Content creation on the adult entertainment platform OnlyFans is an emerging form of digital labor at the intersection of sex work, pornography, and social media influence. OnlyFans’ design requires direct links to access profiles, forcing creators to engage with multiple social media platforms to build a fan base. However, social media's cautious approach to moderating sexual content means that displaying an OnlyFans link or using explicit language can result in shadow banning or account deletion. Creators respond with strategies such as allusive language, link trees, backup accounts, and Telegram channels to direct followers to their OnlyFans profiles. This paper draws on a three-year digital ethnography and in-depth interviews with 27 creators to explore their promotional use of social media. Key findings highlight the critical role of Telegram, the diversity of strategies, and the circular nature of platform connections. Cross-platform promotion emerges as central to creators’ work, arguably more so than the production of sexual content itself. Rather, success on OnlyFans depends on creators’ integration into a broader ecosystem of platforms that are also interdependent. The concept of cross-platform dependency by design emphasizes that creators cannot rely solely on OnlyFans for their income. Due to the design of the platform and the need for a pre-existing fan base, creators must promote themselves on mainstream social media and direct followers to OnlyFans through complex, step-by-step paths reminiscent of a breadcrumb trail. Ultimately, adult content creation on OnlyFans conflates sex work with cross-platform self-branding labor, producing complex dynamics of infrastructural dependency and exclusion.