Three years ago, before she became Eva Elfie, the girl with the anime-figurine hourglass figure, signature platinum blonde hair, darker eye-brows and cautious-but-curious eyes was a journalism college student who waited tables, juggled office jobs like sales manager and HR rep and tried to break into broadcasting as an interviewer for local radio and TV stations in colder than cold Siberia.
Then she moved to Moscow — only marginally warmer, but crucially less provincial — to try modeling and soon started shooting amateur sex videos with a partner.
I think that my life changed a lot since I started making videos. First of all, I have more free time to do whatever I want. Also, I started really enjoying the work that I do. If I didn’t do this, I would still want to be a model.
Fast forward to the end of 2020. Eva Elfie is the biggest clip artist in the world — by a long, long shot if Pornhub numbers are used as the measure.
How big? Top Ten (at times even Top Five) big. Rarefied stratosphere of stardom only occupied by the likes of Lana Rhoades, Riley Reid, Abella Danger and Mia Malkova big. Ridiculous, almost unbelievable boffo numbers that, depending on the weekly and monthly fluctuations of the capricious Pornhub algorithm, often top those of industry established industry powerhouses like Adriana Chechik, Brandi Love and even the most decorated contemporary megastar, Angela White.
Here are some numbers for the stats inclined:
- In late 2019, Eva clocked 546K subscribers and 197M video views.
- As of this writing, a year later, she boasts 472M video views (and rising) and 1.2M subscribers (ditto), which put her at #4 on the overall Pornhub rankings.
- Elfie’s 1.2M subscribers are matched by someone like international fan favorite Mia Malkova, a star in the mainstream porn industry since 2012. Malkova and Elfie have collaborated on content this year.
A typical Eva Elfie video has very little to do with the hyperglammed, tastefully titled studio superproductions that command the talents of her fellow Top Ten stars.
She and her producing partner — with whom she shoots her B/G content, which she offers in addition to solo and all-girl — have racked up ~53M views for their most-viewed production, called “He keeps fucking creampied pussy of his step sis to cum again.”This is followed by ~31M views for “Fucking cuckold’s girlfriend to cum on her slutty face.”
Last year, one of their videos was the third most-watched video in all of Pornhub for 2019.
What is the Eva Elfie secret? How did a fresh-faced Siberian teen become the 2020 XBIZ Europas Female Clip Artist of the Year and the December 2020 Professional Model of the Month on Pornhub, as well as a face and a name with enough international appeal to inspire a fan-made YouTube biography in Hindi?
“I don’t know!” Elfie tells XBIZ via Zoom from her apartment in Moscow. “I think the main attraction was that me and my partner tried to film something unusual and creative and play with the ‘stepsister’ role, and then my appearance is unique.”
“I’m beautiful,” she says matter-of-factly, with evident lack of conceit, “but I’m different from other American actresses who are on Pornhub.”
Elfie — who chose her name because she had long been tormented as a kid about her elfin ears and decided to turn a liability into a (very bankable) asset — has a theory as to her undeniable appeal.
“I think that I look, literally, like a ‘girl next door,’ like someone’s classmate, or friend, or someone’s sister,” she explains. “So therefore I think they consider me not like a big star or something like that. They think I’m a common girl and that is why the ‘stepsister’ genre applies to me so well.”
Elfie speaks very good conversational English, but for the interview she marshaled the services of a friend to translate the more tricky exchanges. It’s charming to hear the last answer in a string of musical Russian surrounding the very recognizable “stepsister” in unmistakable English.
That word and its current algorithm-friendly porn connotation, does provide a key to the Eva Elfie success story.
“Step”-porn is a running joke among jaded porn industry professionals in America, contracted to churn out “fauxcest” titles week after week. But there’s nothing at all jaded about Elfie, in any way. In typical Russian style, she and her producing partner took apart “what the international porn watchers want,” identified all the workable parts (the nondescript youthful clothes, the basic role-playing, the generic music, the required expressions of surprise or enjoyment) and reassembled them into a crafty facsimile.
She’s not alone in this. Fellow Siberian clip artists like Sia Siberia and Purple Bitch work essentially within the same formula: turning Russian interiors into “all-American” dorm rooms with Rick and Morty dolls, anime t-shirts, Supreme logos and a “pizza guy gets lucky” scenario out of a second-tier U.S. studio.
The scenes are neither “American” nor “Russian,” although the presence of the occasional stuffed bear, or remnants of Soviet-era wallpaper sometimes threatens to glitch the simulation. They exist in an international twilight zone of cultural essence that all but guarantees its international appeal.
Like all Russian pop, and much of the nation’s high art, Eva Elfie’s videos are imitative. Like the Russian poets of the 19th century — who tried to out-Lord Byron Lord Byron — or the Hermitage palace — Versailles re-made and re-modeled — Elfie and her partner are, knowingly or not, following in the grand imperial tradition. They deconstruct the stepsister and pizza guy videos methodically, then reconstruct them with Russian flair.
“I speak English and sometimes I speak Russian,” Elfie explains with mechanical, but never cynical, precision. “But in Russia it’s better to speak in English to make these videos.”
“There are many girls from Russia,” she adds, “who like to film like we do, and tend to hide this fact. They try to speak English for the international audience.”
And unlike the Southern California porn pros, Elfie won’t mock the “stepsister” routine that has catapulted her to the very top of the top tube site.
“The ‘stepsister’ genre is mostly about actors’ playing a role, and we shouldn’t treat it negatively or seriously. It’s mostly about the role-play, about something fun to play. It’s a game.”
“You shouldn’t laugh at it,” she warns.
The seriousness in attitude is counterbalanced by the aura of authenticity — or maybe “authenticity” — that is at the core of her success and her brand. Her idea of a video tease is shot with smart-phone aesthetics, while she lazily sways in pigtails at the camera wearing an oversized Chicago Bulls shirt and a day-glo baseball cap.
Even her cosplay is made to look accessible — a video where she role-plays Elsa from “Frozen” uses a Halloween costume version of the outfit, cheap blonde wig and all. She’s not trying to play Elsa but the “influencer next door” trying to play Elsa as a sexual game.
She has cultivated an avid following by delivering updates consistently, with genuineness and high-quality polish grounded in an amateur vibe.
A fan of hers that spoke with XBIZ echoed this sentiment, sharing, “I like her because she’s very Instagram-chic,” he said. “It’s like watching the real sex life of a girl who could be promoting products on Instagram, like a yoga brand.”
What he likes, he explained, is that it’s “amateur” without being actually amateur. “It’s not some gonzo thing or a grimy hidden camera on a real couple. It’s more like an influencer or a YouTuber are authentic.” It is Eva Elfie — “The Girl Next Feed” rather than “The Girl Next Door,” if you will.
Her freshness, and almost nondescript quality, is kind of the point of her appeal. Like an IG model, she’s glam around the edges, gorgeous but not overtly striking. Like the archetypal influencer, she’s not really supposed to stand out from all the other successful influencers. It’s an approachability that feels like intimacy, in part because it’s well-produced to achieve that.
“She hits the sweet spot,” her fan shared. “Her exhibitionism is very charming. She’s outdoors, she’s at the beach, she passes tourists on the way back from doing something hot. You can see real people walking behind her.”
“It’s what you dream happens before and after the Instagram photo with the perfect mocha or the postcard sunset.”
Nonetheless, Elfie still doesn’t feel she has “made it.” Her success was experienced as a gradual, unstoppable rise. “At first we preferred to film more amateur content, self-made content,” she says, “but when we were contacted by studios like Brazzers and Reality Kings, we understood that it is a higher level of recognition and we were happy they were interested in us.”
Elfie, who loves traveling, has shot in Prague and hopes to shoot in the other major Eastern European production hub, Budapest. In 2019, she traveled to Los Angeles for the Pornhub Awards.
“I talked to many stars that film in the mainstream industry,” she says, a little starstruck. The highlight of her trip was meeting Riley Reid and touching her butt. L.A. agents expressed some interest in her before COVID stopped most international travel.
But self-produced clips continue being her focus. After all, why mess with a winning formula? And why share dividends when you can get millions and millions of views, and social media followers, with a camera, a Moscow park, your own clothes and a stealthy public tryst with a trusted partner.
Just slap a hyper-literal, search-word-friendly title like “Walking with cum in panties after risky public sex” on it (an actual Eva Elfie production), and put it up on Pornhub for $12.99.“When we shoot, we always [have] some plan, a special attitude towards it,” Elfie explains with no affect, as if she was parsing a set of compliance instructions in her old HR job back in Siberia. “It’s a set day, we choose a location where we can film and can have all the time in the day to film a video. We have plots written and it’s a serious attitude.”
Elfie currently also manages her own OnlyFans, Snapchat, Patreon, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, plus her Pornhub channel.
“I had a good amount of followers already on Instagram and my TikTok was really good so I didn’t see being moved to the pornstar section of Pornhub affect me in any way, because I had the a strong following already.”
Elfie is referring to a recent change, when after being in the amateur section for a year, Pornhub reclassified big number non-porn-pro accounts — such as hers, and others like mysterious couple Leolulu and Mini Diva — among their “pornstars.”
“We really didn’t want to be in the star section, but a month ago we were included in it and we immediately went to the fourth place,” she says.
Not that this extra exposure bothers Elfie, because in Moscow, she does not live a double life and has embraced her fame.
“I don’t hide it,” she says. “All of my friends and my parents know that I am a porn star and I get recognized on the streets.”
She also has ditched even vestiges of a different persona.
“At first I played some character — I was pretending to be a young girl who likes video games,” she says. “But then I realize it was actually true — I do love video games, so at the moment I’d say this is my authentic self.”
Elfie saves her roleplaying for the scripted scenes she shoots and for her passion — RPGs like “The Witcher 3,” “Life Is Strange” and “The Last of Us,” which her porn career affords her the time to revel in.
“I think that my life changed a lot since I started making videos,” she says. “First of all, I have more free time to do whatever I want. Also, I started really enjoying the work that I do.”
“If I didn’t do this, I would still want to be a model,” she adds.
