Stella Barey made a name for herself on TikTok during the first months of the pandemic talking about how much she loved anal. “The level of isolation pushed me there,” she says, recalling the moment everything started to change for her.
Barey would go on to flip her TikTok fame into OnlyFans riches. In her first month on the adult platform, she says, she made $8,000. The following month it skyrocketed to $40,000, and eventually she got so popular that she pulled in $300,000 in 30 days. “It was five-and-a-half years of posting on multiple different platforms every single day, multiple times a day,” Barey says. She liked the taste of success. But the demands of the industry also weighed on her, and by 2025, Barey, who felt she and her peers deserved better working conditions, decided to build her own platform.
In April, she launched Hidden, the first adult platform owned and operated by sex workers. Billed as the “anti-OnlyFans,” Hidden is out to prove that fairer industry conditions are possible when the people in charge actually come from the world they are profiting on.
Hidden is the TikTok version of OnlyFans—a seamlessly, and sleekly, designed creator-friendly platform where, in lieu of Korean skin-care tips and Get Ready With Me videos, you’ll find a ForYou page with videos that features all sorts of adult content: from oral and BDSM to dildo play and lingerie videos.
“In this industry, no one expects that anyone's going to be able to change anything. We have to drive all the traffic from our social media to OnlyFans by ourselves. And we're getting more and more burnt out every year, because all of the promotion relies on us.” To fix that, Barey built Hidden around discoverability. “Innovation like adding a ForYou page makes it easier for girls to build up promo. It creates an ecosystem where we're all bringing fans that are circulating to everybody,” which helps girls who don’t have large followings, she says.
Hidden is all about giving creators more control, and many of its features reflect that mission by creating avenues for “passive income and promotion,” Barey says. Hidden takes an 18 percent cut (compared to 20 percent on OnlyFans). It also has charge-back protections up to $2,500, which deters customers from falsely disputing payments with their credit card companies and getting refunds. There is a creator store for people who may want to “buy 50 videos in the middle of the night,” she says, noting that about 80 percent of a creator’s income is “made in the messages, selling long-form videos or special bundles.” Every creator also has a liaison who is familiar with their account and will respond within 24 hours to any questions. All of these features exist in one form or another on other adult sites. Hidden just happens to bring them together for the first time.
“I've made the large majority of my money on OnlyFans, so I can't hate at all on it,” Barey says of Hidden marketing itself as the anti-OnlyFans. “They exist in the same realm. But I guess Hidden just offers things that I have felt for a really long time we were always missing.”
This month, OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair announced on LinkedIn that the platform will start running background checks on people signing up as content creators in the US, XBIZ first reported. Blair didn’t clarify whether the platform will prohibit all types of criminal convictions, but, Barey says, “if this is the way that the world's going to go, it’s going to go this way. But sex work is not going to go away. And until it's completely banned, what we're doing is fully legal.” Pornhub has a similar verification process in place for creators.
OnlyFans did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On December 4, Hidden will host its first Goon-A-Thon event, where it will announce porn star Lana Rhoades as its new co-owner and chief creative operator. The company is also rolling out new site features, including a creator leader board, a daily index of the site’s top 20 earners. The creators who land the most sales and the users who spend the most money will be rewarded with up to $30,000 in prizes after 24 hours.
Rhoades is no stranger to the world of porn and has won just about every industry award. (Pornhub awarded her Most Popular Female Performer two years in a row.) Though she no longer actively films, Rhoades says she wants to help Barey build a platform where “creators are treated like collaborators.” It’s an experience that doesn’t happen anymore. “There’s a huge lack of transparency. Creators are often left guessing about shadowbans, payout issues, or why their content suddenly stops performing. And because most platforms are built by people outside the industry, the policies and product decisions often feel disconnected from what creators actually need in practice. Most of the corporate alternatives in this space were created by people who have never posted a single piece of content. They don’t understand the risks, the pressure, the customer dynamics, or the creative side.” Rhoades believes Hidden can be different “because the people running it have lived it.”
Currently, Hidden has 115,000 users (mostly men) and more than 2,200 creators (mostly women).
It’s still early days for Hidden, but long-term plans, Rhoades says, include building “a real creative ecosystem” that spans a clothing line, feature films, educational symposiums, and live events. The site also plans to slowly add in AI features, including customer relationship management (CRM), which Barey says will help with pricing, organizing messages, and customer insight. “It's about $200 to $300 a month for creators. So we're building that in for free,” she says.
“A lot of people have told me there will never be anything except OnlyFans,” Barey says. She isn’t deterred by the doubts. “With all of these changes [around age-verification laws] and the rise of conservatism, it's been really nice knowing that I’ve already built this platform that we’re not all going to just get kicked off of tomorrow.”