How Much Money Can You Make on OnlyFans in 2021?
OnlyFans Content Creators Survey 2021 – We Looked at Earnings, Income, Hours Worked, Type of Content Produced and the Results were Surprising.
OnlyFans Marketing Last Updated: May 24th, 2021 Reading Time: 12 Minutes
We decided to survey OnlyFans content creators on our Twitter account this week to get an idea of the current mindset of OnlyFans creators. While most of the headlines in the media focus on celebrities or controversies, lost in the shuffle are the hundreds of thousand of OnlyFans creators who work hard daily to create content that the platform relies on for it’s continued success. Without these hundreds of thousands of creators giving OnlyFans millions or even billions of dollars worth of free advertising over the years there would be no OnlyFans. So we wanted to get an idea in the middle of the huge success streak that OnlyFans is on, how the front line workers were doing. What I can report back is that from what we received in feedback that OnlyFans is not building up the kind of brand loyalty that you would expect. When you have two people in an unhealthy relationship most of the time one person is in charge and is getting more from the other person than the other is giving. In this case OnlyFans creators are giving everything they have of themselves and not getting as much back from the company. As we’ve reported on previously, OnlyFans has not taken many steps to stop pirated and leaked content from being easily scraped from their website by agents on Github and the Google Chrome store. Earlier last year they diminished the amount that creators could earn from referring other creators as well which hurt a lot of small creators incomes.
So I wanted to get a real state of what’s happening with OnlyFans creators who are part of the current ‘gig economy’ as much as Uber Drivers and Grub Hub Delivery drivers. We were looking to not only find out how much OnlyFans Content Creators were making but also how much time they were putting into the site, where they were marketing themselves and how loyal they are to the site.
How did we collect the data?
We run a Twitter that has a large OnlyFans following, with over 1 Million Impressions a day. I asked the questions as a poll over a 24 hour period for each question asked over an 9 day period. So as with all polls, only those who are most vocal or passionate about a subject are likely to participate. This is not a purely scientific poll but one that intends to hear directly from OnlyFans creators and get an idea of their earnings and the importance on OnlyFans to them.
The Results
1. What Percentage of Your Monthly Income comes from OnlyFans?
After I reported that InfluencerMarketingHub was using junk research from April 2020 on their OnlyFans Statistics page, I wanted to get an actual feel for what OnlyFans creators are making right now. Keep in mind that my sample is from those who are actively working to promote and market their OnlyFans. So I am likely over sampling those content creators in the middle of the pack. In this question I wanted to get an idea of how many creators are relying on OnlyFans as their sole source of income. Only around 19% of those responded that OnlyFans is their only income source. Anther 22% make a good portion of their income from OnlyFans with a whopping 59% saying that they only make 10% of their income or less from OnlyFans. What we can gather from this information is that most creators are using OnlyFans as extra income in the same way you would use any gig economy job. This also dispels the concept that OnlyFans changed “sex work forever‘ as it seems that most people have just taken the part time selling of pictures and videos away from social sharing platforms like Snapchat and just moved them to OnlyFans.
2. How Many Jobs do you have currently besides OnlyFans?
In this question about jobs, I wanted to get an idea of how many jobs creators are working in 2021. With the economic slowdown of 2020 caused by the Pandemic a lot of people either were let go from jobs or their jobs became more remote. Is the concept that OnlyFans popularity spiked because of the Pandemic true? From what it seems in this poll, most creators are still working several jobs or gigs along with OnlyFans. So the economic strain seems to be a good reason for creators to have joined the platform. A year after the start of the pandemic later only 32% of content creators are using OnlyFans as their only job.
3. Do you Post Nudity on Your OnlyFans Page?
The big question out there has always been, is OnlyFans mainly a site for people to post nudity and risque pictures or is the site evolving into a platform for all different types of creators? Where I have mentioned creators like Amouranth who has vast success on Social Media and on OnlyFans without any nudity for the vast majority of OnlyFans creators nudity and the posting of nudes is a reality on their pages. 80% of respondents stated they pose nude pictures on their page while only 7% said they do not. If you include PPV (Pay per view) around 93% of those with OnlyFans pages post some sort of nudity to keep fans engaged and paying every single month.
4. How Many Hours a week do you spend working on and promoting your OnlyFans Page?
There has been a lot of debate on whether OnlyFans pays for itself if you take the amount of hours someone spends promoting themselves versus the amount of money they actually make. As I’ve gone over in the OnlyFans Secrets Podcast the amount of time you spend initially is going to be made up for by the results that you see later. So there is no way of looking at it as an hourly rate concept. If you’re writing a book or painting a masterpiece you don’t concern yourself with how many hours you put into something but the final product. Some people make the argument that if you make only $100 your first month on OnlyFans and spent 20 hours doing it you are making well below minimum wage. This is a silly way of measuring success in business and should not be applied to the hours you see above. So from the poll we learned that 37% of creators spend 10 or more hours every week working on and promoting their OnlyFans. While only 13% spend less than an hour working and promoting their page. We can see that there are an equal number spending 5 hours or less working each week as those spending 10 hours or more.
5. Would You Continue working with OnlyFans if your Commission went from 80% to 70%?
For this question I wanted to get an idea of how loyal OnlyFans creators are to the platform. Currently OnlyFans pays creators 80% of their subscription and tips that come in. I adjusted the commission down just a 10% difference to 70%. In this regard OnlyFans creators were torn with roughly 54% deciding they would stick with OnlyFans if there was a paycut while 46% of OnlyFans creators said they would take a hike. As I’ve found with most of my research OnlyFans has done very little to win over the communities that support the site. While active communities like r/onlyfansadvice on Reddit continuously show that OnlyFans creators are frustrated by the platform on many fronts, OnlyFans has seemed distant to many of their complaints and concerns. If 46% of your workers would walk off the job with a 10% decrease in salary I feel that is pretty telling. I do feel that OnlyFans can do more to build loyalty among their creators. As I’ve pointed out they need to work to remove stolen content on sites like GitHub, Google and Discord.
6. I spend the most time Promoting my OnlyFans on:
This question was a bit skewed as I wanted to find where OnlyFans creators were spending their most time promoting their page. Since it was conducted on Twitter obviously you’re going to get an audience that is already active and promoting on Twitter. But, it does show as I’ve mentioned before that Twitter is the main promotion source for OnlyFans, not Reddit or Instagram. That is why we spend so much time on Twitter Promotion here. The question is asking which area they spend the most time promoting on. The most revealing aspect being that only 7% of OnlyFans creators chose ‘other’ as an option. With so many places to promote your OnlyFans its interesting that most creators feel limited to the three platforms of Reddit, Twitter and Instagram.
7. What amount do you typically make each month on OnlyFans?
This is a question that is at the heart of the OnlyFans creator experience. What do OnlyFans creators actually make each month and is the distribution of revenue out of wack? In this poll we find that only 55% of content creators responded that they make $100 or less each month on the platform. It’s important to remember that Twitter attracts a lot of new creators who are just getting started. So for many of the respondents they could be on the site for less than a month and not have had the time to build up the needed following to be profitable. In this poll though, 45% of respondents said they make over $100 and 20% said they make $500 or more each month on the platform. This does run under the constant of the 80/20 principle which when applied to business says that the majority of sales are done by 20% of a client base. In most sales organizations one or two super sellers do 80% of the sales while everyone else fights over the scraps for the other 20%.
8. If Another similar platform/site offered Creators 90%, would you leave OnlyFans?
This particular poll is pretty shocking because it shows that most content creators by over 2 to 1 would dump OnlyFans for a competitor that offered them more money. OnlyFans could have an issue here because as seen earlier they are holding onto their medium to lower earning creators by a thread. Only half of those creators would be willing to take a pay cut, while this poll shows that all creators would move to another platform if they offered higher rates. This is of course difficult because of the high cost of credit card processing for adult material. Most of those merchants take 10% or more just to process transactions. OnlyFans is likely able to get a better deal than this because of the volume that they do. It does show though that OnlyFans has not done enough to create brand loyalty with their creators and that a viable competitor could make a play for this market if they had deep enough pockets.
9. Will You Still be on OnlyFans a Year from now?
Some good news for OnlyFans at the end of this survey. An overwhelming number of creators plan on still being on OnlyFans a year from now. This means that OnlyFans is likely to be a trend and not a fad. OnlyFans creators are expecting the site to continue to grow and they want to stay with it. This is a sign that OnlyFans is likely moving into a dominant position in the marketplace. Creators are also used to the platform and what they can expect from it and plan on continuing to post on the site as long as the subscriber money keeps rolling in.
So How Much Money Can You Make on OnlyFans:
From this survey we can determine that OnlyFans creators after several years of the platforms existence are mainly still on OnlyFans for one thing.. money. They are looking for the platform that can offer them the most money with the most security possible. Considering that before OnlyFans this kind of work was being done over cash applications and snapchat, the expectations for most creators is pretty low. OnlyFans is banking on that to last, but I do feel they need to step up their game over the next few years to provide more of the security and safety features that OnlyFans creators are looking for. If OnlyFans can do that, they can likely be a site that continues to gain content creators at a record pace.
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