A creator who stopped taking her clothes off for work has revealed her income went up – because fans now pay her to sneeze and to walk around in swishy tracksuit bottoms.
Tatiana Vex gave up explicit content several months ago and says the decision cost her nothing at all.
She now pulls in around £11,000 ($15,000 USD) a month from roughly 12,000 fans spread across eight different sites, with four more platforms launching over the next two months.
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And she says she does it working what she calls extremely part time.
“When you think of an OnlyFans girl you think of something very specific,” said Tatiana, who turns 36 this month and posts on Instagram as @tatianavex.
“But you can literally monetise anything.
“I make the most of my money right now from sneezing, or from walking around in a pair of Adidas wind pants because people like the swish.
“You don’t have to be an explicit content creator to succeed in the adult space.”
Before any of it, she was pulling pints.
She said: “I was a bartender. The bartender to content creator pipeline is a common one.
“I got laid off during Covid and just moved into digital creation.
“Turns out I liked it a lot better and it’s much more lucrative, so I stuck with it rather than going back into the real world.”
She had already been modelling for local photoshoots and performing burlesque, so posting spicier versions of her own shoots online felt like the obvious next step once everything shut down.
But the first three years went nowhere – and she is blunt about why.
She said: “I really struggled with addiction and it never got anywhere.
“I don’t think everyone who works in the restaurant industry becomes an addict, but I think it is hard to have a healthy relationship with drinking in that environment.
“Alcohol very quickly goes from taking you from feeling normal or social or relaxed to, oh my God, my life is ruined.
“It ruined my life.”
Lockdown made it worse.
She said: “The world was shut down. It was a confusing and scary time, especially living somewhere that had very strict regulations.
“I got to the point where I was not able to hold down a real job.
“I really didn’t think I was going to live through the end of the year.
“I just realised it’s either get my act together or not be here anymore.”
She got sober around four years ago – and says the change in her career was almost immediate.
She said: “Within a few months of me getting sober, all of a sudden my career’s taken off, my following’s exploded.
“It was a night and day difference.
“I went from, this is some nice extra money but it’s hard for me to pay my rent, to oh my gosh, this is a sustainable business, to oh my gosh, I should hire an accountant.”
These days she works mainly as a digital dominatrix, and the bulk of what she earns comes from financial domination – a kink where the exchange itself is the point.
She said: “That part of my job is not a job. It’s a literal kink.
“It’s about the power exchange of just being sent money, having a man send you money just because he should.
“I love that men just send me money for no reason.
“Being able to tell them they’re losers and they should send me more – so hot, so good.”
The economics of it have completely changed how she runs the business. OnlyFans was once 90% of her income and is now around 30%.
She said: “I still have the most paying fans on OnlyFans by a long shot.
“But I make more money off of two to three people a month on Loyal Fans, because that’s where the financial domination guys are, than hundreds or thousands on OnlyFans.
“It’s really not an overall numbers game. It’s, can you get a few really good people?”
Instagram remains her biggest source of new fans, though she says a safe-for-work Twitter account is far easier to grow if the audience is the right one.
What she thinks sets her apart is volume, and a refusal to put everything in one place.
She said: “I release a new full length video every single day on clip sites.
“At the beginning of the week I film seven new videos, edit them, get them all scheduled out to different platforms.
“I think that’s something a lot of people aren’t willing to do, is crank out that many full lengths and then be on that many places.”
That is only possible, she says, because she stopped doing the parts of the job she is bad at or hates. An assistant schedules everything she films, and she has flatly refused to do video calls despite being told they are essential.
She said: “There’s a lot of pressure in the adult industry. When you see someone making a lot of money and they’re doing it a certain way, you think, I have to do that or I won’t succeed.
“Learning what those things are that you actually don’t need to do, and putting your energy elsewhere – it’s been night and day.”
Her strongest opinion is reserved for pricing, and it is the opposite of what most creators do when earnings take a dip.
She said: “The biggest mistake is panicking and lowering your prices hoping it will increase sales.
“That is the worst thing you can do, not only for yourself but for the industry and your fellow creators.
“I’ve done that before and not only did it not increase sales, it sort of ruined my brand and made it harder for people to want to buy anything.”
Instead, she quadrupled her prices – and sales went up.
She said: “Sometimes customers don’t trust the lower prices of the content, especially if you’re promised a lot for it.
“So being clear about your content and raising the price to show that it has value can actually build trust and increase sales.
“Trying to entice people by giving more and more away for free trains the customer to expect that, and it devalues you.”
She is not guessing. Her degree is in operations management and her first job was in data analytics, and she still runs her own sales figures like a spreadsheet.
She said: “I’m a numbers girl. I was able to pull hard data on all of this, look at my prices and run the numbers.
“It gave me the price ceiling and the price floor on my content.
“It was such a fun project, I’m not going to lie.”
For all the discipline, the requests that land in her inbox are anything but ordinary. One fan spent weeks demanding a very graphic clip and getting ruder every time – so she kept putting the price up.
She said: “Finally I got him to pay £110 for a 30 second clip of me dumping hair conditioner on my face.
“I regret that it was rosemary mint. It kind of burned. I didn’t consider that.
“I just couldn’t believe someone was paying money and this was an acceptable alternative.”
He wanted to see her covered in something else…
Another she turned down flat – a request to recreate a Home Alone style booby trap sequence, with her as the burglar being drenched in pudding and dunked head first down a toilet, all supposedly orchestrated by the fan’s family dog.
She said: “There were so many things that were wrong with this scenario.
“First of all, I’m mostly a Dom, and the price they wanted for me to humiliate myself – absolutely not.
“And I’m not going to do anything even if the dog is the one plotting it. I don’t like that you’re bringing up an animal in adult content.”
What she wants from the career now is not more money but more life, and she says she is content earning less than friends who work far harder.
She said: “I know people who make more than me, but they are stressed out and working from the minute they wake up.
“I’m out doing yoga. I’m out travelling. I took a two week holiday that was not for work.
“The most rewarding part of this job has been meeting other like minded people who work hard and are weird.
“Being able to live a bigger life through content creation is really appealing to me.”
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