Hi,
For those of you who have had some success with starting a Patreon or OnlyFans account, how did you go about gaining new subscribers?
Did you have a large social media following to begin with?
-Rhi

My assumption has been that, as a female, you (unfortunately) are not going to make a lot of money unless you have adult content. I'd like to be wrong about that, but there are so many profiles out there on Patreon, OF, Fancentro, etc., what sets you apart and what is going to make people ante up?

I had thousands of followers on tumblr.  When they banned nipples, I started a Patreon site, which I pushed on tumblr on my last days there, but only a handful of people followed me even for a minimal monthly fee, even though I promised to spend all my proceeds on hiring more models.  I followed one model on Patron who was simply magnificent (as are you) but even she eventually gave it up.  I hate to be discouraging but I think it is very difficult to make a go of it with artistic work, even nude.  If you solve the equation, please let me know.

A few days ago, I had the same conversation with a few of Instagram's most visible traveling models.

With Instagram's (and Facebook's) sudden total ban on nudity, many models and photographers who used Instagram to post implied nudes (or censored nudes) to attract paying gigs and viewers to their uncensored content on OnlyFans or Patreon are suddenly scrambling for greener pastures in droves.

The key problem seems to be that Facebook/Instagram has pretty much monopolized mainstream social media. Where else can models and photographers go to attract as big of a following?

The options are few.

Twitter isn't censoring anyone yet, but it tends to be the media for sharing links and short comments on serious topics. Anyhow, unless someone makes a living at nudes, they might not want the general public on Twitter to know about what they do outside of their dayjob.

That's basically it.

There's of course tons of image sharing sites, but most of them have recently done contreversial things with the users' content or changed their usage terms in drastic ways. Anyhow, none of them (except maybe Flickr) have any mass appeal.

I have had a patreon account since the end of 2016. I don't make a ton of money on there (always over $500/month but I wouldn't consider that a lot based on what some people make), but I take self portraits anyway so I keep it. I could likely make more, but I don't do post erotic photos (unless you consider lingerie erotic, but there isn't anything explicit on my page). I never started an onlyfans as it seems to be more adult in the nature of content there.
When I started the account, I believe I had around 20K followers on instagram and around 10K on tumblr? Those numbers grew steadily to around 40-50K on instagram and 18K on tumblr (though I deleted my tumblr around 2018/19). Having some sort of decent following on social media or a very engaged following on social media is the best way to get subscribers. So building a following on a variety of sites would be good prior to trying to start these subscriber sites.

I've heard that onlyfans works best if you're using a variety of social media - twitter and reddit are both good apparently. However, both have a tendency to shadowban erotic content creators despite allowing the posting of that type of content. So you have to, especially with reddit, figure out the best way to go about using the platform.
Ello is another social media platform that allows nudity, but I found it to be a bit boring for use and there are not as many users on the site. So your reach there would be limited.
I believe flickr still allows nudity, as does deviantart.
Deviantart is a bit of a cesspool these days, and I have never heard from anyone that they'd use it to source either paying clients or subscribers. Most models I know stay far away from that platform (a shame, I loved using it for art as a teenager but...once you allow porn for whatever reason the platform gets overrun).
Flickr is not as social as many other platforms, and I deleted mine years ago. I think it used to be better for models about 5-10 years ago.
Best bets for advertising content/building a following that you could transfer to paying subscribers on onlyfans are reddit and twitter overall. Having an instagram for SFW content would be good.
For patreon, instagram is likely the best. I found reddit and twitter to be useless for those not making more erotic content.

If you want to have a variety of social media, crossposting via an app like hootsuite or IFTT would be good. Though, keep in mind that crossposting can mess up your posts - going from IG to twitter really messes things up. Same with crossposting from IG to tumblr. Having a linktree for all of your socials is also good, but I heard some sites (IG) have shadowbanned creators with one in their bio. Try to have the same handle across all sites of course.

Keep in mind that you should protect content if you post to patreon especially. There are ripoff sites for stealing patreon content - I post all of my work to an external webpage apart from the patreon site itself that is password protected.
I'm sure onlyfans will eventually have this issue as well (or it already does).

That was a lot of info - hopefully it's not too confusing.