Photograph by Matthew Suárez

In December of 2021, Skye’s OnlyFans page earned a whopping $35,000.

From Disney to Dare

OnlyFans star Dare Taylor began posing in front of a camera when she was 18 and working as a Disney World princess. Theme park fans approached her about doing photoshoots and modeling, and she thought, Yeah, sure, I’ll give it a try! “I did pageants as a kid,” she explains to me over Zoom from her bedroom somewhere in Southern California, “so I know how to take pretty pictures. I did a few sessions for free, and then I was kind of like, you know, ‘Maybe I want to try doing some topless modeling and see what that’s like.’”

Photograph by Matthew Suárez

Before long, Dare was juggling three theme park jobs and modeling on the side. She had success posting adult-themed content on various social media platforms, including Model Mayhem, YouTube, Instagram, and Patreon. A video of her dressed up as a sexy Woody from Toy Story received 5.2 million views on TikTok. But that was nothing compared to the windfall she experienced after blowing up on OnlyFans, a subscription-based website where users post or purchase content. The site primarily consists of adult media, often NSFW videos and photos that are protected by a paywall. To gain access, users pay a monthly subscription fee to their favorite creators’ pages; the fees range from $4.99 to $49.99. From there, they can pay additional fees to receive private messages, curated content, or to tip their favorite creators.

Recalls Taylor, “Another model asked me, ‘Have you heard of OnlyFans?’ I was like, ‘I made one [post there], but it is not really doing that well. I don’t know if I will keep pursuing it.’ She said, ‘You need to keep pushing on OnlyFans. A song just came out where Beyonce is singing about it, and people are flying to that website.’” It was true: in May of 2020, Beyonce rapped about OnlyFans on a remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage.” After the remix was released, OnlyFans saw a 15% increase in visits, and people like Dare Taylor reaped the benefits of Beyonce’s shout-out. “When I first started on OnlyFans, I was making about the same as I was on Patreon. Then it was like a couple of thousand dollars more then I was making on Patreon, and then I doubled the money I was making. Then I tripled it. It just kept going up so fast. It was just this fluke that I met this girl and she told me to stick with it and then OnlyFans popped off. So, thank you Beyonce!” says Taylor, laughing.

It wasn’t just Beyonce: in 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, OnlyFans blew up in part because people were stuck at home with nothing to do. And with clubs and venues closed, adult entertainers struggled to find a new stream of revenue during the quarantine. Demand, meet supply: before long, OnlyFans had a captive audience of over 100 million subscribers; that audience spent $2.4 billion on the platform in 2020. The site began attracting celebrities: Bella Thorne, Chris Brown, Cardi B, and Blac Chyna all cashed in on the website’s popularity (it’s not all adult material). Rapper Bhad Bhabie made $1 million in under six hours when she made her debut.

Top earners on OnlyFans take in upwards of $100,000 a month; the site takes 20%. Now 23, Dare Taylor is in the top 1% of creators. To maintain her success, Taylor follows a simple formula that she calls The Girlfriend Experience. “I personally don’t make any explicit content — ‘explicit’ meaning open leg, or insertion. I don’t do any sex videos. I am pretty vanilla, basically PG. I like to give The Girlfriend Experience, kind of like, ‘This is what it would be like if you were dating me.’ I do a lot of back and forth [with users], sexting and just kind of like [asking], ‘What makes you excited?’ If they like shower videos, I will use my tripod and film myself in the shower. A lot of times, they just want to know about my day or my favorite lingerie. Just simple Girlfriend Experience things.”

Sugaring show

Creators Skye and Travis Sugaring are far from PG. The duo posts daily on OnlyFans: mostly nude content. They comment, like, and collaborate with other personalities in order to gain a larger following. Skye even started a San Diego OnlyFans meetup group to mentor, support, and find other local OnlyFan creators with whom to collaborate. An added bonus: when new users sign up under his link, OnlyFans pays him 5% of that user’s first-year earnings. But, explains Skye when we meet at a Mission Valley coffee shop, that bonus seldom pays off. “A lot of people don’t have a business mindset. They start off on OnlyFans, and six months later, they are like, ‘I am going to get back to my job. I am done,’ But with us, we see the potential, so we are going full force.” Travis nods his head in agreement, adding, “Honestly, we are working throughout the whole day,”

Dare Taylor says “I am pretty vanilla, basically PG. I like to give The Girlfriend Experience, kind of like, ‘This is what it would be like if you were dating me.’”

Photograph Courtesy Dare Taylor

Both Travis and Skye have around 500 videos apiece on their separate OnlyFans pages. The bulk of their videos show them performing sensual nude sugarings, massages, and sex acts. (Like waxing, sugaring removes hair from the body at the root.) They are famous for their Brazilians and undercarriage sugarings. “I think people are drawn to our videos because of the pain aspect, and all the bloopers.” Skye explains with a hearty chuckle.

Skye grew up in Vietnam and moved to the United States when he was 12. Though 45, he looks a decade younger. He has bright blonde, face-framing highlights in his otherwise shoulder length dark hair, and he wears a mauvey-pink shade of lipstick, chunky designer sunglasses, a black oversized t-shirt with a vivid rainbow-colored leopard on it, textured leggings, and mint green and yellow Nikes. Even without his Louis Vuitton bag, he stands out. Travis, on the other hand, blends in: soft spoken and reserved, he is waif-y, with short blonde hair and big blue eyes, and is dressed conservatively in a pale blue button-down and black jeans. The pair met shortly after 25-year-old Wisconsin-born Travis moved to San Diego. He started driving for Uber; Skye was a customer. Travis mentioned he was looking for an apartment, Skye had an extra room for rent. They have been roommates, business partners, and in an open relationship ever since.

Soon after the pandemic hit, the two trained estheticians found themselves at home and out of work with nothing to do. They decided to start posting tutorials on social media. Explains Skye, “We decided to go on TikTok. We didn’t think anything would come out of it. We were just having fun. But then, one of our videos went viral. I was basically just waxing somebody’s legs and the pain [they were in] made it so funny! We got 22 million views in one week!” Looking to monetize their new following, the pair started a YouTube channel, and it caught on. “People love seeing other people feeling the pain from sugaring. We had 100,000 followers on YouTube.” But due to the partial nudity in the videos, YouTube users began flagging their content, and the channel was shut down. A handful of subscribers reached out and encouraged the pair to consider posting on adult sites. They weren’t ready to make the leap into pornography, so they made new pages and continued posting on Instagram and YouTube. But though they attempted to keep their content PG-13, their channel continued getting shut down. Eventually, they pivoted to PornHub.

Explains Travis, “I think we only made about $80-$100 total our first month on Pornhub, but the next month, one of our videos went viral.”

Skye lowers his voice and adds, “It was of a client getting waxed who had...an adult accident. You know?”

I don’t know. “Pee?”

“No,” The pair answers in unison.

“Did they shit?” I whisper back in horror.

Travis raises an eyebrow and says, “Both.”

I am still not catching on, so Skye dumbs it down for me, “When you wax a guy, sometimes they ejaculate, and uh, farts happen. That happens, in real life. We are trained estheticians, so we just move on.”

Travis adds, “It’s that sense of touch. We wear gloves, but we have to move everything around to sugar.”

Travis (pictured) and Skye have around 500 videos a piece on their separate OnlyFans pages. The bulk of their videos show them performing sensual nude sugarings, massages, and sex acts.

Photograph by Matthew Suárez

Skye and Travis had the unfortunate fellow sign a release form prior to filming. The service is free after the waiver is signed, and the participant agrees to be videotaped. In place of payment, the waxee is given the gift of hairless private parts, a service which normally costs anywhere from $50-$100 and up. In exchange, Skye and Travis own the content. That particular video is what launched their career.

“Still, we didn’t make that much,” says Skye, “Every ten clicks, you get a penny. If you get 1 million views, that is $1000.” Still, with another viral video under their belt, Travis and Skye expanded to more adult websites. “A lot of our followers wanted to see more personal content of us. Many mentioned OnlyFans. I signed up and uploaded one video and left it there. I think, at that time, I only charged $10 for a monthly subscription. That first month, I only made $8 because OnlyFans takes 20%. But then Pornhub got shut down. They could no longer accept credit cards. The credit card companies didn’t want anything to do with them; I believe they only accept Bitcoin now. So, we could no longer sell videos on there. The same thing happened with OnlyFans, but OnlyFans was able to reverse it. We uploaded all our content [to OnlyFans]. The second month on that site, we made $3000!”

“Not a lot,” says Travis, “but still decent.”

For six months, they averaged $3000 a month. Then they began posting more risqué content, and they reaped the benefits. In December of 2021, Skye’s page earned a whopping $35,000. Though Skye is quick to explain that much of that success comes from smart business as much as it does explicit content. “Collaboration is the key to growing on OnlyFans. We are open to anything when we collab. People can choose whatever their comfort level is. I can collaborate with you, and you can simply just wear lingerie and I can just say, ‘Oh, look at her curves,’ and that would be it. A couple might come to us and say, ‘Oh we don’t want to do anything with you guys, but we love your channel, and we want to be featured on it.’ They can come and do ‘their thing.’ We videotape and do the narration.”

Skye says that potential collaborators are asked to begin by sending a nude photo, “because, you know, that is what our channel is. Before they can even collab, we get a nude photo, plus their driver’s license, and they need to sign a release form.” After a collaboration, Skye and Travis often end up with a slew of new subscribers. “We are hosting a meetup and meet and greet on July 4th. I rented a suite so we can also film content. It will be a win-win.”

Escort to e-sub

One of Travis and Skye’s collaborators is Kierra Ken. A week after meeting them, I set up an interview with Kierra (they/them) at Krakatoa in Golden Hill. When I get there and take a seat at a table in back, Kierra is a no show. Upon texting, they explain that their last two Uber drivers cancelled. I offer to pick them up, adding, “My car is piece of shit, and I might be a murderer.”

“Me too, and my yard is a piece of shit, so we are even,” they respond. They live in Southeast San Diego off a street cluttered with chain-link fences and small houses turned into multiple apartment units. Most of the cars that line their street are beat up junkers like mine. And nearly all of the windows have bars on them. Kierra greets me outside. They are pint sized; I can’t imagine they weigh much more than 100 pounds. They sport an androgynous look with naturally curly hair cropped into a pixie cut and dyed psychedelic purple and blue. Kierra wears a tie-dyed shirt that reads: Support your local drug dealer. It is knotted to reveal a pierced belly button. Their septum is also pierced, as well as both nostrils. A snake tattoo runs the length of one forearm.

Kierra’s path to creating their OnlyFans page is long one. Now 30, they got started in sex work at 19. “I started out, technically, escorting. I think if I hadn’t done that first, I would have been naïve going into OnlyFans and other platforms. I was more prepared to ask for what I asked for. I wasn’t going to be lowballed, and I had boundaries.” By this time, we are sitting at a small table on the patio at Krakatoa. Directly across from us sits a leathery, disheveled man; he is drinking a Delirium Nocturnum beer while reading from the Bible. From time to time, he shouts out a Bible verse, or yells across the street to offer a jovial greeting to passersby. Each time he shouts, Kierra smiles before patiently continuing.

What initially led Kierra into sex work was an ad on Backpage. “I saw a post for an agency that was like, ‘We can get you dates!’ So, me and my roommate decided to do it. The [owner] told us we needed to give a certain amount back to him regardless of how much [the client] paid us. The only time you did not have to give him a percentage, was if you got there and they turned you away. He also had a stipulation for them: they needed to give you gas money to cover your transportation. He would not take anything out of our gas money.” Kierra found that most times, when they showed up for dates, the date would look at them and say, “I thought you were going to be white!” They came to learn that the escort service owner was catfishing these men, posing as a blonde sorority girl type. He would send a photo and saucy messages before scheduling dates; then, prior to the date, he would tell the client, “Sorry I can’t make it. But I’ll send a friend.” That friend was often Kierra.

When Kierra got hip to the situation, they decided to take advantage. “The whole thing ended with that agency, because I just kept telling them I was only getting gas money. Instead, I would negotiate the price with [the client], cut them a deal, and pocket all of it.” A sly smile creeps across Kierra’s face as they tell this tale. The agency eventually found out about the setup after a three-way went sideways. “My roommate and I would sometimes drive each other to dates and wait in the parking lot. We had this tradition where after a date, we would drive to the McDonalds all the way in La Mesa because it was open late, and get chicken nuggets and fries as a reward to ourselves. So, she was waiting there, and this guy was like, ‘Did you say your roommate is here? I would rather have two than one.’ He went to the ATM and pulled out another $600. But he could not perform. He was so drunk. I mean no one was judging him. He was like, ‘You can just go. Just take the money,’ But then, after we left, he called the agency and was like, ‘They are scamming you!’”

The next day, Kierra received countless angry phone calls from the escort company owner. “He left us a bunch of crazy messages saying, ‘You owe me all this money!’ I called him back and said, ‘I am not going to pay you anything. You are not going to report me because you are online pimping, sir. Don’t call me again and I won’t take any more of your clients!’” Kierra explains this with a small laugh and a shake of their head. The leathery man at the table across from us shouts a scripture quote and looks directly at me. We switch tables.

Because of OnlyFans, Kierra no longer needs to meet paying customers in person. However, due to the roles they play online, Kierra has noticed some negative effects in their everyday life.

Photograph by Matthew Suárez

From escorting, Kierra decided to move into more online work. They were burnt out and tired. “I had a very sex-positive roommate at that time who told me about Tumblr. I thought maybe that was another opportunity for me to try [sex work] in a different way. At that time, Tumblr was on the outs; most people weren’t using it. I thought it would be a safe place for me to be anonymous. I thought it was a lot less likely someone from my city would come across it.” Before long, Kierra began receiving messages from people on Tumblr asking for videos and personalized content. So Kierra began creating google drive folders containing explicit photos. They shared the password with fans who purchased the content through PayPal or a cash app. “It was perfect, because Tumblr did not take anything. The only thing that kind of messed it up with Tumblr is that they flagged most of my posts [for adult content].”

Over the years, Kierra experimented with different platforms: FreeLiveCams, Instagram, and Twitch. They figured out what their audience likes to see them do. For instance, Kierra has played Dungeons and Dragons in lingerie. They cosplay, mostly in a cat suit complete with butt-plug tail. They post videos performing sex acts — alone and with other people. And they muckbang in lingerie: basically just a live video of Kierra eating an insane amount of food while people watch. “A lot of the guys that subscribe to my page just want to see me doing something nerdy that they are into, with like an element of fem — in lingerie. The first video I posted was of me hitting my bong in full cat — I had my ears and my tail, and lingerie on. I was just dancing around my apartment, hitting my bong. And that is what brings all the e-doms to the yard, I guess.” Kierra chuckles

I need Kierra to define that term. They explain that an e-dom is basically an individual who enjoys dominating their partner online through various kinky activities. During the course of our interview, Kierra will graciously define several more terms for me among them: unicorn, e-submissive, flagellation cross, House of Black (a local swing club), Thad’s (another local adults-only swing clubhouse), pet, cash pig, and financial domination. I will leave our interview with a newly expanded knowledge of San Diego’s kink culture. Kierra explains that most of their subscribers on OnlyFans are in the “kink community.” “I say that in air quotes, because I don’t know how many of them are stepping out and doing the things they talk about online. When I started out, I was like an e-submissive. What that means is, subscribers were basically paying for content of me either in my full cat — so that I was like their pet — or they would pay me to talk to them and basically submit to them online. On OnlyFans, they pay to message me or purchase separate content. I started with a free page where there was a bunch of locked content that you had to pay to unlock. I had a couple of freebies on there. I also had a paid page. I think it started out at $5 or $6, because I did not have very much on there. Now I charge a monthly subscription fee of $20.” According to Kierra, their largest monthly payout on OnlyFans has been $2000. However, they have big plans to increase that.

Sex site as safe space

When I ask Dare Taylor what her biggest payday has been on OnlyFans, she won’t tell me. She isn’t even comfortable letting me know her average monthly income. But she does say that she rents a four-bedroom home with a backyard pool and drives a luxury car. The average rent for a four-bedroom in her neighborhood is $10,000 a month.

Taylor’s hesitation to share this information stems from fear. “There is this thing that has happened to a couple of my friends. Girls that have OnlyFans accounts are being targeted online and having their Instagrams and their TikToks deleted. Scammers are making fake profiles of us and then claiming that ours is the impersonation. The platforms are deleting us. A lot of these platforms are now using AI technology. So if 12 accounts report someone as an impersonator, [the websites believe] they must be. Instead of hiring someone to vet through this, pages are just getting removed. They lose their income, just like that. A lot of us don’t qualify as celebrities. We don’t have that blue checkmark. We are just online girls, and we lose our accounts because of it.”

It has not happened to her, but she lives in fear of being next. “It’s like walking into your job and getting fired and them claiming you never worked there. It is happening left and right with tons of creators right now. A lot of women that are on OnlyFans have articles coming out saying they are making $30,000, $40,000, $100,000 a month. All these scammers are thinking, ‘Well if she has that much money, if I delete her account, maybe I can take some of that and scam her into buying it back.’ It is such a horrible thing to have happen, to lose what they have worked so hard for, and for no reason. Just because someone else finds out you are making money and they want it. I mean, give us a break! We have been through so much.”

I wonder what she means by that last sentence. I ask if she often feels taken advantage of by subscribers. “No,” she replies, then pauses before continuing. “I have had really great experiences, but it has been a learning process.” At the beginning of her career, Taylor worked with a lot of different photographers. “I got really lucky in that the first six months of modeling. I had some really great photographers that helped make it a comfortable experience. I did not ever feel shameful about what I was doing or that it was wrong. But a lot of these guys worked blue collar jobs, and they wanted a way to express themselves through photography. Sometimes they would say things that were really creepy like, ‘Oh I like the way your butt crack looks!’ They would just say weird things. But I wanted to get paid, so I would just say, ‘Thanks?’ and kind of divert them. There were several times where I would have to check people and say, ‘Hey, that is not appropriate,’ and try to keep things professional.”

She did her best to put safety measures in place, but they did not always work. “I am a people pleaser, so back then, it was really hard to say, ‘I am uncomfortable.’ That changed after I was harassed at a photoshoot.” Taylor shakes her head and corrects herself: “I mean, not harassed,. Sexually assaulted in a hotel room. [A photographer] wanted to shoot late. That should’ve been a red flag to get him to rebook. I do remember him being pushy when I first showed up. That should’ve been another moment where I said, ‘You know, this is not something I am comfortable with. I don’t want to do this.’ I should’ve left. I am not thankful for the experience, but it gives me the power now to say no to a lot of things that I didn’t back then. There were two other times where [a photographer] was trying to be my sugar daddy, and I was like, ‘This is not something I am interested in. I came here for a professional shoot. If you can’t see me in that light, you need to go.’ Luckily, I have grown out of that people-pleasing phase.”

Taylor credits OnlyFans for creating a safer place for models like her. “For as much as people say OnlyFans is such a bad website and that we are promoting porn, it has provided so much safety for so many of these girls. They don’t have to go and shoot with a stranger in a hotel room. It has really cut down on underage sex trafficking.”

Pay pig empowerment

Because of OnlyFans, Kierra no longer needs to meet paying customers in person. However, due to the roles they play online, Kierra has noticed some negative effects in their everyday life. “I wouldn’t say it stopped me from being who I was in the real world. But during quarantine, when I wasn’t going out, being an [e-submissive] became my every day, and it bothered me a lot. Submitting to people online is mentally taxing, simply because [subscribers] are saying things to me that normally, if someone on the street said that to me, I would punch them in the face.” Kierra also saw repercussions in their real-life relationships. “I had several male friends that asked me to hang out, happy hour or whatever, somewhere public, and they’d ask, because they knew about [OnlyFans] or my previous paid dates, if I was open to hooking up with them. When I would say no, more often than not, they would offer money, instead of accepting my no, like a friend would.”

That feeling of being taken advantage of made Kierra want to switch things up. They took a break from OnlyFans. Now, Kierra has a rebrand in the works. “There are a lot of people out there that take advantage — not just guys, but all genders. And if that is the case, why not use those people? But rather than physically, where I would have to put myself in a position to be with someone that I genuinely don’t even like, I can just do it online. If I am going to do it, and devote my time to it, I want to do it in a way that is the healthiest for me. I want to be able to say, ‘I don’t want to do this right now, and if you want to do this, that means the price has to go up.’”

After spending almost a decade as an online submissive, Kierra is taking on a new practice: financial domination. “Financial domination is when someone literally just wants you to control their wallet for them. They get off on you either spending their money or demeaning them. It’s mostly just a relationship where someone wants you to spend their money freely.” Kierra came up with the financial domination idea after stumbling across an account on MyFreeCams where a user did something similar. “She wasn’t even really taking her clothes off. She was just on there, smoking, cooking, playing music, and talking. She had this army of what she called pay pigs that just watched her. She would come on and say, ‘I am going to be here, and you aren’t going to talk to me today. You are just going to watch what I do.’ That really appealed to me. I like the idea of having control over someone else. So that is where I am trying to go now. I am trying to curate enough content to come back out with like a month to two months’ worth of queued posts, so that everything is already going.”

When I ask them if they believe that this new role will be more lucrative, Kierra nods and says, “That is why I want to make the switch to financial domination, because I now realize that OnlyFans can be super lucrative without being super mentally taxing. There are people that will pay me $500 an hour to literally just step on their back in heels. The goal is to eventually move somewhere where I can have a dungeon in my place, so instead of going somewhere to rent that, I can have my own.”

Where do you rent a dungeon?

“Anywhere. Any storefront can be turned into a dungeon. I have rented out massage parlor spaces, but they were always too small. I would like to set up something similar to the pool house at Thad’s. They have a flagellation cross, a couple of beds, they have some swings, a cage. Basically anything you can think of for kink, they have it. That is what I would like. By 2024, ideally, I would like to be doing a combination of OnlyFans and exotic dancing. I am trying to get hired on at a [strip] club. I considered Little Darlings, Pacers, and Pure Platinum. I want to get good enough to have my own pole dance, even though lap dances pay more. I am not really into dancing on dudes.”

What next?

Dare Taylor has her own plans, plans that don’t necessarily include OnlyFans. “I used to worry about all of this going away, because it can, like tomorrow. And that is okay. I have been pivoting into an acting career. Acting has always been something I wanted to do, but I could never afford to do it. Growing up, I would audition for local plays in Minnesota. But, when it came time to having a job or doing acting stuff, [I] would always have to pay bills. Now I have the luxury that if I don’t book a job, I don’t have to sweat it. It’s super easy to say, ‘Well, that job was not meant for me, I am going to go back to my online stuff.’” And she believes she has an edge, thanks to her online background. “The industry is changing. There are so many times when I go to auditions in LA where they want me to be topless, make out with a guy, or they want a full nude body shot, and I am like, ‘Great, I do that every day.’ So I would not be afraid to be on set in front of people naked, or have my body being on a television show. I would feel no shame over it, because I am so used to it now. So, yeah sure, hypothetically, things could end for anyone tomorrow, but you can’t live life like that. You need trust that you are in the right place at the right time and things are going to come your way. I am sure you have seen that on red carpets now, it is not like Jason Derulo anymore, or Rihanna. It’s Addison Rae from TikTok. The internet has changed the way we view celebrities. I would love to be the one who gets notoriety for being an OnlyFans girl that goes mainstream. That would be awesome!”

Skye and Travis have big plans, too: they are moving to Vegas “I have two goals,” says Skye. “To make $100,000 a month as a content creator and to move to Vegas and get a place on the strip [to use as] a collaboration studio. Vegas has unlimited visitors, so I can collab with people all over the world. That is how I will keep my channel even when I am 70, because I can always have people come and collaborate. And when I get old, I might not have new content, but my library will still make money for the rest of my life, because somebody that has never seen my content before can still click and watch all my videos. When you have a [normal] job and you quit, that’s it, there is no more money coming in. With OnlyFans, you own the content, and people will continue to pay for it.”

For now, Travis and Skye are living meagerly and squirreling away most of their income. Travis makes around $3000 a month while Skye brings in anywhere from $10-$20,000 a month. “We are saving as much as we can for the Vegas move,” Travis explains.

Skye nods and looks at Travis, adding, “Most of the money [Travis] has earned on his channel, he is saving for medical school. He just applied. He wants to be a plastic surgeon.” Travis nods, sheepishly.

Skye smiles before reaching across the table for my hand, adding, “I think something important that people should know is that anyone can do this. It’s just like Instagram. Some of that content is very risqué, and you can do the same or less on OnlyFans. Like you, you could do a video on OnlyFans on how to be a writer — while you are naked. That could be your niche. Anyone can do OnlyFans. You just have to be creative. You have to put in the work and be consistent every day. If you only do it sometimes, you will just earn some money.”

Travis interrupts: “Treat it just like a job!”