Leonid Radvinsky, the billionaire owner of Onlyfans, earned more than US$1.2 million a day from the social media subscription site best known for hosting adult content.
Oni Crawford, an exotic dancer who works for herself making content to post on OnlyFans, puts on makeup before making content at her home in Temple Hills, MD on October 13, 2021.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
Annual accounts for OnlyFans’ British parent company Fenix International show that the business paid a $472 million dividend to Radvinsky in 2023 after a surge in revenues and profits. That’s up from 2023 when the business paid Radvinsky a $338 million dividend.
The new financials show that transactions processed over the platform grew 18.9% to $6.6 billion in 2023. OnlyFans claims that around 80 cents of every dollar spent on the platform goes to its creators. Revenues also grew to $1.3 billion from $1 billion in 2022 and profits grew by a fifth to $485.4 million last year.
That growth stemmed largely from non-subscription based revenues, one time purchases of pics or videos, that grew to $765 million in 2023 up from $567.6 million in 2022. Subscription revenue recorded a more modest increase of $540.8 million up from $522.1 million in 2022. The total number of subscribers on the platform increased 28% from about 240 million to 305 million, while the number of OnlyFans creators jumped 29% from 3.2 million to 4.1 million.
The United States accounts for the bulk of the London-based company’s revenues totalling some $863 million in 2023 with Europe and the rest of the world accounting for $443.2 million. The profits are extraordinary given that OnlyFans’s parent company claims to now have just 42 full time employees, down from the 52 it recorded in its 2022 accounts.
Radvinsky, a U.S. citizen who was born in Ukraine and started his career running porn referral websites, has taken $1 billion in dividends from OnlyFans over the last three years. Forbes now estimates Radvinsky’s wealth at $3.8 billion.
In 2018, Radvinsky bought the then much smaller OnlyFans site from its British founders Tim Stokely and his father Guy Stokely. The sites boomed during the pandemic largely as a showcase for pornographic material, but moved to ban sexually explicit content in August 2021 after coming under pressure from bank and credit card companies following reports it had hosted child sexual abuse content.
OnlyFans reversed course just a few weeks later, saying tit had “secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community.” The initial announcement of OnlyFans’ pivot drew heavy criticism from the site’s creators and sex work advocates. The British media regulator Ofcom opened an investigation into OnlyFans’ age verification measures in May after the company revealed a “technical glitch” meant its minimum age threshold was set to 20 years old instead of 23.
A separate Reuters investigation published in March detailed nearly 140 instances in which men and women complained sexually explicit content had been posted without their constent.
Still, OnlyFans seems intent on broadening itself beyond the sex industry. In 2021, the company launched OFTV, a YouTube-style video streaming platform promoting “safe-for-work” videos on fitness, cooking and music hosted by OnlyFans creators.
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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