OnlyFans owner bags $701m after user numbers increase to 377m
OnlyFans, the UK streaming platform used by adult video stars, influencers and celebrities to sell content directly to fans, paid out $701 million to its owner last year.
Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian- American entrepreneur, received the record dividend before a potential multibillion-dollar sale of the business.
Accounts filed with Companies House for Fenix International, the British parent company, showed the scale of its growth in the year to last November. The number of “content producers” on OnlyFans grew by 13 per cent to 4.63 million, while the number of user accounts increased by 24 per cent to 377.5 million.
It paid $5.8 billion to creators, who receive 80 per cent of net payments, an increase of $500 million on the previous year. Profit before tax was $684 million, up from $658 million the year before. Its taxation charge was $163 million.
OnlyFans was founded in 2016 by Tim Stokely, a British entrepreneur, and his father, Guy. It was bought by Radvinsky, 43, in 2018 and Stokely, 42, left the business in 2021. The platform enables creators to make content on their phones and sell this directly to subscribers, with the company taking a 20 per cent cut.
The company has branched out with OnlyFans TV (OFTV), which is gaining traction by showing more familyfriendly content from cookery to comedy and has a licensing deal with Netflix UK. Keily Blair, 42, the company’s chief executive, said it was a way to increase “discoverability”.
She described OFTV in a LinkedIn post as “No nudity, no subscriptions, no tips”. It won “best platform” for reality streaming content at this year’s 14th Annual National Reality TV Awards and Smash City, its pickleball show, won best streamed reality series.
Radvinsky is the sole shareholder of Fenix International and has paid himself at least $1 billion in dividends over the past three years, according to filings. He is exploring a sale of the business to Forest Road Company, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, which would value OnlyFans at about $8 billion.
Little is known about Radvinsky, who grants few interviews. He was born in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa and his family moved to the United States when he was a child. He studied economics at Northwestern University near Chicago.
He is now thought to live in Florida, where Leo.com, his venture capital fund, is based. It pays out cheques of up to $1 million to tech start-ups. Radvinsky has donated large sums to support the recent relief effort in Ukraine.
Before OnlyFans, Radvinsky owned Cybertania, an adult webcam business, which offered users links to passwords for content, including pornography.
His LinkedIn page describes him as “an accomplished venture capital investor, philanthropist and technology entrepreneur [who has] spent the last two decades building successful companies in the fields of social communities, digital advertising, web hosting and software development”.
In March Ofcom, the media regulator, ordered OnlyFans to pay a fine of more than £1 million over failures to correctly disclose information related to measures to verify the ages of those on the platform.
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