People often joke about quitting their jobs to produce adult content on OnlyFans, but how much money do creators on the platform actually make?
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Due to the nature of the site's paywalled and private business model, hard numbers aren't easy to come by, but personal finance website SpendMeNot estimates the average account earns just $220 ($150 US) per month. Creators charge anywhere from $7.50 to $75 (US$5-US$50) for a monthly subscription, which means you'd need between three and 30 subscribers to earn $220. SpendMeNot estimates the average creator has 21 subscribers, paying an average of $11 per month.
On the other hand, it's not hard to find people who claim to make much more than SpendMeNot's average earning estimate. Vlogger Makayla Samountry has documented how she made more than $1,400 in her first month on OnlyFans. Samountry explained this was split roughly 50/50 between subscriptions and revenue from paid-for private interactions with her subscribers.
A composite image of former Married at Fist Sight star Jessika Power and the Onlyfans logo.
Earning big bucks as an OnlyFans star might be harder than you think. (Source: @jessika_power / Getty)
People often joke about quitting their jobs to produce adult content on OnlyFans, but how much money do creators on the platform actually make?
Due to the nature of the site's paywalled and private business model, hard numbers aren't easy to come by, but personal finance website SpendMeNot estimates the average account earns just $220 ($150 US) per month. Creators charge anywhere from $7.50 to $75 (US$5-US$50) for a monthly subscription, which means you'd need between three and 30 subscribers to earn $220. SpendMeNot estimates the average creator has 21 subscribers, paying an average of $11 per month.
On the other hand, it's not hard to find people who claim to make much more than SpendMeNot's average earning estimate. Vlogger Makayla Samountry has documented how she made more than $1,400 in her first month on OnlyFans. Samountry explained this was split roughly 50/50 between subscriptions and revenue from paid-for private interactions with her subscribers.
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Samountry later revealed she went on to make more than $40,000 in her first five months and just over $150,000 in her first year. Subscription fees account for 40 per cent of this revenue, with the other 60 per cent split evenly between private interactions and affiliate fees earned from referring other creators to OnlyFans.
Although Samountry's success on the platform may not be representative, it highlights how truly successful content creators must develop multiple revenue streams in order to succeed. In fact, Thomas Hollands of xsrus.com said the revenue of OnlyFans content creators "follows a classic power law distribution" where the majority of earnings were generated by only a select few. Hollands' research suggests the top 1 per cent of creators generate 33 per cent of all earnings on the platform, while the top 10 per cent generate a whopping 73 per cent of
There are pages and pages of scam videos on YouTube, advertising access to OnlyFans content for free if you follow a few steps to "unlock" or "hack" so-called "premium" accounts.
Most of these videos started appearing on YouTube about three months ago, right around when OnlyFans started marketing itself as a way to make some cash during unprecedented levels of unemployment because of the COVID-19 pandemic. A month earlier, a "leak" of stolen content from OnlyFans rattled the sex worker community, as a database of videos that were previously behind paid subscription accounts went viral online.
These videos, which instruct users to download and interact with app for a certain time in exchange for access to OnlyFans that never materializes, follow a playbook that targets whatever happens to be popular online. For a while, Fortnite-themed scams for getting free in-game currency by the same method were popular on YouTube. Now that OnlyFans has exploded in popularity as people flocked to the platform for income and entertainment during the pandemic, it's the new scam du jour, and YouTube is full of videos claiming viewers can access subscription OnlyFans content with a few simple steps.
Motherboard noticed one of these videos in our YouTube Home page as a paid promotion, meaning the creator of the video paid YouTube to increase its reach on the platform. The title of the video was "Learn How To Get OnlyFans Premium Account," and the thumbnail pitched it as a "Only Fans Hack." YouTube removed the video, which had over a million views at the time, after we contacted the company for comment, citing the platform's policies for scam content, which forbid posting videos "promising money, products, software, or gaming perks for free if viewers install software, download an app, or perform other tasks."
Motherboard was able to find dozens of similar scam videos still on YouTube. Using the search term "OnlyFans hack," seven were uploaded in the last 24 hours alone, but they appear under several variations of "free," "hacked," and "2020" with differing videos of the same scam.
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