Kit Barrus isn’t hiding her earnings.
The 27-year-old math and psychology graduate says she now earns more from OnlyFans in one month than many tenured professors do in a year.
“It’s not bragging, it’s reality. I’ve seen the salary data. The math checks out,” Barrus told The Blast.
Barrus graduated magna cum laude and once envisioned a life in academia. Instead, she ranks in the top 0.1% of creators on the subscription platform, attributing her success to treating it like a business.
“I make more in a month than many tenured professors make in a year,” she said.
“This is not luck. I treat it like a business. I look at churn rates, price elasticity, user behavior. It’s not random. It’s predictive modeling.”
Raised Mormon in California, Barrus described a conservative upbringing centered on modesty and hard work.
She put herself through college working full time and taking night classes.
“What started as a joke turned into my full-time job,” she said.
Her success didn’t stop with earnings.
Barrus also closely monitors shifts in subscriber behavior.
During the recent government shutdown, she noticed a drop in engagement and adjusted her pricing for affected users.
“Anyone who’s blue collar, anyone working for the government and we know about it… when I sent out pay-per-view content to them, it’s going out cheaper,” she said.
“A lot of people who subscribe are blue collar workers, and when the government shut down, they weren’t getting paid. So they’re obviously not on OnlyFans pages.”
Barrus sees her trajectory as a rejection of outdated academic gatekeeping.
“I was never going to get a MacArthur Fellowship,” she said. “But I built a platform that values what I bring to the table. I don’t need tenure.”
Though she once imagined a future in the classroom, her outlook has shifted. “I always thought I’d be a professor,” Barrus said. “Now I’m the case study.”