How Does the OnlyFans Niche Work and How Can a Media Buyer Make Money From It

Blog » How Does the OnlyFans Niche Work and How Can a Media Buyer Make Money From It

OnlyFans is a sub-niche within the 🔞 adult vertical. It’s a growing segment, as the platform itself is seeing an increase in both users and their earnings.

OnlyFans  ☝️ isn’t just about adult content. The platform is full of fitness coaches, musicians, psychologists and other types of “gurus.” Still, the majority of creators are webcam models — and that’s who we’re going to focus on.

There’s already a huge amount of content about this niche, but most of it is overloaded with details. And that makes it hard to grasp the core idea. We’re going to cover only the things that 📌 really matter for media buyers — without the unnecessary clutter.

How does One Work on OnlyFans?

The main goal for OnlyFans models is to 💰 make money on their content. I means that there are two types of users here: content creators who get paid for it and regular users who pay for subscription and make other purchases. Still there are a couple more 🔗 links in this adult chain.

Manager — the person who runs the model’s account (either on her behalf or together with him/her), handling sales, chats and warm-up strategies.

Agency — brings together models, managers, analysts and sometimes even media buyers. It often provides a workspace for models as well.

The classic 💳 money-making scheme on OnlyFans looks like this ⬇️

• Traffic generation and building a loyal audience;
• Warming up is done through a free OnlyFans page, a TikTok channel or a profile on another social platform. At this stage the goal is to attract loyal followers and spark their interest;
• Monetization — once the users subscribe to the paid page, the goal is to get as much money as possible from them.

Income doesn’t come just from paid subscriptions. It also includes:

• Pay-per-view (PPV) messages;
• Private chats;
• Custom exclusives (fetishes, personalized videos);
• Tips and donations.

It means that both individual creators and full-scale model agencies make money in the adult segment on OnlyFans. These same agencies often go on and launch their own CPA networks to scale up traffic volumes.

Specifics of the OnlyFans niche in Affiliate Marketing

The need to warm up a user before monetization puts the webcam vertical in a unique position. The classic “get traffic — get leads” approach doesn’t work here. Here are a few 🔎 peculiarities that set webcam apart from other verticals:

The offer is a specific model. In nutra traffic goes to a product, in dating — to a platform. But in webcam you have to choose a particular model to attract subscribers to. Each model has her own average stats, which help you decide whether she’s worth directing traffic to.

Here are the key metrics to pay attention to:

• ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) — the average earnings per user. For example, media buyers attracts 1,000 users to a model’s page. Out of those, 100 subscribe and pay $5 for the first month ($500 total). Then 50 of them renew for two more months ($500 more), and 10 spend an additional $25 each ($250) on private chats. In total, the model earns $1,250 from those 1,000 users — making the ARPU $1.25.
• Conversion — the percentage of users who upgrade from the free subscription to the paid one. If this number is 100%, it means the model doesn’t offer a free plan and all users subscribe for a fee.
• ON 25 / UR (on/under) — rankings in the top and bottom charts based on subscriptions and donations. The lower the ON number, the more successful the model. For UR it’s the opposite — a lower number means lower performance.
• 🏆 — the percentage of subscribers who purchase extra services.
• Commission — the share the model pays you from the payments made by the subscribers you brought in.
• Sources and Countries tabs — clicking these two tabs shows which countries and traffic sources the model does not accept.

Another ❗ key feature of the webcam vertical is that Tier-3 traffic is not welcome. Even Tier-2 traffic is often unwanted too, as users from these regions are less likely to pay for subscriptions — and even if they do, it’s rarely a long-term commitment. So 🤷‍♂️ focus on Tier-1 countries.

The only widely used payout model in the OnlyFans niche is revshare. There is a flow where webmasters get paid for simply bringing in a new subscriber (either on a free or trial plan). For example, if an affiliate brings in 10 new subscribers, they earn $10. But this model is rare and usually offered only to experienced webmasters who can back their traffic quality with solid case studies. 

You can work in the OnlyFans vertical either directly with models or through affiliate programs (APs). The second option is safer, as there have been cases where models ghosted media buyers and didn’t pay.

Webcam Affiliate Programs

One of the most popular affiliate programs is Only Traffic, but it’s not the only one — there are several other networks you can use to run traffic to webcam models (especially since the webcam niche goes far beyond just OnlyFans). Let’s take a closer look at them.

Only Traffic

The most popular affiliate network featuring OnlyFans models.

On the main page you’ll see a list of models along with a potential earnings calculator. The network pays out only via revshare with a minimum payout threshold of $100.

Crakrevenue

An affiliate network with a strong focus on the adult niche — it offers traffic opportunities for webcam platforms, individual models and even adult games.

In addition to revshare, there are also fixed payouts for bringing in fans and generating sales. There’s also multi-CPA — a hybrid model that combines both lead-based payments and revshare.

AWEmpire by LiveJasmin

It is the OnlyTraffic equivalent for the Spanish platform LiveJasmin. It offers four payout models: per lead (trial/subscription), per sale, revshare and a mixed format.

The offers here are not individual models but rather video categories — like Cameraboys, Livesexasian, Mytrannycams, etc. Payouts are made automatically twice a month, once your balance reaches the $100 minimum.

Traffic Sources: What You Need to Know in 2025

The standard ⛲ traffic sources include Reddit, YouTube Shorts, Twitter and Instagram Reels. This is a conditionally free traffic approach with the following strategy:

• You create a model account and regularly post photos and videos. On Reddit this strategy includes replying in comments and artificially boosting upvotes to drive more traffic to the account. On Instagram you’ll need to post more often, especially Reels, to attract followers. To generate more traffic, people often use auto-comments, story views, and even DM spam, but the last method is strongly discouraged.
• The model’s account includes a 🔗 referral link to her OnlyFans page . In regular posts, there’s a subtle but consistent call to action directing followers to the OnlyFans page.

Example of accounts for driving traffic to OnlyFans.

However, keep in mind one important detail — not all models accept traffic from the platforms mentioned above.

Reddit is considered to be a top-tier source of conditionally free traffic for the webcam, especially since it brings in some of the most solvent users. What’s more, it has a dedicated 💋 NSFW section where erotic photos can be published. However, Reddit is also highly competitive and every year it becomes harder to generate significant traffic volumes from it. On top of that, the platform keeps tightening its rules, making it more difficult to create accounts for affiliate marketing.

The main ✅ advantage of the free traffic lies in the following:

• You’ve created a batch of accounts, possibly using several different strategies;
• Some time later you identify which sources are bringing in the most “profitable” users;
• After that you focus on scaling the most effective accounts — you simply keep posting content there, boosting comments and other activities.

However, driving free traffic  is a very 🛠 resource consuming strategy.

Another category of sources — push, pop and native traffic. This traffic is paid, but it has several ✅ advantages over free one:

• Easy to launch. Almost all push networks are tolerant of explicit ads, and Onlyfans accounts are considered a “white niche” for them;
• Minimal effort. All tasks are narrowed to publishing ads, optimizing and occasionally topping up the ad budget. As long as the campaign runs (and it can last several months), the workload is minimal.

Since many offers work on a revshare model, the question arises: 🤔 “How to optimize advertising?” There is actually a well-established quality criterion for ads. If acquiring a new member on a free plan or trial costs less than $0.8–1, the campaign is successful and you will likely make profit. If new fans cost more, you probably won’t make it. At a minimum, the cost of acquiring a new member should be lower than the ARPU for that particular model. Based on this criterion, optimizing ads is quite easy.

If the cost of acquiring a new fan exceeds the ARPU, you are almost guaranteed to operate at a loss.

Case studies as an Example

Let’s look at a couple of cases that clearly show how an affiliate can earn on the webcam.

Fan acquisition at $0.26 via keywords from premium sources via HilltopAds

The affiliate in this case faced a declining traffic from Reddit, and decided to try the HilltopAds network (push and pop). The ad link led to a landing page offering a 30-day free subscription.

At first the affiliate used popunder ads from premium sources. As a result, spending $777, he gained 412 fans, 14 of whom spent a total of $215 between December 7 and January 18. With these numbers, profit seemed very unlikely, so the approach was optimized.

Now, the affiliate targeted users entering specific search queries. In this case, the keyword was “onlyfans.”

As a result, with a spend of $297, he managed to get 1,132 fans who, between December 27 and January 19, spent $255. That means the average cost per member was $0.26, which is a great number that is likely to generate profit in the long run.

$6,055 from 20,000 fans on OnlyFans via Twitter (X): three workflows for working with the social network

Partners set up fan acquisition from Twitter in three stages. The initial steps were as follows:

• Launch of 200–300 accounts to post tweets with hashtags every 5–10 hours;
• Use of content without nudity to avoid bans;
• Accounts were banned within 5–7 days, making this method ineffective.

That is why later later they took a slightly different approach. They created model accounts and included them in retweet groups for sharing content among models. Manual testing of this method showed the ability to attract 25–30 subscribers per day from a single account. Therefore, they automated the approach to scale up the volume. They also integrated Keitaro to determine which Twitter accounts were bringing what kind of traffic.

As a result, the team came up with three strategies:

• 50 to 1. There is one main model account and 50 assistant accounts. The assistants participate in RT-groups, repost content and promote the main account;
• No Name. Anonymous models are used with face-blurred content. They post it and their profiles contain links to the OnlyFans landing page;
• Clickable Content. Posts are uploaded with the image that is a clickable link leading to the OnlyFans landing page.

In the end, the team created a network of approximately 5,000 accounts with a total audience of 8,000,000 users. They attracted 20,043 subscribers on OnlyFans and earned $6,055.

Thus, there are no ready-made recipes for earning in the webcam. To make money with model affiliate programs, you need to know how to work with traffic and, most importantly, have some creativity in finding new approaches. The latter is especially important given that current methods constantly burn out like retweet groups, which have become less effective recently.