Why You’re Failing on OnlyFans

Most people are! I realize it seems flippant to say it, but it’s the truth. Most people who make OnlyFans accounts or who make online porn in general will fail to make a significant amount of money. For the few people making significant money, that’s a result of already having a sizeable platform or of letting the job consume their life alongside being very lucky.

It’s likely that your OnlyFans account will never make enough money for you to do it full time. It’s less lucrative as a second job than plenty of other things would be for the same time investment, too. The thing is, there’s no barrier to entry and you can work when you want to for as little or as long as you want, and so some of us will be compelled to try it despite the low chances of real success. If you happen to sell sex for a living already, it often makes sense as an addition, despite not earning you much on its own.

OnlyFans puts power into the hands of individuals to make and post our own content and be able to monetize it. There are other sites that also allow sales, like ManyVids and IWantClips, but OnlyFans has more recognition and people are a lot more willing to pay for a subscription to see a large amount of content than they are to buy singular videos. This is also true with people’s attitude towards streaming services compared to buying individual films or episodes of TV. Unlike those streaming platforms, however, you’re not a huge company with thousands of different people’s content in one place. You’re marketing your personality as well as the porn.

How well you do depends on how much you stand out among a sea of people all trying to do the same thing. Depending on how you look and how much you fit the beauty standard you’ll either be competing against a sea of people who look just like you, or you’ll be considered a niche and have to find the smaller pool of clients you appeal to and fight for their attention.

Marketing your personality either means being fairly open and therefore vulnerable, whilst keeping the most identifying information secret, or creating an entire brand for yourself as a false persona. It’s exhausting and most people don’t have the mental fortitude to do it even if they technically have the time.

One huge barrier to maintaining motivation and avoiding burnout is having to keep your online sex work compartmentalized. If you have a personal social media presence and you don’t want the fact you do sex work to become public knowledge, you’ll either have to split time between your personal and work accounts or give up the personal one entirely. To make the time to advertise, you need to be on your work account constantly. People don’t want to see purely ads, they want to see your personality and constant activity.

Assuming you’ve decided to put everything into your online porn work, you’re still unlikely to be doing better than just scraping by each month, even once you really get going. The reasons for this are varied, and each one has a huge impact and can only be mitigated rather than avoided completely.

There’s so much free content out there: A lot of online porn is free to access. Much of that porn is uploaded to advertise for paid sites, some of it is pirated, and some of it is amateur porn that people are uploading for fun. Despite popular belief, individuals or companies don’t make a lot of money from advertising on free porn they upload. PornHub, for example, offers around $0.65 per 1000 views. That means you’d make $650 pre-tax if you got a million views on a video (and you won’t get a million views). People aren’t willing to pay merely to see porn. What people will pay for is porn of someone specific which they cannot see entirely for free, or for convenient access to large quantities of full videos of someone or something they know they like. To compete with free content you need to keep some amount of content pay-only, and make it very convenient for people to pay you and immediately see the videos and pictures they want.

Unwillingness to show nudity without a paywall: There’s a reason major porn companies usually advertise with free uncensored clips of their porn, and it’s because that draws people in. Sure, someone can theoretically get off to a short clip, and that’s frustrating when you’ve put in time and effort and aren’t getting paid for someone watching your content. The problem is, there are so many people out there who are advertising with nudity so that their customers can see exactly what they’re getting… making you a riskier choice to spend money on if you look different than expected or maybe even don’t post full nudes or videos at all!

Like with anything, there are exceptions to this. If you’re well-known and not building a platform as a sex worker without an existing fanbase, the mystery of not knowing what you look like naked might even pull in more people. But, if you’re failing on OnlyFans, it’s unlikely that’s your situation.

You’re advertising wrong: Not all platforms work equally well for all people. Creating a reddit profile with your links and posting nudes into subreddits will work for some people, and can actually get you a lot of subscriptions if one of your pictures gets really popular and a lot of people click on your profile. For other people, reddit is going to be largely useless because the popular subreddits are racist or fatphobic or transphobic, and the smaller positive subreddits just don’t have a big enough reach to gain you many subscribers. Twitter is a good place to advertise in the sense that you’re actually allowed to post nudity and a lot of people use it, however things like retweet groups will get your account muted by a lot of people and you need to reach a critical mass of followers before you start getting new subscribers through it.

If you want to work out where is going to be good for you, you need to diversify and then narrow it down. Try Reddit and Twitter and PornHub and ManyVids and Tumblr and even places where you need to be more subtle with your advertising like Instagram. Once you find a place that works for you, then you can devote more of your attention there.

A lack of consistency: Keeping subscribers requires that you stay on their minds, post often, and that you always keep them looking forward to the next thing. Having a large catalogue of content is a great start, and might keep someone subscribed for a couple of months, however most people will want something new after that. It doesn’t have to be crazy, like full-length roleplay videos on your OnlyFans every day, but even just some nude pictures of a couple of minutes of a clip filmed on your phone’s selfie camera in between better produced content will make a big difference when retaining subscribers.

For all that effort, is it worth it?

Sometimes, the answer is just no, it’s not. You know your life and personal situation better than anyone, so you’re in the best position to assess. Are there things you could be doing with your time that would earn you more money with less effort? Do you like making porn? Is this work riskier for you than other options you have, with regards to your family finding out or losing other employment? These are important questions to ask yourself, if you do have other options!

A lot of the time sex workers will pose these questions to people considering starting an OnlyFans (or using an equivalent online porn site), but it’s equally important that we post these questions to people who are currently making porn. Even for people who are well-informed and prepared, sometimes you just don’t end up making much money and it’s not worth it to continue trying.

Due to the shame of failure, many online-only sex workers get into this mindset that giving up means admitting they weren’t sexually desirable enough to succeed. Not doing well in terms of money or subscribers begins to feel like evidence you’re unattractive, and if you stop there’s no change of that changing. If you’ve only made $200 on OnlyFans, and from your advertising that means thousands of people have seen you naked for that price and perhaps a couple dozen subscribers have seen you masturbate or have sex, that number can feel humiliating.

People who are anti sex work will sometimes shove the cost of someone’s OnlyFans in their face asking “so you’re only worth $6.99?” or “you’re showing it all for that little”, to which a common reply is that the amounts add up to a lot more than that. What if it doesn’t? What if the amount adds up to only a hundred dollars? What if you can’t reach that, even?

Your worth isn’t in how much money you make from your porn. People who see you naked don’t take a piece of you with them. Do not let purity culture bullshit, largely from misogynists, make you feel lesser. How many people have seen your nudes, and how much you’ve made as a result, does nothing to change how attractive you are and does not diminish you.

If you’re failing on OnlyFans, welcome to the club! Most people never make much money at all. OnlyFans will tell you that you’re in the top 50% when you’re making $40/month, and that’s because of how many people open accounts and never get more than a couple of subscribers. You’re not alone.

Most vitally, if you’re doing poorly and you’re putting in more work than it’s worth, it’s okay to stop. Maybe you’ll come back to it later, maybe you won’t, but there’s no shame in closing down your account calling it quits.