Is selling nudes actually easy money?
Taking the picture can be easy.
Making somebody pay for it, and then come back and pay for something else, is the business.
That is the missing part in most "easy money" stories.
If you sell your own content, you need somewhere to sell it, people who know you exist, pricing, messages, new material, promotion, privacy management and enough time to keep the whole thing moving. The nude itself may be the easiest ten seconds of the process.
A crowded market does not mean nobody makes good money. It means attention has value. Sometimes you buy it with advertising. More often you pay for it in hours spent posting, chatting, collaborating, building a persona and trying not to look exactly like the next hundred accounts.
Direct selling also changes your relationship with the buyer. People may ask for customs, discounts, more explicit content, private messages or specific fantasies. Maybe you like that interaction. Maybe it becomes the bit you dread opening every morning.
Privacy becomes another small business department. Which accounts do you use? Is the face visible? How separate is the work identity from your normal one? Which room are you shooting in? What do you reveal to keep customers interested?
A paid production uses a completely different model. You are not selling one picture at a time. A producer hires you for a defined job, you agree the fee and the production deals with the camera, edit and distribution.
That means less direct control over the finished work, but also far less time spent trying to sell each individual piece yourself.
Neither model is easy money. One makes you the shop owner. The other makes you the booked performer.
The useful question is which job you would rather have.
Custom content makes the workload even clearer. The buyer is no longer simply purchasing something you already made. Now there can be discussion, specific requests, preparation, filming, editing, delivery and sometimes a negotiation about revisions. One custom can be more profitable than a premade clip and still consume far more time than it looked like in the message.
That is why I would think in terms of hourly effort and repeatability rather than how effortless the final photograph looks. The customer is paying for the finished fantasy. You are doing all the invisible work needed to produce it.