Dolly, an 18-year-old aspiring online model, was sitting in her kitchen one day in June when an exciting email arrived. Someone had just paid $10 to view her posts for a month on a social network called OnlyFans. Just like that, Dolly had her first subscriber.

Like a growing number of her counterparts in the world of online sexual content, Dolly is trying to start converting her social media following into a paid customer base. Models are using Twitter, Facebook-owned Instagram and Snapchat to promote their premium offerings on sites like OnlyFans, Fancentro and Patreon, where they can charge a recurring subscription.

In the opaque online porn industry, where billions of dollars a year flow to websites powered by ads and premium subscriptions, Dolly and others are aiming to wrest some control from the content distributors and take a bigger slice of the economic pie. Just as independent musicians are trying to make money by going directly to their fans on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, and comedians are turning to Comedy Central's Stand-Up Direct to sell uncut performances, women in porn are adopting the direct-to-consumer business model on the web and mobile devices.

"There's no in-person stuff to deal with," said Dolly, who doesn't disclose her real name, in an interview. "You make your own rules, you make your limits."

The subscription market is in its relative infancy and the sums are still generally modest. Dolly said she makes $500 to $1,000 a month at the moment. Part of her revenue comes through $10 monthly subscriptions on OnlyFans, which caters to YouTubers, trainers, models, content creators, influencers and makers of amateur porn. She also charges $12 a month for her private Snapchat (or a $35 payment for indefinite access), where users pay to see a person's posts.

Then there's the true do-it-yourself option of giving individual customers content via direct message on Twitter or providing access to a Google Drive or Dropbox folder and collecting a one-time fee through Venmo or Square's Cash App. For example, Dolly promotes what she calls "Dolly's Disney Fund," where customers can pay between $5 and $100 for photos and videos that she'll share from an upcoming trip to a Disney theme park.

Models have been able to charge for content in a variety of ways since the early days of the internet. What's new about sites like OnlyFans and Fancentro is they provide a suite of tools and a customized content management system (CMS) to help creators run their business and handle subscription billing all from their smartphone. The sites keep a portion of the revenue — between about 5% and 25% — and the rest goes to the talent.

Goddess Tierra has been in the online porn business for 13 years, long enough to remember how hard it was when there were no specialized tools available. When she started, she had to learn how to code in HTML and paid for domain and hosting services to reach her customers. Now, that all comes in a virtual package.

"Everything's so easy now," said Tierra, who typically makes at least $10,000 a month. "You just need to know how to brand yourself."

OnlyFans markets itself as a site for all types of creators and told CNBC in a statement that it doesn't "always want to be at the center of stories that focus on the adult side of the business." But pornography is clearly the market that's gotten the company attention.

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Fancentro is more willing to embrace its target audience.

"There wasn't a web-based CMS targeting performers and what they needed as independent content creators and giving them the ability to run their own businesses," Fancentro CEO Stan Fiskin told CNBC. "We consider ourselves a premium social network."

On Fancentro, models set the price and frequency of the subscriptions, charging on a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual basis. After a user subscribes, the company notifies the model and links the customer to her private Snapchat account. The website, which takes a 25% cut on transactions, now has 15,000 active models, up from 6,000 in July 2018, though it doesn't disclose the size of its user base.