I Made $100,000 in a Month 7 Performers on How OnlyFans Changed Their Lives

OnlyFans is empowering sex workers, challenging old stigmas, and making porn more intimate than ever. It also offers the possibility of life-changing money—for those willing to take the plunge.

He moved to Nashville to make it as a singer but wound up working as a barback, a job that in three years had gone from tolerable to marginal to almost unbearable. At 26, his dream of a career in music had already begun to feel hopeless. And now Brayden Bauer's anxiety was spiraling. “Every time I would buy something, I would think that I should be spending this money on a song,” he says. “Even when I would buy food, it would be like, ‘What am I doing?’ ”

Then, last March, Brayden's circumstances grew even more precarious. The coronavirus pandemic temporarily shuttered the bar. When the place reopened, it felt unsafe, and he made up his mind not to go back—even though he wasn't quite sure what else he'd do. He turned to Twitch, the livestreaming platform popular with gamers, and he began selling merch—sweatshirts and hats with little weed jokes screen-printed on them. He was earning around $2,000 a month, which was enough to make rent, but Twitch involved streaming himself playing video games for seven or eight hours every day. He had no time for music. It wasn't sustainable.

Yet his foray into performing online opened his mind to certain new possibilities. In May, after a little encouragement from some of his followers, Brayden started an account on OnlyFans, the subscription platform that allows creators to charge for photos and videos, notably explicit ones—a kind of Patreon of porn. He had no experience with sex work, but out of some measure of desperation he decided to give it a go. “I realized it was kind of my only choice,” he says.

Brayden has curly brown hair, brown eyes, a slim build, a warm singing voice, and 26 tattoos. He often wears nail polish. On Twitter, his display name used to be Discount Pete Davidson, as he bears a close resemblance. He's amassed more than 43,000 followers there—an audience that OnlyFans would enable him to monetize on his own terms. The platform allows creators to charge what they like for subscriptions, income they can supplement with tips and fees for customized photos and videos. In exchange for hosting the content, OnlyFans takes a flat 20 percent cut of performers' income, far less than most camming sites take and closer to the terms set by Patreon and Substack.

“It was just crazy,” says Brayden Bauer. “I'd never had more than a couple thousand dollars in my bank account at one time in my entire life. I was able to pay off multiple credit cards.”

In November, Brayden started posting nude photos and solo videos of himself, often in the shower, for an audience that he says is roughly 50–50 women and men. (Brayden is straight, which he mentions on his page, but he also doesn't care if anyone assumes otherwise.) He set his subscription price relatively high ($14.99 a month) to take advantage of the initial wave of curiosity, produced a lot of content, and promoted it on Twitter. Then the money started coming in. In his first month he made $20,000.

“It was just crazy,” he says. “I'd never really had more than a couple thousand dollars in my bank account at one time in my entire life. I was able to pay off multiple credit cards. Put some money aside for taxes and music and still be able to do whatever I wanted.” And buy things: eight pairs of new sneakers, a bunch of tattoos, a new TV, a PS5, and a VR headset. Since then his monthly income has stabilized at around $3,500, and he spent the winter recording new songs that he hopes to release this spring. “It's been nice to have a little bit of disposable income without exhausting myself,” he says. “Because anytime I would have a decent amount of money working at the bars, it was because I had just worked two 14-hour shifts in a row on a weekend.”

Brayden is part of a wave of former low-wage workers turning to OnlyFans during what has been a boom year for the platform. With screen time (and general horniness) soaring during quarantine, the site's traffic more than doubled over the first six months of the pandemic, and by December the company boasted that it was adding 500,000 new users a day. The number of creators on the platform has likewise skyrocketed during the pandemic, from 120,000 at the end of 2019 to over 1 million at the end of 2020. Out-of-work service workers like Brayden found themselves vying for online attention alongside career sex workers, models, influencers, and, increasingly, celebrities. Cardi B joined to premiere the behind-the-scenes video of “WAP,” Teen Wolf star Tyler Posey made his debut by singing naked with a strategically placed guitar, and Bella Thorne earned $1 million in a day—and the wrath of Twitter—after her followers believed she'd promised a nude photo that was not, in fact, a nude.

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Mostly, though, these creators are not famous. They are ordinary people trying to make a living by appealing, with an unprecedented digital intimacy, to your fantasies. And the life-altering financial success they're chasing remains intertwined with a simple cost: the old stigma that still goes hand in hand with doing any kind of sex work. As the pandemic rounded year one, I set out to talk to OnlyFans creators making erotic content—newcomers and veteran sex workers alike. Joining OnlyFans is a great pandemic gamble, and most of all I wanted to know: Was it worth it?

Brayden Bauer, a former barback, made $20,000 in his first month on the platform.
How to Make It Big (and Why You Probably Won't)
Among the savviest and most successful creators on OnlyFans is a 28-year-old woman who goes by the name Aella. A shrewd and data-driven former tech worker, she has earned as much as six figures in a month, and the story of her success is also one of liberation. She grew up in the Northwest, the eldest daughter of evangelical Christians who homeschooled their kids. Her father, she says, was particularly strict, which prompted her to break from the family at 17 and enroll in college. Unable to pay the tuition, she was forced to leave school before completing the first semester. She ended up working at a factory in Eastern Washington, assembling electrical components for $10 an hour and living with five roommates in a cramped apartment where she slept on a mattress on the floor. She did not always have enough money for food.

After about a year, a friend mentioned camming, and one night, Aella tried it. In her first session, she wore a padded bra, not quite realizing she would be taking it off during the stream. But she made $60 in three hours, twice as much as her rate at the factory, and camming became her profession for the next five years. She often worked on a site called MyFreeCams, which she says took 50 percent of her earnings, but her take still averaged around $200 an hour. In her best month, thanks to a fierce contest with a fellow model, she made $50,000. The money enabled her to travel widely in her early 20s, working from Turkey, South Africa, and Europe. For a time, she moved to New York City and, seeking a higher hourly wage, began escorting. Last March, she started posting on OnlyFans and is now making far more than ever before—about $60,000 a month, and in two different months as much as $100,000.

“OnlyFans feels like it's really put the power in the hands of the performers themselves,” says Stoya. “And that's groundbreaking if true.”

In a way, Aella's evolution as a performer parallels the rise of OnlyFans itself. The company's founder and CEO, Tim Stokely, created the site in 2016 after launching two other online adult businesses: GlamWorship, a “financial domination” site, and Customs4U, a cam site. Two years later, Stokely sold a majority stake in OnlyFans to Leonid Radvinsky, whose long career in adult businesses includes owning the camming giant MyFreeCams, the site where Aella worked.

With its structural similarities to social media, OnlyFans quickly proved a hit: The site draws on influencer culture as much as it does the adult world, a dual identity that set it apart from your average camming site. The platform also capitalized on what Lux Alptraum, a writer and sex educator who's reported on the adult industry for 13 years, says may be a wider cultural shift around paying for adult content. Because of Tube sites, younger millennials and Generation Z have always known internet porn as abundant and free; following a performer on OnlyFans can feel exclusive in a way that simply watching a video of unknown pedigree does not. “I suspect there is a weird phenomenon whereby paying for porn is almost more taboo and more special and kinkier now,” says Alptraum. “It's like, why do people buy artisanal water, you know?”

According to Aella, OnlyFans is a big improvement over camming for performers too. “OnlyFans is a much easier way of earning money,” she explains. For one thing, she says that OnlyFans' 20 percent cut offers much more advantageous financial terms to its creators than any cam site. All the adult creators that I spoke to for this piece agreed that the cut was surprisingly modest, especially given that adult websites pay higher fees to payment processors than other businesses do. “It's fair compared to industry standard, but I also think it's actually fair, which never happens in entertainment or sex work,” says Stoya, a 34-year-old porn star and writer, who started an OnlyFans account in March. As a comparison, she points out that PornHub takes a 35 percent cut from its affiliated performers' video sales. “I don't want to get too excited,” she says, “but OnlyFans feels like it's really put the power in the hands of the performers themselves. And that's groundbreaking if true.”

For Aella, OnlyFans also offers vastly improved working conditions. She describes camming as a kind of Glengarry Glen Ross of sex work; it's intense, and models are at the mercy of an algorithm that pushes or buries their content in real time. In addition, like many cam models, she would usually make the majority of her money from a single anchor client. “It becomes a weird power relationship, which can be very toxic,” she says. “A lot of girls would be beholden to emotionally abusive members.” On OnlyFans, by contrast, Aella's earnings are much more widely distributed; her biggest client might spend $800, or about 1 percent of her monthly income.

Aella has pale skin, hazel eyes, and long chocolate-brown hair. Her self-produced content is well lit, with good production values, and often accentuates her slight goofiness: For example, she might post a video of herself working out topless wearing a VR headset or playing the accordion. Her monthly subscription price is high, at $22.92, and she posts content to her page as often as four times a day. To hear her talk about OnlyFans, you'd think she might be running any small business experiencing first-year growth. “The majority of what I do is thinking about how to market my product,” she says. Fan turnover is high, she adds—many people subscribe for a month, then drop off, so to be successful, a creator needs to consistently draw in new subscribers. She says that posting free content on NSFW subreddits (those that do not ban users for posting consensual adult material) is a common method of promotion. Aella says some creators also prioritize Twitter, which she thinks, among social media platforms, is relatively tolerant of sex workers and of adult content.

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That kind of attention to marketing is what can make an OnlyFans performer truly thrive, according to Alptraum. “I think fundamentally, it's the non-sex parts of online sex work that make someone succeed or fail, which is counterintuitive for a lot of people,” says Alptraum,