A popular TikTok influencer claims she makes $US350,000 ($531,000) per month on adult content subscription site OnlyFans.
Tara Lynn, who goes by the handle Taraswrld, has amassed nearly five million followers on TikTok since 2019, and previously sparked controversy on the platform for revealing she spent $US10,000 on Harry Styles concert tickets.
But the Los Angeles-based creator has also sold sexually explicit content on OnlyFans since May 2021.
In a recent interview with the podcast Plan Bri Uncut, she left the hosts stunned after they asked how much she earns.
“Until like this past October I would make like $US100,000 to $US150,000 a month,” she said.
“And then I made a TikTok … I vlogged like me getting ready for my OnlyFans shoot, and it did so f**king well. So now it’s like, $US350,000 a month. It’s insane.”
She had previously spoken with Narcity about her eye-watering income, which works out to about $US4.2 million ($6.4 million) a year.
“On days that I’m shooting, I like to go to a hotel and film content for 12-15 hours so that I can get a few weeks of content in! I like to try to go and do this every two weeks but in between that time I will randomly shoot any content that comes to mind,” she wrote in an email to the website.
“I’ve never used a videographer or a photographer because I feel like that’s a little impersonal when it comes to something as intimate as this and it’s just so much more fun for me to do alone.”
A clip of the interview went viral on Twitter after being shared by podcast host Isabella Riley Moody. “Women are so lost today,” she captioned the video.
Reactions to the claim were mixed.
“Men are the ones who are lost. She is making huge amounts of money off this and I kinda respect it,” one Twitter user wrote.
“You’re jealous because your media personality doesn’t make what she makes in a month, in a year,” another wrote.
“Oh so now you guys hate capitalism,” a third said.
But many agreed with Moody.
“A lot would change in the world if young men cultivated an ethic that it’s completely beneath their dignity to ever pay directly for any sexual service of any kind,” wrote author James Lindsay.
One user argued conservatives “must choose between worshipping free market capitalism and the social good, between worshipping individual liberty and the social good”, saying “if even one young girl” can make $US350,000 a month, “a million more will try, no matter the individual or group outcomes”.
Some users raised questions about Lynn’s claim, noting other “top OnlyFans earners” had made similar statements.
Last year, British OnlyFans model Sophie Dee quoted the same figure in articles promoting the platform, saying she went from surviving “on welfare” as a child to raking in $US350,000 a month.
“The $350,000 a month figure is also cited by other OnlyFans ‘top earners’, and I find that suspicious,” one Twitter user wrote.
It comes after Australian rapper Iggy Azalea joined the site in January, with widespread reports at the time that she had made “over $US300,000” in the first 24 hours.
But Azalea debunked those claims, saying the “number was pulled outta thin air”.
Last month she defended her move to the platform, saying she was “making so much money that I won’t say how much it is”.
According to some reports, former Disney actress Bella Thorne is the top earning OnlyFans creator, earning $US11 million a year.
OnlyFans paid out more than $US500 million ($760 million) to its reclusive Ukrainian-American owner over the last two years, The Guardian reported in September.
Leonid Radvinsky, 40, is the sole shareholder in the highly-profitable UK-based platform he purchased from its founders in 2018.
Users spent $US4.8 billion on the site in the 12 months to September 2021, with pre-tax profits rising 615 per cent to a record $US432 million, according to its most recent accounts.
Mr Radvinsky, a Florida-based pornographer who shuns media, had been paying himself as much as $US45 million a month in dividends, The Guardian reported.
OnlyFans chief executive Ami Gan said in October that the company had paid out $US10 billion to its more than two million creators since 2016.
