Tongue out and mouth open wide, her hands expertly guide a thick piece of meat chub closer to her lips, teasing out that inevitable moment when she can no longer resist the temptation to smack her lips around it. The camera pulls back, panning down her voluptuous cleavage then back to her mouth, just in time to see a saucy trickle hit her tongue. Captioned: “I love a nice juicy weiner,” this 10-second clip of Francia James eating a hot dog on her Instagram account has over a million views and thousands of comments. The flirty Playboy model has made a profitable career out of creating and posting salacious content that toes the line, selling sexual fantasies without actually having sex. James proves how being a naughty social-media star can be more lucrative than becoming a Playboy-model-turned-porn star, a route often taken by Playboy models in years past.
To hear James tell it, it wasn’t so much a plan but something that just happened. “I was working as an esthetician and a friend of mine was a new photographer. We started taking pictures and in less than six months, I had a million followers,” says James, who currently boasts 2.4 million followers, and counting. A few months after they began working together, that same photographer friend sent her photos to Playboy, helping her land May’s cover earlier this year.
“I was working by the hour on commission and as an esthetician you work so hard and you don’t really make that much money,” says James. “I’m so happy I’m not doing that anymore.” However, due to the often erotic nature of the content she creates, James’ family struggles to accept her new career.
“They don’t want me to be showing my booty. I’m shaking my booty and shaking my boobies and they don’t understand what’s happening now, here [in the States] with social media,” says James. Though James expresses a confidence—or perhaps hope—that her family (many of whom still reside in her native country of Colombia) will eventually see the positive side of her career, she’s taking some protective measures until then. “I blocked my mom from my Instagram. She’s a very religious person in Colombia so I only send her the nice pictures I think she’ll like,” says James. “It’s not like I’m doing something wrong; I just don’t want her to see it. She’s a mother like any other mother.”
And like any other daughter selling erotica, shielding mom from that content makes sense—especially when that content leads to questions about porn.
“It’s a constant question. Most of my followers ask me all the time, ‘When are you going to do porn?’ I have sexy stuff on my page but I don’t see myself going into porn,” says James. “Right now, I’m very happy with my Instagram and how it’s going.” Plus, what model would get into porn when the no-royalty flat rate for a penetrative hardcore scene is equal to or less than the compensation for a single post on Instagram?
Maintaining Instagram-Star status and entertaining millions of followers is a 24/7 job and, surprisingly, it pays like one too. “I didn’t expect it to be as much work as it is. With all this money it’s constantly go go go but it’s amazing how much you can do with this, if you want to do it,” says James. “I usually get paid $1,500 for a post and companies don’t just book you for one, they book you for a couple of stories and posts for that same company. It’s good money.”
To make money selling posts on social media, you need to have followers—a whole lot of followers. And that’s what Francia James excels at: she knows how to attract and keep her millions happily tuning in. As James points out, “Once you get to a million followers, that’s when you make money.”
It’s not just about gaining the followers—you have to keep them too, which means coming up with creative and engaging content nearly every single day. “I have to post every day. I wake up and I have to post my stories. All day,” says James. “When you’re in the entertainment industry, you have to keep your followers happy.”
It was the commitment to create content that both attracts and keeps her followers that has prompted James to make videos of her doing squats with an alligator slung across her shoulders, or to make a game of yanking her hot friend’s pants down while they shop, or film twerking lessons bent over a barstool. Then there’s the candid shots that seem spontaneously caught on camera (but we all know better, right?)—and those sometimes take even more work to pull off.
A bikini-clad model groped by an elephant as she tried to snap a picture with it went viral. James was, of course, the model, and though the set-up didn’t go as planned, the filming turned out better than they’d scripted. “I drove for 10 hours with a friend of mine to see the tigers and elephants, to post about them. We wanted the elephant to grab my booty but she didn’t want to do it. The elephant trainer had special candies the elephant liked, so we put it under my bra and that’s how it happened. It looked like she was grabbing my boob but really she was just looking for her candy,” recalls James. “That video has been all over the world, over 20 to 30 million people have seen it. That video has brought me a lot of work. The elephant grabbing my boob has been my best video so far.”
A copious amount of invisible work is done to craft a spontaneously caught moment, which is after all the job. “It took six takes and the crew trying to get the elephant to move just to do a 15-second video,” recalls James. “People don’t realize what goes on behind the scenes, or the money, work and time it takes to make this happen.”
