Is drawing furries profitable?

A friend of a friend draws furry art and got paid well for it. She used to attend small local cons about once a month and would set up a booth for her art. She was getting around $500-$2000 a month for it. Not bad for a side hustle.

Highly.

Furries are a life long choice (rather than a youth fetish) so you've got some pretty surprisingly rich furries that want art.

I think the issue is securing your place in the market because of how lucrative it is.

Also uh, don't dox yourself or reveal any personal information. While most furries are fine people there are some dangerous folks there and it'd be good if none of them ever showed up at your doorstop. Generally speaking, making NSFW art should involve a lot of deliberate and careful detachment from any PII.

If you don’t already have an audience you should try to establish one before doing commissions. Furries generally don’t want a Walmart that just has whatever commission is cheapest, they want to commission an artist that has a style that speaks to them and they enjoy.

You don’t necessarily need to have your own fursona or do porn, but both help.

If you can crank out high quality drawings you can earn a fair amount. The fewer people are willing to draw it (weird porn) or the higher quality* the art is, the more you can charge.

Whether or not you can live on it is something you’d just have to sit down and do the math on. With rent/taxes/expenses/savings, how much do you need to charge per page or per hour of work? If you’re doing it as anything other than a side hustle DO NOT skip this step, or you will be working below minimum wage.

* subjective, but you probably have an idea of what a potential client would mean by that

Edit: realizing I assumed this was asking for advice on how to be profitable with drawing furry stuff and not a general inquiry, lol. It can be profitable, but you have to be good at self marketing and not be shy about charging an appropriately high rate for your art.

Depends largely on how good you are at it, whether you're willing to draw NSFW stuff, and if so, how extreme you're willing to get with that NSFW stuff. Sad but true.

I follow many artists on Instagram. One such account that used to regularly make art basically quit and outright came out to state to their followers that doing furry art comissions was so worth it that that's what they will be dedicating their time to going forward.

Depend on how good of an artist you are and what you're willing to do. One of the dudes that pays the most on furry art is the one that has an obsession with Macro Falco. If you're willing to make a Macro Falco, then you're good.

Why furries are suspiciously wealthy I do not know. Anyone have a theory?

Creative and traditional media is a tough sell. The primary issue is freedom of information. The gatekeepers are consolidated. Reaching any audience is a heavily taxed and, at the very least neigh impossible, feat. It does not matter what kind of business you attempt to start, search engines are not deterministic. Searching for you by name is irrelevant on nearly any and certainly all large platforms. Like I could do a ton on somewhere like eBay, but their margin is untenable. Amazon is a joke for fools. Their entire seller system only exists to mask their price fixing scam. PayPal and other payment processors online use a loophole to charge an order of magnitude more for payment processing compared to brick and mortar traditional retail. Social platforms that sell stuff take out what would be the entire profit margin of most products. Selling stuff online is a massive scam. I did it and have sold nearly $150k on eBay in 2 years of doing it professionally. It was not viable when I ran the real numbers. Total overhead was half a tick below 40%. Even at 50% ideal keystone retail (basis of traditional MSRP), 10% is not even minimum wage. The platforms will do nothing to promote you; only enough to barely string you along. It is by design. They are a means of exploiting the poor for as much as possible while masking their scams from regulations.