communities

Subreddits dedicated to posting NSFW TikToks are growing in size. After r/TikTok and r/TikTokCringe, the next most popular TikTok subs are r/TikThots, r/TikTokThots and r/TikTokHot.

  • Gwen's TikTok followers: 125,600 since joining last September.
  • r/TikTokXXX members: More than 61,000 members.
  • r/TikTokXXX growth in 2021: Gained over 20,000 new subscribers.
  • Content Source: Only 30 to 40 per cent of the videos on the sub have actually come from TikTok.