- Lauren Spencer is a 47-year-old OnlyFans model and in the top 0.5% of earners on the platform.
- She said her popularity on the site could be boiled down to her being a Princess Diana look-alike.
In less than two years, Lauren Spencer has broken into the top 0.5% of earners on OnlyFans, which she said is down to her resemblance to Princess Diana.
Before making the switch to content creation, she had owned a cleaning company with her husband for over 10 years, but when the pandemic hit, she saw her work dry up because of restrictions.
"We went from having a normal income to nothing overnight," she told Insider. So she signed up for OnlyFans to earn money from home.
The 47-year-old had a side hustle doing webcam-modeling work, where viewers join a chatroom and pay to watch explicit content live. But with the cleaning business no longer operating, fans who said Spencer looks like Princess Diana suggested she try OnlyFans out.
"I often get comments from fans saying, 'You remind me of her.' Every time I'm told that, I'm flattered," Spencer said.
The OnlyFans creator said that she will sometimes dress like Diana at her fans' request. Now she's earning an average of $16,000 a month.
"When people ask me for custom movies, then I do that, but it's not how I dress day-to-day," she told Insider.
She customized a top and skirt to recreate Diana's "revenge dress," an off-the-shoulder black dress Diana wore to a 1994 event on the day her then-husband, King Charles, admitted to cheating on her.
She said she spends over 60 hours a week working as an OnlyFans creator, which translates to around nine hours a day, including on the weekends.
Spencer said the vast majority of her earnings come from subscriptions: "So far this month, I've made more than $16,000 and from that, around $15,350 is from subscriptions, and close to $725 is from tips."
Her day involves responding to messages from subscribers in the morning, taking photos and videos, and doing livestreams on other platforms like Instagram and TikTok to market herself and attract new subscribers.
She learned to shoot, edit, and upload her own content using the iMovie video-editing app through trial and error.
"Promotion is the be all and end all, and social media is the primary method," she said. She uses hashtags that are relevant for her target audience and comments on other creators' posts to boost her engagement.
Fans sometimes ask Spencer to pretend that they're King Charles and ask her to tell them "naughty stories" about how she is cheating on them with the driver or with the butler, she said.
She says she does "tasteful nudity," reads erotic stories, and likens her content style to "old-school tease." She also offers fans up-close pictures for a subscription fee of $9.99 a month.
One fan even went as far as to send Spencer a picture of Diana with every message they sent her on OnlyFans, she said.
"The fact that I remind lots of people of Diana has definitely helped. It's a kink for some to see someone like her, who is proper and decent, in underwear," she said.
The pros of being a OnlyFans model "far outweigh" the cons for Spencer. "I think doing OnlyFans is sometimes portrayed as being a last stop for women who can't do anything else or have no skills or are desperate, but that's not true," she said. "I love it. I have complete control over what content I put out."
Spencer said her goal is to save enough money to open an animal sanctuary.
She said the downsides are that she's now working longer hours, and that sometimes, people stigmatize sex work. "I have less time now than I did with the cleaning business, but I prefer this," she said.
She loves not employing staff anymore, saying it "used to be the biggest bane of my life, as people would not turn up for work and problems would then escalate."
"This is far more fun, it's not physically taxing on my body and there's no limit to how much I can earn," Spencer said.