How much can you make from foot pictures? I put it to the test

Samantha Rea

Published January 11, 2025 1:00pm

I tried being a foot fetish OF creator and this is what I learned — This wasn’t the easy money maker I’d believed it would be (Picture: Samantha Rea)

Scrolling through a famous OnlyFans account, I paused on their latest post.

This creator had received over a hundred likes for crushing a banana beneath her feet, and getting her toes gooey destroying a chocolate chip cookie. I felt inspired.

Racing to my local shops, I rescued some Belgian buns from the reduced aisle and promptly returned home to set up.

I was two weeks into my self-assigned challenge to become a foot content creator. So far I’d amassed less than a handful of likes, but I was sure this video would be the one to change everything.

I popped one of the buns onto a plate, placed it on the floor and then, barefoot, I squished it into oblivion until the soles of my feet were encased in cake.

I did have fun with that Belgian bun – until I realised I now had no way of getting to the bathroom, to clean myself up, without treading icing all over the floor. Not only that, but I’d forgotten to press record.

This wasn’t the easy money maker I’d believed it would be.

Lily Allen posing for a photo at a fashion event — I was inspired by Lily Allen (Picture: John Nacion/WWD via Getty Images)

My personal involvement with the adult site started in August after I discovered that singer and actress Lily Allen was on it.

In June, she confessed to her Miss Me? podcast co-host, Miquita Oliver, that her feet were highly rated on a website called WikiFeet – a site where foot fans compile (and rate) pictures of celebrities’ feet.

When asked how much money she could make by selling foot pics on the internet, Allen said she believed that she ‘could make a lot of money from selling foot content’ and implied that she wasn’t totally against the idea.

Fast forward to July and Lily’s foot page opened for business. I was instantly intrigued.

Although I’m a journalist, rather than a celebrity, I’ve had a four star rating on Wikifeet since foot fans set up an account for me six years ago, after I wrote about attending a foot fetish party.

They’d added pretty much every barefoot photo that existed of me online, and, naturally, this got me thinking: should I set up am OnlyFans foot account too? Could it really be a millions-a-month money-spinner? I decided to find out.

After wading through a quagmire of admin, which included taking verification pictures of myself and my passport, my page was set up, under the name ‘Feetures Writer’.

I wanted to be crystal clear about my account’s intentions so in my bio I introduced myself as a national newspaper journalist and explained that I would be writing about my experience for Metro. I added that I would respect the privacy of my subscribers and offered assurance that nobody would be named.

Then, it was time to start posting.

For my first posts, I decided to make the most of a trip to the seaside. I filmed myself barefoot, squelching through seaweed, wading through murky water, and strolling across the sand at a beach in Margate, before getting back to London and washing off my feet under the outside tap.

But the response to the videos was underwhelming at best, with a sum total of zero likes.

At this point though, I only had four subscribers, all of whom were followers from other platforms, who’d subscribed out of support, rather than any interest in feet. So, still optimistic, and in hope of attracting foot fans to my page, I decided to give my feet a ‘glow-up’.

My next few videos showed me giving my feet a makeover, involving pumice stones, soapy scrubs with exfoliating gloves, a foot massage and a full works pedicure. Yet still the level of interest remained at zero.

I decided to click on Lily Allen’s page – which I’d been paying $10 a month to subscribe to – in the hope she’d inspire me.

I mimicked her post of her tanned toes peeking out from under a white sheet, including a video of me wiggling my toes. Amazingly, it got four likes, making it my most popular post to date.

That’s when I saw her posts of the squished banana and crushed cookie.

My first attempt to recreate this foot-and-food combo, clearly, did not go smoothly, and sadly take two (which I actually did record) resulted in just three likes. Evidently effort did not equal interest. 

Determined not to give up, I switched things up again by posting some full length shots. All my clothes – the hoodie and boyfriend shorts from Gap – remained on, but my feet were bare as I posed on a bench in the park. Amazingly, this snap got a record-breaking six likes.

Encouraged, I made more full length content, including a ‘foot reveal’ consisting of a series of shots of me unzipping, and taking off, a pair of knee-high boots.

My subscribers – all seven of them now – went wild.

‘I like feet a lot but it’s an added frisson when it’s someone you sort of recognise,’ wrote one. 

‘I like seeing as much of you as possible in the pics. Disembodied feet are a little bit too niche for me,’ said another.

I’d been posting for a month now, and it was at this point that I shot my first custom request.

I’d ruled out anything that wasn’t foot-related, which meant turning down pleas for ‘a cheeky tit flash vid’ and requests to drape my naked body in newspapers.

Finally, I had received a request I could say yes to, which consisted of pictures of me with magazines at my feet – for an agreed fee of £100. I felt quite good about it all, and was even starting to think that maybe OnlyFans was a goldmine after all. But my pay day turned out to be less than exciting.

The platform deals in dollars, and rather than converting his money according to the exchange rate, the subscriber paid  $100 flat. Viewing it as an oversight, I didn’t ask for the difference, but that was a mistake.

The site keeps 20% of content creators’ earnings, so out of the $100, I only received $80, which was about £60. And as the magazines cost around £20, I actually only made £40 before tax. Not exactly enough to retire…

As disappointing as this was, it was actually more lucrative than some of the other requests I received.

One guy offered me £20 to spend half an hour ‘brainwashing’ him into being my foot slave. Another guy requested a custom video of me taking off my sweaty gym socks and telling him to sniff and kiss my feet, for which he’d pay me $40 (roughly £25 after the 20% commission).  

I turned down both because, quite frankly, I couldn’t be bothered. But maybe an established content creator would see this as easy money? 

For perspective, I turned to Amy Wynters, aka @WrinkledSolesQueenFeet, who has over 30,000 followers on X and who’s found herself in the top 4% of earners on OnlyFans.

‘No!’ laughed Amy when I asked if I was mad to expect more money. ‘They’re always going to low-ball you. They underestimate the work involved.’

She added that although I’ve got lovely feet, I was making the same mistake she did when she first started – packing multiple pictures into a post, like I would on Instagram. Instead, she advised me to use the schedule function to post one picture at a time, throughout the day.

Amy also had advice for when I didn’t have the time – or motivation – to set up a shoot. ‘Everything you do in your normal day, you can fit into making content,’ Amy told me. ‘Take pictures in the gym. Then when you get home, take pictures showing your feet soapy in the shower, then when you get out, take a picture of you moisturising your feet.’

Realising that I could just take some snaps as I went about my day was like some sort of epiphany, and for the next 10 days I followed her advice.

However, despite my new consistent posting pattern, there was still barely any interest. I felt like I was shouting into a void. 

I limped along like this for another few weeks, slinging up the occasional picture, until the three months came to an end.  

Between 6 August and 6 November, a total of 31 people subscribed to my account. However,  the most subscribers I had at any one time was 16, and on average it was actually about eight.

This was entirely my fault. I didn’t want to spam my existing followers on my other socials, so I hadn’t really plugged it on those. That left Reddit, where I somehow got permanently banned from a group called Foot Fetish Addicts, and Craigslist, where my posts were repeatedly flagged for removal.

On X, instead of spamming my followers, I’d directly messaged about 30 accounts with names like ‘Foot Slave’, ‘Foot Freak’ and ‘Foot Pic Buyer’. After all that, I only got one new subscriber. However, he turned out to be one of the best, as he bought two custom videos that were super easy to make, paying me £145 directly.

In the three months, I’d made $192.80 after the site took its 20% cut. This equated to a grand total of £152.56.

Could I have made more money if I’d put in more effort? Probably. But effort, or lack thereof, wasn’t the only factor impacting the amount of money I made. 

On October 25, Lily Allen confirmed that she earns more money from having 1,000 people subscribe to pictures of her feet, than she does from her 7 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Considering I had only 0.1% of her following, it’s safe to say that the big bucks were always going to be out of reach.  

I suspect that’s the case for the majority of foot content creators, who find that actually, to make money, they’ve got to put a lot of work in – and also be a bit raunchier.  

Like Lily, I kept my account PG, but while she can rake it in by posting perfectly innocent pictures, that’s probably not the experience of most foot content creators.

In my three months, I found that posting the odd foot picture now and then definitely isn’t going to lead to big bucks.

What I struggled with most was motivating myself to post, and I even received a couple of emails from OnlyFans, telling me off for not posting anything for days on end.

I learnt that becoming a successful creator takes consistent hard work and it’s certainly not the ‘easy money’ it may seem to be when we hear about celebrities and top creators making millions.