Blackhat Marketing & OnlyFans
Within any industry so dominated by marketing – and the constant need for generating traffic – you will hear the word ‘blackhat.’ OnlyFans and OFM are no exception. OnlyFans models and agencies alike have been engaging in aggressive blackhat marketing campaigns for years, covering all major social media platforms and reaching even obscure, unintuitive corners of the internet.
What is Blackhat Marketing?
The term ‘blackhat’ conjures up all kinds of negative connotations. It is often used synonymously with scamming, hacking or otherwise illegal activity in the digital space. In reality, blackhat marketing simply refers to traffic-generating or brand-promoting strategies that are perfectly legal, but could be deemed unethical. When applied to OFM, we are referring usually to marketing tactics that break large social media giant’s guidelines or terms of services (i.e., the long wall of text you agree to when creating an account on Instagram, or Snapchat).
If breaking these terms of services constitutes a betrayal of your principles and moral code, I would recommend you stop reading this article. Just remember, these multi-billion dollar social media companies you are going up against are not saints; from exploitative algorithms, to third-world ‘sweatshop’ labour, to censorship and propagating misinformation, these companies’ entire business models depend on objectively unethical behaviour.
Another thing to note is what your competition is doing. Whether it is other OnlyFans models, or big budget agencies, they are exploiting blackhat marketing strategies whether you think it is unethical or not. They are taking subscribers that could be yours, revenue that could be yours. If you wish to truly compete within this industry, you must be prepared to utilise blackhat marketing strategies.
A Blackhat Case Study: Instagram
A common misconception in this industry is that there exists a strict dichotomy between ‘organic/whitehat’ and ‘blackhat’ marketing channels. In reality, almost all OnlyFans marketing strategies employed on the major social media platforms (Instagram, Reddit, X, TikTok, etc.) are ‘greyhat,’ existing somewhere in the middle, with elements of organic and blackhat tactics.
Take for instance Instagram. Promotion on this platform currently revolves around the creation and posting of short-form content (reels), that hooks the viewer and maximises watch time. If your content is high-quality, you have a chance for one of these reels to go viral and accumulate millions of views. Provided you have a well-structured funnel, you should be converting 1 OnlyFans $3 paid subscriber for every 5k views, but this of course depends on many factors (e.g., how you are perceived as the model, your niche and projected personality, how sexual/alluring the reel was, how much resistance they go through during the funnel, call-to-action stories on your IG profile, how your OnlyFans profile looks).
If you are playing it ‘straight’ and abiding by Instagram’s TOS, you would only have at maximum five IG accounts consistently posting similar content, and each account should post content that is substantively different (i.e., different niche, different style of videos, different aesthetic). That is a lot of work, especially on top of everything else an OnlyFans model must do daily. On top of that, you only have five accounts to hit a viral reel with, so even with consistent daily uploads, your chance of being picked up by the algorithm is very slim.
Lets compare that with a model (or an agency) who markets on Instagram, but is more open to utilising blackhat strategies. Firstly, they will have possibly hundreds of IG accounts that post daily. Secondly, the content will be either the same, or extremely similar across all of these accounts, so the model will be working much less time than someone abiding by TOS. Thirdly, and most importantly, the model has a much greater chance of going viral, will generate far more total views across all accounts, and in turn, generate more revenue on OnlyFans. Less work, more subscribers. Building large-scale operations like this, known sometimes as “reels farms,” is usually carried out by agencies, rather than independent models, due to the high costs involved. Most commonly, it involves equipping staff terms with jailbroken iPhones and specific methods around account creation and posting, ultimately to bypass Instagram security. In this scenario, all the model has to do each day is deliver daily content to the agency/staff team, usually following specific instructions or example reels to maximise the chances of virality.
The Best Blackhat Strategies
- Instagram Reel Farm
As described above, this method allows models and agencies to bypass the account limit that Instagram sets, maximising your total views and chances of going viral.
- Dating Apps
Using dating apps to promote your OnlyFans at first may seem unintuitive – how do you convert these men looking for a date or a relationship to OnlyFans? Dating app marketing (especially using Tinder and Bumble) is actually an extremely popular strategy for many agencies. It involves the mass creation of accounts (sometimes thousands per day), usually using jailbroken iPhones, and targeting countries with high disposable income, most notably the United States. Through autoswipers or mass purchases (e.g., Tinder Boosts), these accounts will be viewed or matched by tens of thousands of single men – the perfect target demographic – who will be funnelled to either an Instagram or Snapchat account, and from there, to OnlyFans.
- Mass DMs
Agencies and models implement Mass DM strategies on all major social media platforms, but Instagram is the most popular. The concept is extremely simple – and as old as the apps themselves – but the execution at scale is extremely challenging. To send millions of DMs per day (which is necessary to generate a significant number of subscribers) requires massive expenditure, and usually expensive bots/software that can perform actions across thousands of accounts at once. But like all these strategies, you can of course attempt it at a smaller scale, especially if you are an independent model. Firstly, think about who you wish to target for these mass DMs (e.g., followers of male-dominated Instagram pages, or men who engage with similarly niched OnlyFans model’s posts by liking or commenting). Secondly, think about your message frame, and how to persuade as many people as possible to visit your OnlyFans. Finally, assemble your army of IG accounts, and set up the profiles to make them appear authentic; you can even buy accounts from marketplaces, rather than creating them yourself.
Final Remarks
If you still have some reservations about implementing blackhat strategies, maybe due to the startup costs, or possibly because you think it isn’t worth your time and effort – you may be right.
As an agency we have run blackhat marketing on our clients from the beginning and it has been an incredibly costly event. However with highly structured staff teams, large budgets and an unrelenting desire to beat the competition, blackhat channels can be worth it.
