A few years ago, you probably had no idea who Annie Knight was. The young girl from Brisbane didn't really know either.
From an early age, she wanted to be a surgeon. With a clear interest in science and maths and a drive to be perfect, she began a medicine degree. But after she started studying, she quickly realised she didn't have the passion and instead found herself drawn to marketing.
Now, she's known as Australia's most sexually active woman and is one of the top earners on the adults-only platform, OnlyFans. It started innocently enough, Knight tells Mia Freedman on this week's episode of No Filter.
"I started posting TikToks [during COVID] and then realised how fun it was and I started getting views," she says.
"I saw all of these girls saying they make $50,000 a month (on OnlyFans). Probably after nine months of doing TikTok, I finally decided to start my OnlyFans in August 2020."
Listen to Annie Knight's full conversation with Mia Freedman here. Post continues after audio...
At the time, Knight was working as a marketing manager, a job she loved, but paid her just $60,000 a year.
"I wanted to move out of home and I couldn't afford to move out of home," Knight says.
Her OnlyFans career started off "very mild."
"I started with lingerie and bikini only. And then slowly sort of progressed on to the other stuff," she says.
"I knew what my strategy was from the start. No one knew who I was, I was not an influencer, I didn't have a following I was literally just a nobody.
"So I knew that I had to have a free page to begin with. I would post lingerie and bikini stuff and then if they wanted to see nudes or anything like that they would have to pay extra for that specific piece of content.
"Eventually once I got to a point where I felt like I was well known enough and I had a big enough following, then I could switch to a paid subscription model."
Using TikTok as her main source of marketing she translated that audience into around 7000 paid subscribers that she charges $15 per month to access her content.
Knight is now one of OnlyFans' top creators landing in the top 0.02 per cent of earners taking home an average of $250,000 per month. But being a creator on the app isn't an instant hit for everyone — it takes hard graft and according to Knight a very conscious marketing strategy to get to the top.
When it comes to the scope of revenue, Knight has a limit to what she's willing to do.
"I've been offered quite a lot of money to do things that I'm not comfortable doing," she said. Knight will steer clear of custom videos (creating specifically requested content from an OnlyFans user), BDSM, urinating or defecating.
"That's not for me," she said. "That's where I definitely draw the line."
Even though she is incredibly secure and comfortable with her career as a sex worker now, Knight says the road to get here hasn't been smooth sailing.
Friends she'd known since she was five years old stopped speaking to her and she also lost her marketing job.
On day five of her new role as a marketing coordinator, she went home sick because of extreme pain from endometriosis.
"When I got home, I had an email from my boss saying that I had been terminated," she says. "They listed three reasons why and one of them was that I had lied because earlier in the day they had asked me if I had any side hustles or side businesses and I had said no. And then also that I had a website containing explicit content."
But it seems as though it was a blessing in disguise as Knight was already seeing the benefits of her new endeavour.
"I wasn't necessarily hiding my OnlyFans because I honestly was at the point where I was like 'I don't really care if I do get fired for doing it,'" she says.
Last year, Knight appeared on the Kyle and Jackie O Show after they discovered her on TikTok. During the interview, she mentioned she'd slept with 300 people in a year.
This wasn't a rough estimate either.
"I kept a pretty strict body count in my notes app," Knight says.
This revelation led to Kyle and Jackie O dubbing her 'Australia's Most Sexually Active Woman' - a title which she approved of and is now her strongest marketing tool.
Soon after the interview, her number of subscribers shot up to 12,000.
Now in 2024, Knight is 27, owns two properties, has saved up enough money to go travelling and by the end of the year she plans to have paid off both of her mortgages — all before she turns 30.
"I am my own boss, I work for myself I charge a price and it is only my content being featured on my page," she says.
"I get to keep 100 per cent of my money."
Feature Image: Instagram/@anniekknight.
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