OnlyFans is just eight years old but has already made its secretive Florida owner a billionaire.
American-Ukrainian businessman Leonid Radvinsky bought the company which owns the site from its British founders for an undisclosed sum in 2018. The pandemic lockdowns, catastrophic for some business, was a boon for OnlyFans and its not-safe-for-office content. It points out that not all the material on the site is sexually explicit but it is widely accepted that the site’s rapid growth is largely down to user-generated pornography.
OnlyFans “creators” can post videos and photos behind a paywall, which “fans” or subscribers pay a monthly fee to access. Creators can also earn money from tips and from “pay-per-view” content. In 2019, OnlyFans facilitated £238m of such payments. By 2023 that sum had soared 21-fold to £5.3bn. OnlyFans takes a 20% cut, banking more than £1bn in 2023. After costs, more than half of this was profit.
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Variety via Getty Images)
Radvinsky is the chief beneficiary, paying himself more than £1 billion in dividends in less than five years, according to the latest accounts of Fenix International, the company he owns and which owns OnlyFans. Last year, he was getting more than £1m a day from his investment. He is not the only person getting rich at the company. In 2019, the average earnings among 11 staff including the directors was £101,000. By 2023, 42 staff, including the two directors, were getting paid on average £482,000.
Some of the most successful creators are reportedly earning millions of pounds a year. But the company’s accounts show that the average annual earnings for an OnlyFans creator was £1,291, before fees and tax.
OnlyFans own data suggests that the phenomenal growth of the site may have peaked. Approvals for new “creator” accounts hit around 400,000 a month in early 2023, and are now down about 55% to around 180,000 a month. Last month saw the smallest number of creator account approvals since OnlyFans started recording these in mid-2021. Yet the amount of content continues to grow, with more than 300 million individual pieces of content in the last six months alone.
The site is notoriously difficult to monitor. Every creator account is hidden behind its own paywall, with subscription rates typically between £5 and £30 a month. The company’s monthly “transparency reports” show that the number of accounts deactivated for breaching site rules doubled last year, from just over 28,000 in 2023 to nearly 60,000 in 2024. At the same time, the amount of pieces of content taken down for the same reason has almost halved, from 557,000 in 2023 to 323,000 in 2024. OnlyFans did not respond to a request for comment about this.
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