Last summer, controversial internet personality Lil Tay celebrated her 18th birthday by launching a new business endeavor: an OnlyFans page. “One minute past midnight, I got to work,” Tay explained on TikTok Live. Within three hours, she’d allegedly pulled in $1,024,297 from a mix of subscriptions, tips, and private messages. The new gig initially seemed to suit the Canadian American creator, who soon offered up some career advice to other young women. “If you’re over the age of 25 and you’re still working a 9 to 5, you are a failure,” she scolded in an August 16, 2025 Instagram video. “And ladies, every single one of you should drop the link, like me. Literally, just make your bag. Who gives a f–k what anybody thinks?” 

By January 15, though, the harsh realities of her new line of work had set in. “Being an OF model is genuinely one of the hardest jobs in the modern economy,” Tay wrote in a lengthy X post. “It is not posting a few pics and getting rich. It is running a full-scale digital business where we are the product, the brand, the marketing team, customer support, PR, legal risk and emotional labor all at once.” 

Given the young creator’s dismissive comments about others’ employment choices, her post received a predictable backlash online. As unsympathetic as the persona she’s crafted may be, in this case, Lil Tay is absolutely correct. The idea that throwing together an OnlyFans page then “dropping the link” is an easy, quick way to make money is fiction.

“There are so many sensationalized stories of young women just willy-nilly making an OnlyFans account, and now, all of a sudden, they made a million dollars in a month,” Siri Dahl, an adult performer, online content creator, and sex workers’ rights activist, tells Playboy. “That is the exception to the rule.The average creator makes a couple hundred dollars, ever, on their OnlyFans account. The people who actually consistently make good income on there are very, very dedicated to running it like a business.” 

Dahl started her OnlyFans account in 2019, but has been working in the adult industry since 2012. The site, where she has about 5,000 subscribers, is currently her main income driver, meaning it’s a full-time job. On top of the time she spends on filming and editing content, planning shoots, and pre-production, Dahl estimates she also spends at least four hours per day monitoring and replying to DMs and answering custom content requests. She handles all of her own messages, but popular creators have increasingly turned to outsourcing the work or even using AI chatbots to navigate their overflowing inboxes. 

“There have been two class action lawsuits started against OnlyFans in the last couple years by fans that used the platform and were like, ‘Oh, this model said it was her account, but I found out she has people she hires to answer DMs for her, so it’s fraud,” Dahl explains. “That’s kind of an interesting take to me personally, because it doesn’t seem realistic that you would expect that any celebrity with millions of followers would be personally replying to every single DM you send them.”

The time commitment increases alongside your subscriber count, and it’s also become increasingly common for successful creators to hire help to manage their social media and video uploads. 

“People think that this is not a full-time job, and it is,” Kenzie Anne, an adult performer, online content creator, and podcaster with over 825,000 Instagram followers, tells Playboy. She recently hired an assistant to handle her social media posts because the workload had become overwhelming. “I have to take pictures every single day,” she explained. “I have to take videos every single day; even if I’m not making a big production out of something, something needs to be recorded. I have two OnlyFans pages. I have three Instagrams. I have two Twitters. I have two TikToks. If I stop, I’m not being fed into the algorithm anymore, and no one’s gonna see me. Your success is directly related to your views.”

And in online adult content creation, views are money. Marketing and social media promotion, then, are a huge part of the job for OnlyFans creators for a simple reason: it’s really the only way they’re able to advertise, and even then, it’s a gamble. 

“Online censorship is on a very delicate cusp worldwide right now, which means sex workers’ profiles are getting taken down arbitrarily and shadowbanned left and right due to increasingly conservative social media rules,”  Oxford, an adult content creator in Los Angeles, says. Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, and Tumblr’s ongoing policies of deplatforming and banning sex workers’ accounts became even more draconian following the 2018 passage of FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) and SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act). Billed as a means to combat human trafficking, SESTA/FOSTA severely limited sex workers’ ability to exist online—even when they’re not posting sexual content. “OnlyFans does not have an explore page,” Kenzie Anne explains. “There’s nothing pushing your page except for what you’re doing on other platforms, and unfortunately, all these platforms have silenced and blocked and deleted so many sex workers. I’ve had my own Instagram account deleted eight times, and I try to post the safest stuff possible.”

There is money to be made on OnlyFans and its competitors, but the behind-the-scenes costs do add up, sometimes for little payoff. “It’s a very difficult industry to break into in general,” Oxford shares. “The stress of being a backend admin whiz and a front facing customer service agent at all times is very taxing. There are days when I earn hundreds and stretches where I earn nothing.” Even creators who don’t hire any outside help and run their pages themselves have to factor in a litany of expenses, from location rental costs, costumes, camera equipment, and link masking services to editing software and attorney fees. For professionals like Dahl, there’s also the added expense of industry-specific biweekly STI testing, which runs $250 a pop. 

“I’m happy with where I am, but I still feel anxiety and the need to constantly market and expand and get new eyeballs on my content because it feels precarious right now economically,” Dahl explains. “The customer churn rate is higher. It’s harder than ever now to keep fans. In the last two years, I’ve lost about 30% of my business revenue, mostly due to fans leaving platforms.”

Related: Florida Governor Candidate Proposes “Sin Tax” on OnlyFans Creators

Like many other porn professionals, Dahl also pays for a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown service to cut down on piracy and leaks. Online porn creators are locked in a perpetual struggle to keep their content from being stolen and uploaded to “tube” sites, which offer up their work for free then keep the profits.

“The unseen labor in adult content creation comes down to the idea that the value of porn is not zero,” Jiz Lee, an adult film performer and producer at queer porn studio, CrashPadSeries.com, tells Playboy. “Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s easy. Over two decades of rampant piracy created a saturated, devalued market in which leaks remain one of the most commonly viewed sources. Needless to say, a consumer market raised on free videos does not convert very well. While some more reputable tube sites now pay a small portion of advertising income for views, it is nowhere near an appropriate pay rate for the value of a video clip. The profit in porn is incredibly low, despite everything thinking it’s ‘easy’ money.”  

And when performers do make money, financial barriers make it difficult to actually use it. Thanks to widespread financial discrimination and whorephobia throughout the banking industry, sex workers and adult content production companies are frequently debanked and barred from using common financial tools. Creators like Dahl have seen the bank accounts they use for their business closed with no warning, or seen their accounts on payment processors or platforms like Paypal, Patreon,  and Ko-Fi suspended multiple times. Banks often decline charges for adult businesses, and major financial institutions like Chase and Wells Fargo refuse to provide adult merchant accounts at all.  “Despite being a profession protected by the first amendment, virtually no bank will readily work with a production company who creates adult media,” Lee says. “Same goes for insurance. The effort to simply run a legally sound business is made more laborious due to industry stigma alone.”

After they’ve shot, edited, posted, and promoted their photos and videos, dealt with their inbox and administrative tasks, factored in platform fees (OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of their earnings) and paid off their business expenses, an online adult content creators’ workday still isn’t over. They still have to think about taxes—and since many of these workers are either independent contractors or have registered their businesses as LLCs or S-Corps, there’s a lot to think about. “It just gets more and more complicated every year, the longer I’m in the industry,” Dahl says. “The amount of times I have people in my comments being like, ‘Get a real job!’ and I’m like, I probably pay way more to the IRS than you do! I think my job’s pretty fucking real. The government says it is.”

Sophie Rain, a popular OnlyFans model and philanthropist who runs one of the platform’s highest-earning accounts, made headlines last year when she responded to far-right Florida gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback’s proposal to impose a “sin tax” on adult content creators like her. The financially circumspect candidate—called the first “groyper candidate,” though it’s a label he’s rejected— had called for a 50% tax on all OnlyFans income in the state to fund Florida’s public school system, framing it in explicitly religious terms and referencing Rain directly, saying she’s being “exploited.” “No one ever forced me to start an OnlyFans, it was MY decision, so I don’t need a 31-year-old man telling me I can’t sell my body online,” she told People. “I am a Christian, God knows what I am doing, and I know he is happy with me, that’s the only validation I need.”

Between June 2023 and November 2025, the creator raked in $95 million. Under Fishback’s proposal, “We would have to pay 50% to the state on top of the 37% I already pay to the government,” she said. “I would be more than happy to pay that if multi‑billion dollar corporations were also being properly taxed. But surprise, they’re not!” 

Fishback’s “sin tax” seems destined to die alongside his embattled campaign for governor, but the stigmatizing language he used to describe a staggeringly successful young businesswoman is sadly par for the course. The stigma that sex workers face for simply doing their jobs is a pervasive and discriminatory labor issue, and is an occupational hazard that established creators want their aspiring coworkers to understand before they “drop the link.” As Lil Tay and so many others before her quickly found out, achieving success as an OnlyFans creator isn’t always quick—and it’s certainly not easy. 

“I get really sad when I see 18-year-olds excited to launch their OnlyFans, and I’m like, you have no idea how many ego deaths you’re about to have in your twenties,” Kenzie Anne says with a rueful chuckle. “So many people throughout my journey have been like, ‘I kinda just want to quit my job and sell feet pics,’  and I’m like, ‘Yeah, maybe one day I’ll just wake up and be a fucking doctor.’ There isn’t a PhD in this, but it is your time, it’s your exposure, and the price you pay is the judgment you get from society. Is it that easy if you have to have it on your shoulders for the rest of your life?”