Amelia Quest is a content creator who shares how the loss of her TikTok account and discovering that her private explicit photographs are available on Reddit made her take a six-month hiatus from the internet and eventually return as an influencer.
Quest didn’t set out to be an influencer. She stumbled onto her successful path almost accidentally by livestreaming from her local gym on TikTok.
“My trainer was telling me that I needed to walk, and I was so bored with it,” Quest recalls. “So I started livestreaming, and people were like, ‘Why are you wearing so many clothes? Aren’t you hot?’ And it just naturally turned into, ‘I’m not gonna take off my jacket unless you guys pay me to do it.'”
Livestreaming became a significant source of revenue. When the streams were at their peak, she made about $1,700 per one-and-a-half-hour live stream.
“I think the most I made was probably around $1,700, which, for an hour and a half of me walking on a treadmill on TikTok Live, not gifts or anything like that, but people sending money directly to my Cash App and Venmo, I thought that was pretty good,” she said.
As Quest gained popularity, the stream evolved, and eventually she started doing them in her own house, allowing viewers to pay to watch her change clothes.
“It evolved into people tuning in to watch my livestream every single day, because I was probably doing it five days a week,” she revealed. “Then it was so lucrative. Instead of just doing the treadmill livestreams, I would do them at home.”
“It was like a ‘Barbie doll’ kind of livestream,” she explained. “I’d just be hanging out at my house. I’d have a clothing rack behind me with different outfits, and people could pay for me to change outfits.”
All this progress came to a sudden stop when Quest livestreamed from a Korean barbecue restaurant. Quest says she was banned from TikTok because she put a yogurt shot between her breasts and tried to drink it during one of the streams.
“The shot got me banned off of livestream and then within 24 hours banned off of TikTok,” she says.
In addition to being banned from her account, on the same day Quest discovered a fan page on Reddit where nude photos she shared privately at the age of 19-21 were posted without her permission.
“My TikTok account got banned the same exact day that I found out there was a Reddit fan page about me where my nudes had been leaked on there,” she explains.
“I went from having this great income that I was making off of TikTok to losing that all and, within maybe an hour or two, finding out that not only did I just lose that source of income, but men are making money off my t*** on Reddit,” she said. “I was like, ‘What the f***?'”
While she was able to get Reddit to remove those photographs, some people claimed in the comments that they still have copies of her photos somewhere.
“I got Reddit to take the photos down, and people in the comments were like, ‘Oh, just send me a message. I have them. I’ll send them to you,'” she said. “I don’t even know if all of them were making money off of it. I think it was just g****** helping each other g***.”
“I was devastated. I was crying. I was very depressed. I felt incredibly alone, defeated, and violated,” Quest said. “I was just thinking, whoever sent it in, didn’t you already get enough from me? Why did you feel like you had to hurt me?”
Those things made Quest take a complete break from social media, where she worked as a creator. She worked as a barista and believed her time as an influencer was over.
“It took me like six months of being depressed and upset about what had happened before it even became an option to me that I was going to do [influencer work],” she says.
“It wasn’t even just like, ‘Oh man, this s***ty thing happened. Let me immediately jump on [influencer work]. I’m gonna make money off this,” she adds. “It was devastating for a long time before I saw the silver lining.”
Eventually, spending time with the swingers community in Orlando, Florida, and talking to people who cared about her helped her start being an influencer again.
“I think enough people hyped me up that it gave me the confidence to feel like I could do it, and then also the kind of vengeance of being like, ‘I’m gonna take back my power. If they’re gonna make money off me, I’m gonna make money off me,” she says.
Now earning six figures, Quest says her job goes far beyond selling explicit content.
“I would never cheapen myself by doing p*rn. I’m not selling s*x. I’m selling companionship,” she said. “I’m creating a narrative online that makes men feel like I’m a safe person, or like they would want to be in a relationship with me.”
While she wouldn’t advise others to copy her decision, she doesn’t regret the path she took that led her to where she is.
“I’m happy to be in the mindspace I’m in now. Would I advise myself to make the same decisions I did back then in the mindspace I’m in now? No. But I would never go back and change it, because it made me who I am,” she says.
