In November 2021, a then-unknown college student named Camilla Araújo appeared in one of YouTube’s most-watched stunt videos of all time: MrBeast’s $456,000 Squid Game re-creation. Araújo is only in the video briefly, but her dark hair and stunning eyes make her stand out in a sea of contestants in matching green tracksuits. In one viral clip, MrBeast approaches Araújo and asks her if she even watched the original Squid Games show. She admits she didn’t.
In the end, Araújo didn’t win the cash prize, she wasn’t even cast as a central star in the video. But when it dropped, fans were captivated by her.
“I gained like 145,000 followers overnight,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I’m literally the only one that got that much fame from it, even the guy who won the video didn’t blow up. It’s fate.”
Araújo has become one of the most well known Gen Z influencers online. She is an OnlyFans star and a former member of the Bop House, a mega viral content house in Florida that consisted of a half-dozen or so OnlyFans stars, including Araújo. On OnlyFans, she attracted fans with explicit content, everything from flirty selfies to full-on sexual acts, available for various rates. But she needed to figure out other ways to pull in new followers.
Over the past couple of years, OnlyFans and the viral fame ecosystem have become increasingly intertwined. Creators on mainstream social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are now making money by driving traffic to subscription-based content. An entirely new crop of Gen Z creators is skyrocketing to fame through the platform. And for Gen Z creators, OnlyFans is quickly becoming the next major social media app to make it big on.
But becoming massive on the app isn’t easy. Succeeding on OnlyFans in 2025 often means having a high tolerance for controversy, negative attention, the willingness to troll, and an ability to flip tsunamis of online haters into fans.
Amid the pandemic-era lockdowns, more and more people began paying for explicit content online. Soon, creators began to realize that the fastest way to transform online attention into cold, hard cash was to start an OnlyFans. Araújo is perhaps the best example of someone succeeding on this pipeline. She uses provocative and polarizing content on her public, mainstream feeds to generate outrage online, like including her teen brother in her podcast interview clips, or performing as a ditzy character aimed at triggering men. She teases her OnlyFans content with suggestive posts. This content gets views, which means exposure, which results in the growth of her OnlyFans subscription base. (Even her OnlyFans bio seems to lean into this mashing up of the safe and the edgy: “You might have seen me on MrBeasts ‘Squid Games’ or maybe you’ve seen me in the BOP House, but one thing’s for sure … You haven’t seen me without my clothes on … Why don’t we change that?”)
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The 2021 MrBeast YouTube video that first got Camilla Araújo noticed online.
While she and MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, have radically different business models, they are remarkably similar in their approach to the internet. They are both strategic architects of virality, hyper-aware of what content spreads, why people engage, and how to turn that engagement into revenue. Both spend an enormous time studying the internet and learning trends. They’re both extremely data driven and obsessed with optimizing every single last aspect of their content. They’re experts at engineering audience behavior, monetizing attention, and driving onlookers crazy.
Araújo didn’t set out to become an OnlyFans star. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Brazilian parents, she grew up in what she calls a “household of love, not money.” Her mother worked at Subway and a fish market and her father worked at Domino’s. Growing up as the daughter of immigrant parents, Araújo learned how hard it was to get by without money and connections. She taught them English and would go to the grocery store for them as a child, helping out in any way she could. “When they had me they weren’t really ready to have a kid at all,” she says. “We were living with my aunt and uncle. But my childhood was filled with so much love and unity.” Araújo kept her head down and graduated in the top 10 of her class in 2020 before enrolling at a nursing program at East Carolina University.
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Soon, like many students there, she began working for Donaldson, whose headquarters is in Greenville. She got the job through a friend and her role mostly consisted of running around grabbing coffee and assisting with production. But she absorbed everything she could. “Me and the Beast crew became really good friends, even Jimmy; to this day, he’s such an incredible, incredible person,” Araújo says.
Donaldson often relies on staffers to function as extras or performers in his video. After just a few months on the job, Araújo was invited to participate in his massive re-creation of Squid Game.
The Squid Game video was published at the end of November 2021 and amassed enormous online attention. People Araújo didn’t know began to recognize her. Students across campus began discussing the video’s success. As the video racked in over 883 million views, Araújo’s social following skyrocketed. Within a month, she dropped out of college and quit her job at Beast Productions to pursue content creation full time.
But her initial attempts to capitalize on her fame weren’t successful. For a year, she grinded on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. She posted lifestyle and comedy videos but struggled to find a niche or figure out a good genre to operate within. “I tried doing YouTube, I was collabing with people in L.A.,” she says. “I failed for like a year straight.” Finally, in the fall of 2022, she said “fuck it” and launched an OnlyFans. She left her family home and moved to Orlando and began to prepare to post risque photos online.
“I was so against doing OF,” she said. “There are clips of me being like, ‘I would never.’” She was concerned about the stigma and what people in North Carolina would think, and she didn’t want to take what she thought was just an easy road to money. But she quickly realized how much it takes to succeed on the platform. “I’ve never worked harder my fucking life doing what I do now,” she said. “Yeah, it’s easy to start, but getting people to buy [your OnlyFans] you have to promote it.”
She says that her parents weren’t initially supportive of her moving into OnlyFans. “We didn’t speak for four or five months,” she recently said on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast, “which in Latin culture that’s very, very rare.”
It took Araújo about a year and a half to pop off. She paid her bills working bottle service at a nightclub and working for a real estate developer. “I would go from my nine to five job, and then I would leave my nine to five and then go straight to my bottle service job, get off at four o’clock in the morning and do it all over again,” she says. “And on top of that trying to make OF work.”
Then came what she describes as her “canon event”: She exited her real estate development job with a $30,000 check, which she claims she received as a settlement for sexual harassment in the workplace. It was a big influx of money, and she decided to use it to move to Fort Lauderdale, where she could better focus on OnlyFans. She moved in with her boyfriend at the time and his best friend, and the three essentially formed a mini content house.
Every moment, from sunup to sundown, they strategized on how to go viral. They wrote their goals on the mirrors of their bathroom and developed a formula for getting views: rage bait.
Trolling people for attention has become the fastest way to OnlyFans stardom. Some creators, like Bonnie Blue, do it through extreme sex challenges, like sleeping with over 1,000 men in 12 hours. Others, like Ava Louise, do it through viral media stunts, like flashing the New York-Dublin Portal or licking a toilet seat in the beginning of the Covid pandemic. Araújo decided that her particular brand of rage bait would be to play into men’s stereotypes about female creators.
She knew many men didn’t take OnlyFans seriously as a career, so she decided to troll them about that. “When you do OnlyFans, no one likes to think of you as an entrepreneur, they think of you as a slut bimbo,” she says. “I was like, OK, I know how to make a man mad. They hate when a woman who does OnlyFans calls herself an entrepreneur. So I would drill that. I would be like, ‘I’m a CEO. You’re working a nine to five, and if you think it’s so easy to make money selling your body, why don’t you whip it out and show them how it’s done?’
“I knew how to trigger people by saying things, and it worked,” Araújo says. “It worked every single time, and it still works today.”
Like Donaldson, Araújo will also iterate endlessly on her content. If a concept is working, she’ll make 10 more videos that are almost identical. “If something works, you never pivot,” she says. “You beat it into the fucking ground.” However, lately she’s hoping to expand her content. She recently posted a video where she says that she feels she’s outgrown the word “bop” and that she’d rather be known as an “intimate influencer,” noting it’s that content that allowed her to afford her new $5 million home. “An absolute marketing GENIUS” reads a top comment on the post with over 28,000 likes.
But making people angry online for views comes with consequences. Araújo says that she’s recently realized that part of why she’s leaned into rage-bait content is as a defense mechanism. It helps her separate herself from her online persona. “When you don’t truly put yourself out there on the internet you can’t get hurt because they’re not hating on the real you,” she says. “I know that it is easier to get someone to hate than it is to get someone to love you. And it’s easier to make a check off of people hating you. So I was like, you know what, I’m going to purposely say things that piss people off because I know it’ll get views and I know views get money. It’s a formula. Anger plus engagement equals views equals money.”
Araújo leveraged drama within the Bop House to grow her podcast, The Camilla Show, which she recently relaunched under the name The Clock It Podcast. (She left the collective in August to start a “new era.”) She invites other OnlyFans stars on to the pod to have raunchy, candid discussions. Clips from Araújo’s podcast have racked up millions of views on Instagram.
Araújo’s long-term goal, however, is to use OnlyFans as a launching pad. She sees OnlyFans today as many young people saw TikTok in 2020, or YouTube a decade ago: It’s a platform that hasn’t yet been saturated, and there’s still room to generate a massive amount of money and fame. Eventually, with enough success online, a content creator will reach escape velocity and become accepted by the traditional entertainment and media world.
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Araújo acknowledged that it may be a rocky road, but she’s determined to stay focused on her goals. “I’m 23, I’m going to continue to fuck up,” she said on the Impaulsive podcast, adding that as long as she doesn’t “go fucking AWOL and have a Britney Spears moment in two years,” she should be good.
“My goal isn’t to be confined to being an influencer,” Araújo says, “it’s to break into the mainstream media and be a voice and be heard. I want to be everywhere. I want to be unavoidable.”
