Ten years ago I dipped my toes into making independent porn. At first, I did couples cam shows with my partner on Chaturbate, and then expanded into content creation and clip making. I worked in the online porn world for many years before transitioning to phone sex and ultimately, escorting.
When I began, I was still doing work outside of the sex industry and didn’t intend on building a career here; I saw it as a side hustle and a means of personal exploration. I soon learned, though, that porn isn’t something that you can just do “on the side.” The longer you’re in it, the more it takes over your life, changing most things about it. Not only is the effort required to be successful all-consuming, but getting naked for money changes people’s perceptions of you.
My time in the sex industry has given me invaluable gifts, the most important of which are the resources to care for my family when conventional employment was out of reach. That being said, I have paid a price for that, as all sex workers do. In my case, it has been worth it. It’s a personal choice, but one that’s easier to make when you understand what you are getting into. Here are 7 things I think are important to know before diving in:
1. The indie porn market is over-saturated
When my partner and I first started camming and shooting independent porn in 2014, it was still possible to come into the space without a significant social media following, build an audience, and make some money. Since then – especially since the boom in independent content creation that happened as a result of the 2020 COVID lockdown – the market has become over-saturated, making it much harder to break into. If you are shooting your porn to explore your sexuality or to fulfill exhibitionist tendencies, it probably doesn’t matter how saturated the market is. However, if you are shooting porn to supplement or replace your income, know that it will take significant time and commitment and that even with both, there are no guarantees.
2. Porn is not easy money
Even though civilians consistently joke that they can just start an OnlyFans account if their other career ambitions fail, making porn is not the easy money it is often imagined to be. Mainstream media has done us no favors in this regard, consistently highlighting the earnings of top performers and thus implying that earning 6-figures a year is within reach of the average performer, let alone someone brand new to it. The truth is that while the median income on OnlyFans is better than that of other gig work like driving Uber or delivering for InstaCart, it is still only $4995/year, less than $500/mo. That is not enough money to rent an apartment, especially one that would give you enough privacy to consistently pump out new content, much less to live high on the hog. Also importantly, most Onlyfans creators make even less than that. According to some estimations, the average income before taxes is $180/mo. The higher median number is inflated because the top 1% on the platform earn 33% of the gross revenue, and the top 10% earn 73%. Everyone else – 90% of all OnlyFans creators – is just scraping by.
3. If you want to be successful you will have to diversify your income sources
Content creators who have been around for any length of time know that in order to ensure longevity and consistency of income, you cannot rely on any one platform. With political pressure from American conservative organizations like National Center on Sexual Exploitation (Formerly Morality in Media) that have been actively working to shut down porn for decades and are only picking up steam, all platforms are precarious. After all, it was only in March this year that Pornhub shut down access to the entire state of Texas as a result of the state’s age verification laws. Moreover, in 2021, Onlyfans announced that it would stop allowing erotic content on its site after being pressured to do so by credit card companies, only to reverse that decision a week later. Unfortunately for independent creators, despite the fact that the decision was reversed, they had already suffered a huge economic blow when customers fled the platform in the wake of the announcement.
4. Diversifying your income is not as simple as just putting all of your content on multiple platforms
There are many different ways to make money off your porn: subscription sites like Fansly and OnlyFans, clip stores like ManyVids, free hub sites that drive traffic to your content like PornHub, fetish sites like Clips4Sale, and live webcam sites where you can also sell content like MyFreeCams. What a lot of people don’t know before entering the industry is that the type of content that is allowed on each site is determined by the contracts that those sites have with the credit card companies that process their payments. This means that the rules that govern what is and what is not allowed differ from site to site. For example, while you may be able to do pee content on ManyVids, you cannot duplicate it on MFC Share. It is your responsibility to make sure you comply with the rules of each site at the risk of having your account shut down. For more information on what is allowed on each site, model and performer Sophie Ladder keeps an updated spreadsheet on her website.
5. Making porn is only one small part of the job.
One of the nice things about making porn is that there are few barriers to entry and it can be artistically satisfying. With as little as a smartphone, you can create, edit, and upload videos to various platforms and start engaging with fans. However, it is not enough to create and upload good content. If you hope to make any money and build a fan base, you must create and maintain social media profiles, learn to work around the shadowbans on the platforms so that paying customers can find you, engage with other models who are appealing to the same fanbase, and build relationships with your fans. The admin work that it takes to do this will take more time and energy than making porn itself.
6. You must be prepared to have your body, your identity, and your sexuality both praised and critiqued in ways that you can’t imagine until you experience it
The blessing of putting your body and your sexuality out there for public consumption is that you find out that there are people who like everything about you, even the things that you don’t like about yourself. I was shocked when I first started camming to find out that the very things I didn’t like about myself were the things that drew people to me. The experience made me reconsider my “imperfections” and realize that human desire is much more diverse than we are raised to believe. The flip side of this is that other people will pick you apart, pointing out everything they think is wrong with you. The trick to maintaining your mental health as a performer is learning to focus on the people who feed you, both financially and emotionally, and to let those voices drown out the negative ones.
7. Doing pornography is not something you can undo
The most important thing to consider is that living under sex work stigma will change you. People in your life will find your porn, neighbors will gossip about you, family members may shun you, and partners may not be able to handle it. After some time in the industry, you will realize that it shapes most of your interactions because, in the words of Lorelei Lee, “It will be civilians for whom the knowledge that you’ve been naked for money will be a kind of flattening – a thing that they cannot see around.” The stigma is grinding, and it is something that you will have to live with forever.
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