- Lizzy Capri pivoted to OnlyFans from kids' content, and she's never been happier.
- She said the relentless churn of YouTube was burning her out.
Lizzy Capri is turning 30 this year, and with that milestone, she wants to leave behind her legacy as a kids' entertainer.
What better way, she thought, than to start an OnlyFans.
"I didn't have that passion anymore," she told Business Insider. "You start to realize you're kind of in this hamster wheel, and you're really doing everything to please this YouTube algorithm, and through that process, a lot of creativity is kind of bogged down."
The pressure to succeed came early. Capri started her YouTube channel in 2018 and hit a million subscribers within just a couple of months.
Seeing it as the opportunity of a lifetime, she quit her job at LinkedIn and started making content packed full of ball pits, fidget spinners, and unboxing toys.
She became a firm favorite star among children, who loved her vibrant, candy-colored videos about slime, pranks, and all things pink, and earned more than seven million subscribers.
But while on the outside there was only success, on the inside, Capri was burning out.
She said she felt less and less connected to her fan base and started thinking her channel, with its vivid colors and exaggerated video thumbnails and titles, wasn't representative of who she was anymore.
"My brain has been so trained over the past six, seven years to just make super colorful, crazy thumbnails that are a spectacle," she said. "And now I'm just like, I can't sit here and watch my own videos because they're not fun for me to watch."
It was isolating having this character be so intertwined with her real life, she said, where everything in her life was bubblegum pink, including her car and her entire house, down to her bedsheets and towels.
"I think there's actually a study that if you stay in a room that's all pink, at first it seems nice, but after a couple of days, it makes you go insane. And I think that's what happened to me."
Capri says she sees her journey a little like Miley Cyrus's, "getting out of that kid's realm and into her own self."
That's why she started an OnlyFans. The venture venture seems to be paying off, though, having earned around $100,000 over the past year, according to documents sent over by her team.
"I actually chose OnlyFans because of the stigma around it," she said.
Capri said she has always been insecure about her body and her appearance, and OnlyFans helped boost her confidence. Her account is "safe for work," so there is no full-on nudity on there, and she sees it more as "artistic expression."
"It also keeps me motivated to stick to my workout routines because when I look good, I feel good," she said.
Capri had a bit of a "moral dilemma" because she knew the pivot to adult content would mean a drop in views. But the risk was worth it, she said, even though she lost all of her brand deals, and she's taken a financial hit.
Capri's kid-centric videos used to reliably hit one to four million views per upload. Now, she's getting less than 100,000 on average.
That's the way of the YouTube algorithm, she said — it does not favor a shift away from the norm. Capri said she is still learning to cope with that, because YouTube views gave her such external validation for a long time.
"I just really had to unlearn a lot of that this past year and realize that life is meant to be lived for yourself in your lens," she said.
Capri wants to be a voice for women who have felt like they've been "put in a box" their whole lives.
"I fucking hated that and I still hate it," she said.
"I'll walk into a room and it'll just be so different how people treat me just based on what I look like. They don't even know who I am yet."
Her main goal is to be her most authentic self, and show others in a similar position that they can do something different if they want to. Running on the content hamster wheel "so hard, so fast" for so long, she said, "it's only a matter of time before you burnout."
"I just want to break out of that box. I want to show other people that they can too," she said. "Whether I fail at it or not, at least I tried."