Saudi Arabia's OnlyFans Spending Grew More Than 50% in a Year

The Gulf is now the fastest-moving corner of the OnlyFans economy. The growth is concentrated in exactly the places with the strictest public rules about modesty — and demand isn't tracking the rules so much as routing around them.

Pornography is illegal in Saudi Arabia, and OnlyFans is blocked there. Spending on the platform still grew by more than 50% in a single year.

That figure — a 50.24% jump in both per-capita and total spending — comes from OnlyGuider's OnlyFans Wrapped 2025 study, reported by The Jerusalem Post in December. In Abu Dhabi, where the platform is also inaccessible without workarounds, the same study clocked growth of 65.25%.

The headline that ran alongside those numbers was about Tel Aviv, the region's biggest per-capita spender. The more telling story sits underneath it. The Middle East is the fastest-growing market OnlyFans has, and the fastest growth is happening in the Gulf states with the most restrictive public norms around sex and modesty. The demand is real, it is rising, and it is arriving in the places least set up to acknowledge it.

A market that isn't supposed to exist

Start with the obvious complication: in most of the Gulf, this spending isn't supposed to be possible at all.

OnlyFans is banned or blocked across much of the region, and adult content is illegal under local law. Reaching the platform means going around the block — typically through a VPN — which is precisely why nobody can produce a clean receipt for what the Gulf spends. OnlyGuider's model is built from search-interest data, purchasing power and OnlyFans' own reported financials, then expressed as per-10,000-resident estimates. In a market where the front door is locked, those are directional figures, not transaction records, and worth reading as such.

What the directional figures show is momentum. Saudi Arabia's 50.24% year-over-year rise and Abu Dhabi's 65.25%, per The Jerusalem Post's account of the OnlyGuider data, are among the steepest anywhere in the study. They start from a low base — but the direction is unambiguous, and it points up.

The regional map

The absolute leader isn't in the Gulf at all. Tel Aviv spent an estimated $173,900 for every 10,000 residents in 2025 — 14 times Dubai's rate, 33 times Riyadh's and 43 times Kuwait City's, according to the same report. Globally, that put the city 19th, ahead of Chicago and several other US markets. Haaretz described Tel Aviv as the region's "hyper-liberal anomaly."

That gap is the point. Tel Aviv spends like a mature Western city; Riyadh, Dubai and Kuwait City spend a fraction of it per head. But the growth rates run the other way. The conservative-market cities are the ones accelerating, closing a distance that looked unbridgeable a couple of years ago. In a per-capita ranking they still sit far below the leaders. In a momentum ranking, they are the story.

What the demand says about modesty online

The interesting tension isn't hypocrisy — it's architecture. Publicly, much of the Gulf enforces strict norms around modesty and adult content. Privately, a subscription platform built entirely on discretion turns out to fit those conditions unusually well. Anonymity isn't a bug users tolerate; it is close to the whole value proposition. A paywalled, one-to-one feed leaves less of a trace than almost any other form of the same consumption.

That logic runs on the supply side too. Modest presentation has become its own distinct category in the creator economy — creators who keep the aesthetics of modest dress while working on an adult platform, a combination that sits at the center of long-running arguments about faith, agency and commercialization. Those debates are real and unresolved, and they tend to fall hardest on the women involved, who absorb the bulk of the scrutiny and, frequently, the harassment. As a market segment, though, it is defined enough that discovery tools index it directly: OnlyGuider, which organizes the platform by niche, maintains a running directory of Top Hijabi OF Creators, a category that didn't meaningfully exist as a search term a few years ago and now does.

None of that requires naming anyone. The demand shows up in aggregate, in the search data, before it attaches to a single person — which is exactly how a market like this one grows in a place where being named is the risk.

The numbers come with caveats

A few, and they matter.

OnlyFans Wrapped 2025 is a model, not a ledger. Its Gulf figures lean heavily on proxy signals precisely because the platform is blocked there, so the absolute dollar amounts should be read as estimates and the growth rates as the more reliable part of the picture. OnlyGuider itself frames its rankings as a standardized way to compare regions per 10,000 residents, not a tally of confirmed purchases.

For scale, the firmer ground is the US. Americans spent an estimated $2.63 billion on OnlyFans in 2025, AOL reported, citing OnlyGuider, on a platform with more than 300 million registered users worldwide. Against that, the Gulf's totals are still small. Against its own past, the Gulf is the fastest-moving thing in the dataset.