“Woooooow”
“Hurry up and get to the good part”
“Vry sexy”
I only glanced at the messages. They didn’t matter right now. I was just getting started. Foreplay was important in sex, and it was every bit as important in this business.
I pressed another button on my remote, and soft music began playing. I slid off the bed and began gyrating like a stripper, showing off the outfit from every angle. Giving the viewers a little taste of what was to come. The comments were going wild now, as I hoped.
As I danced a little bit, my computer made a barely-noticeable “cha-ching” sound. Like a cash register. That was the sound that played whenever I received a tip from one of my viewers.
I made money on OnlyFans in several different ways. First, fans had to pay a monthly subscription fee to “follow” me. This subscription fee varied wildly depending on the model—some charged as much as a hundred bucks a month! But that wasn’t my strategy. I kept my subscription fee very low: just $1.99 per month. About the cost of a Coke at a convenience store. That gave fans access to most of the videos I posted, which they could watch whenever they wanted, as often as they liked.
But in addition to those videos, I had “premium” videos that had to be purchased on a pay-per-view basis. I charged $9.99 a pop for these because they’re usually more explicit. For example, the free videos might show me dancing around in lingerie, and maybe go topless. In the premium videos, I would get completely nude. I would play with myself, and with toys. Masturbation videos soldreallywell. I had a lot of those in my online portfolio.
Then there were live shows, like the one I was doing tonight. Subscribers could pay $19.99 and watch the feed live. They could leave comments for me to see in real-time, and make suggestions. Sometimes I listened, which gave viewers even more incentive to tune in to live shows in the future.
On top of that, users could send me an individual tip if they liked the show. If someone tipped more than ten bucks, I would acknowledge them by name.
“Nicetip, LakersFan69,” I said when one such tip flashed on my computer screen. “Thanks for tuning in, baby. I hope you like the rest of the show even more.”
There was one final way in which I made money: special requests. Before a show, users could submit a private request to me for a certain price. These varied wildly: some were as innocent as wanting me to moan their name, while others strayed into weird fetish territory. One guy paid me $200 to paint my toenails cherry red in front of the camera. Easy money. Some girls would write their fans’ names on their boobs. I thought that was kind of weird, so I never did that. But I did have a special request in store for tonight’s show that someone had paid me $1,000 for. That’s right: someone was giving mea thousand freaking dollarsto do something on camera.
“Is everyone having a nice evening?” I asked. “I’m feeling pretty randy tonight, if I’m being honest.” I laid back on the bed, spread my legs a little bit, and let my fingers drift down to my panties.
A flurry of cha-ching tip noises came from my computer.
Yeah, you’re probably judging me right now. I get it. But let me emphasize: this kind of work paysso much money. Stupid money. Life-changing money.
Like most people, I was only vaguely familiar with OnlyFans until recently. It was something on the internet related to porn, and that was about as far as I cared. I was busy trying to make rent with my crappy minimum-wage job while taking finance classes at night at the local community college.
But then I read an article in the New York Times about a woman who was paying her way through medical school by doing OnlyFans once a week. According to the article, she was makingten grand per month, and that was while only submitting one video a week. A few hours of work for the equivalent of a six-figure salary.
I was skeptical at first. But I was curious enough to start doing research. There were plenty of examples of women making serious cash while doing this as a hobby. And those who turned it into a full-time job were sometimes makingmillions. It felt like I had stumbled upon a gold mine, and all I needed to do was grab a pickaxe and start swinging.
Surely there was no way I would make serious cash doing this, I thought. All the top earners were porn stars, or amateurs who looked like supermodels. I was just a random twenty-three year old woman who couldn’t afford to go to college. There was another hiccup: I had no interest in showing my face on camera. The last thing I wanted was for explicit videos to pop up whenever a potential employer Googled my name. Because of that, it took me a while to work up the courage to give OnlyFans a try. Months went by while I slaved away making minimum wage—which, in New Mexico, was $11.50 an hour. Do you know how many hours it takes at minimum wage to pay for my monthly car payment?Twenty-five hours. That’s too many hours!
Then, one night after a particularly awful shift at my job, I took the plunge. I swung by a Halloween store on the way home and bought a cheap mask and a red wig. I arranged my laptop on the edge of my desk with the built-in webcam facing my bed. Next—and this is the most important step, by far—I got wine-drunk on a four dollar bottle of chardonnay. And when I was good and sloshed, I stripped down to my birthday suit and took a bunch of photographs in scandalous positions. I even took a few videos of me dancing around, bending over in front of the camera, and lightly touching myself. Nothing crazy. Then, before I could change my mind, I created an OnlyFans account and uploaded the best photos and videos.
I woke up feeling like I had been run over by a dump truck. Cheap wine gives the worst hangovers. I immediately regretted what I had done, and quickly logged on so I could hopefully delete my account and pretend like none of this had happened.
But then I saw that I had four subscribers. Just four, enough to count on one hand. And at $4.99 each, that netted me just under twenty bucks. Per month. For about half an hour of work.
If I were a cartoon character, big dollar signs would have replaced my eyeballs in that moment.
That was two months ago, and I now had over three hundred subscribers, but I still remember those first four guys by name. Their screen names, at least. Sometimes, I wished I could send them each a thank-you letter for leading me toward a path to financial freedom. I had invested a lot of equipment into the venture since that first drunken foray. All the tech equipment I already mentioned, plus a closet and three dresser drawers dedicated only to lingerie. I upgraded my wig along the way, trading in the five dollar costume accessory for an elegant Daniel Alain crimson wig that cost just under two thousand dollars. Which, for those keeping score, would have taken me nearly two hundred hours to afford on my minimum-wage job.
“We’ve got a special treat for some of our viewers tonight,” I said in a sultry voice. A voice I never would have imagined using two months ago. “A new toy. And it has a very special name on it.”
I rose from the bed and went over to my drawer. The sex toy that I pulled out could only be described asmilitary grade. It was a huge dildo, nearly the proportions of a can of Pringles. It was also green, a shade that no natural penis could ever hope to achieve. Nohealthypenis, I should say. The cha-ching noises from the computer intensified as I showed it off for the camera like Vanna White.
“This thing ismassive,” I said with fake awe. “I’m told it’s a replica of…” I twisted the dildo to show the side where a name was written in black marker. “Spencer Gilroy. Spencer, you’re a gifted boy! Let’s put this guy to the test…” I returned to the bed and began rubbing the tip of the gargantuan dildo around my pussy.
Again, I know you’re judging me right now. I don’t blame you. But please keep in mind: someone, probably a bunch of guys at a bachelor party, paid me $1,000 to do this during tonight’s show. Plus all the other tips I was receiving during the show itself. Easy money. And still somehow less degrading than my old job.
Some girls were born with a fat trust fund. I was born with a fat ass. Why should I be the one judged for using what I’ve got?
The live viewer count on my laptop skyrocketed as soon as I began playing with the toy—which I was callingThe Hulkin my head. So did the chat feed. Some guys were creeps, sure. Any time you got 300 guys together in one place, especially the internet, a sizable portion would be assholes. And that’sbeforefactoring in all the sex stuff.