The rise and fall of OnlyFans
The video narrates the full business trajectory of OnlyFans, from its modest £10,000 start in 2016 as a creator‑payment platform that initially banned adult content, through its 2017‑2021 transformation into the world’s most profitable adult‑content marketplace under Leonid Radvinsky. It details the COVID‑driven user surge, mainstream cultural mentions, and the massive cash flow that generated $700 million in net profit with only 46 employees. The story then explores the systemic challenges that crippled the company: banking and credit‑card restrictions (Metro Bank shutdown, Mastercard AN‑5196), the rise of “e‑pimping” agencies that scammed users, and regulatory pressure from the ACLU. It examines the emerging AI disruption—both as a tool for creators and as a threat via AI‑generated fake creators—highlighting how AI could bypass the platform’s core human‑to‑human model. The narrative follows multiple failed sale attempts, noting the limited pool of capital willing to fund adult‑content businesses, the $8 billion and later $5.5 billion bids, and the ultimate plan to fix banking issues and possibly go public by 2028. The video concludes with reflections on ethical trade‑offs, the importance of timing exits, and the recent death of Radvinsky, which likely accelerated the sale process. Throughout, the presenter offers business lessons about profit versus ethics, the need to monitor external pressures, and the inevitability of disruption.
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The owner of OnlyFans made $700 million last year. 46 employees and no debt. By almost any measure, it is one of the absolute best and most profitable businesses on the internet. About a year ago, the owner of the business tried to sell it and has been struggling ever since to get a high price for it. Why is one of the most profitable businesses in the history of the internet struggling to sell? The answer to that stems of how the whole business came together. It all started with a $10,000 loan from one guy's dad to him to go and start the business. And today, $7.2 billion in revenue flows through OnlyFans. If you think about it, what should a business that generates $700 million a year in cash trade for? Like, if that was on the public stock market, it would be incredibly highly valued, multiple tens of billions. But here we are, and OnlyFans is kind of stuck. And look, this is a crazy story with OnlyFans. It is also one of the most difficult videos to make. I mean, in the end, this is an adult website. Well, I did no first-person research on this, unlike I did with most of the fast food videos and coffee ones. But in the end, we'll talk about— because there's some crazy business lessons in this whole thing. But before we get into that, I want to let you know that I put every single one of these video stories that I do into a one-page summary cheat sheet. It's a great way for you to remember the key beats of the story and take away all the great lessons that come from it. And maybe you could be the cool guy at the party who is telling interesting business nerd stories like I do. Join the club. Anyway, you can get all these cheat sheets totally for free at girdley.com/youtube. Just put your email in and you'll get this video's cheat sheet automatically, plus all the other ones I've done. Now let's get back to the video. How OnlyFans got to where it is today actually starts back in 2016, not that long ago. And it actually starts in England. A young man who is living in Essex and had gone to kind of a second-tier English university, a man named Tim Stokely. Well, he's a hustler and an entrepreneur. And look, The adult business tends to attract a certain type of folks. They're people that decide that that's an okay market to be in. And Tim was that type of person. His first few websites were adult-oriented called Cams4u and Glams4whatever. Basically kind of off-brand, you know, adult pornography type websites. He tried a few other things, none of which took off. One of them was like a matchmaking site. So like an Angie's List for tradespeople. Didn't go anywhere. And ultimately he was about to run out of money. So he went to his dad, who was a banker in England, and said, "Dad, I need some more money to keep trying these business ventures." And his dad said, "Look, this is the last loan I'm gonna give you. Here's £10,000 and see what you can do with it." This last shot would be a business called OnlyFans. But OnlyFans back then was not what OnlyFans is today. They actually, from the very beginning, banned adult content. The idea was basically to be Patreon but on steroids where people connect directly with their fans and basically do business with them. They wanted musicians, artists, creators, all that type of stuff. The creators would keep 80% of the revenue, the platform would take 20%. The problem was there was already a Patreon doing Patreon very well. So the Stokelys were stuck and eventually they needed to make some money. So in 2017, they quietly lifted the ban on adult content and suddenly adult performers and people in the adult industry flooded the platform. And for the first time, these creators can earn directly from their audience. No middlemen, no promoters, nobody taking 90% of the cut, and they can start to build their own business going directly to their fans. Growth is steady, like they managed to make payroll and keep going, but there's nothing really to grab headlines or to start kind of the snowball of popularity for OnlyFans at the time until somebody comes along that sees something in the site and potential that they don't. And in 2018, that man is Leonid Rovinsky. He comes in and he buys 75% of the parent company of OnlyFans. Leonid is like a lot of people in the adult industry, famously quiet and reclusive. He's never given a podcast interview. His photos are rarely found on the internet. Heck, I don't even know if we're gonna be able to find one when we edit this video. And he's the son of immigrants who'd moved to the US from Ukraine. He got a degree back in 2002 from Northwestern, I think it was, in Chicago. And his very first business had been, well, you guessed it, in the adult industry. One of his subsequent ventures in 2004 was called MyFreeCams. And it was basically a site where people could, well, basically do live streams of their, well, adult stuff. And his growth tactics were so extreme and so aggressive that Microsoft eventually sued him on behalf of Hotmail users for the types of growth hacks that he was doing to try to get new people on the platform. After he bought out OnlyFans in 2017, 2018, Tim stayed on as CEO, but behind the scenes, it was Leonid calling the shots. And his vision was to turn OnlyFans into a hive of pornography. I quoted that, that somebody wrote that in my research, so I didn't make up that phrase. Almost immediately, stuff started to go wrong, but not what you imagine. Uh, what went wrong was on the financial side. In 2019, Metro Bank, who had controlled all the accounts for OnlyFans, basically shut down all of their banking services with no notice. Vinsky and his team went crazy to go try to find a new banking relationship, but this was the first message that they were going to be hearing from the financial system. Everybody from the credit card companies to the banks didn't want to be doing business with adult-oriented websites, and OnlyFans was definitely one of those. Then came a lucky break for OnlyFans, the COVID pandemic. In March 2020, the world basically shut down. At that moment, I remember that time when the NBA game was canceled and suddenly we all felt like the world was going to be shutting down very quickly. With everybody trapped in their homes, suddenly OnlyFans was poised to explode. In that first month of COVID the user base grew 75% for OnlyFans. Supposedly they were averaging between 6,000 and 8,000 new creators per day and over 200,000 new users. The entire adult industry was basically shut down. You couldn't go to gentlemen's clubs, you couldn't go outside your house, and people needed an outlet and they went to OnlyFans. In April 2020, they started to make the leap into the mainstream. And part of what did that was Beyoncé name-dropped OnlyFans in a collab she did with Megan Thee Stallion. Traffic jumped 15% overnight just from that song. Then suddenly the rest of cultural mainstream started to recognize and know about OnlyFans. Cardi B, all these different folks started to mention OnlyFans in their stuff, and it was getting amplified as part of the culture. Then in August 2020, a lady named Bella Thorne signed up for OnlyFans. She reportedly made $1 million in 24 hours and another couple million the next day. She was not selling explicit photos or explicit content. She was charging $200 per message with fans who thought they were messaging with her in order to copy of explicit photos. But the problem was when they actually went to request the photos and go through the whole thing and paid the money, they just didn't get anything that was X-rated. The longtime creators on the platform kind of tricked and used all of the user base who were expecting one thing and got another. Basically created a ton of refund requests that the users asked for their money back when they felt, uh, well, cheated. OnlyFans makes money by taking a percentage of each transaction. So when we talk about revenue numbers for it, we're talking about net revenue. Remember, most of the money coming in goes straight back out to the creators. YouTube is like this, by the way, as well. 55% of every dollar you spend on the platform, or advertisers pay, goes to folks like me. So thank you for watching. So net revenue, the percentage take that OnlyFans was taking, started exploding. In 2020, they did $375 million. In 2021, it was nearly a billion. OnlyFans was printing more money faster than almost any company in history of the internet. And they were doing it all at a crazy scale with a tiny number of people, only 46 employees. But as the platform grew, something else was starting to emerge that was gonna be a real problem for it. And this was a shadowy industry that was created around the platform itself. As creators on the platform started to scale, suddenly it was becoming impossible for them to keep up with the flood of what was happening, which was DMs were where the real money was made. People were creating basically parasocial relationships between the creators and the customers. In other words, somebody who had a credit card might think they had a direct relationship with the producer of the content, the star. But in reality, that's not what was happening. What was happening was the scale was so great the creators couldn't keep up. So in stepped a new type of company, people who had agencies that would go run these accounts on behalf of the creators. In other words, people who thought they were talking directly with the creator were basically chatting with who knows who, some random person with hairy knuckles located in some foreign country who is probably not even the same gender as the creator. So while this person might think they were talking to the creator, in reality they were talking to somebody in the Philippines or Pakistan or India or South America or any place that was different than the creator. And that person might be managing 3, 4, or 5 relationships at the same time, all with one goal. How do they get that person who has the credit card to swipe it as many times as possible, thinking they're talking to the real creator? This kind of scamming had its own term created by the New York Times. They called it e-pimping. Basically, these folks' job was to scam, cheat, lie, and mislead people with credit cards— basically lonely men, typically— to swipe it as often as possible. So you see the problem with what's going going on as these agencies emerge. You've got basically relationships that are built totally on a lie, and behind it all is OnlyFans taking 20% of each and every one of those scam transactions. So while OnlyFans pretended to sell a relationship with a real person, they were selling you basically somebody in a call center trying to get you to open up your wallet as quickly as possible. But then MasterCard, one of the two major credit card networks in the world, in 2021 announced a new policy that would make that very difficult. It was called AN5196, and 5196 basically said that any website that was taking MasterCards that was producing adult content had to go through and examine each and every piece of content before it went out without fail. They required further that each and every producer of content had to have government IDs issued and verified by the platform. Every piece of content, every single person. This all had to be done by October 2021. Or platforms like OnlyFans would run the risk of not being able to take credit cards anymore. These requirements had a simple goal stated, which was they didn't want people to be using these websites to do things like child, you know, exploitation and trafficking of humans for the purpose of basically making money because of their bodies and appearance. But it's also worth asking if the real intent behind all of that was making things like OnlyFans basically too expensive to operate on the internet. With everything else, and a lot of life. There's no such things as black or white answers to stuff. Life is complicated. The ACLU got involved. They basically filed a formal complaint saying that this policy by MasterCard was restricting First Amendment rights for basically sex workers and making it difficult for many of them to earn a living. It's the ACLU after all. Basically, this backed OnlyFans into a corner. At the same time, you had folks like Mellon Bank, JPMorgan Chase basically shutting down their ability to move money around in wires. The reality is in America, And in most of the world, if you're cut off from the banking system, it makes it incredibly difficult to do almost anything, much less, uh, you know, you can't even pay your mortgage if you're cut off from the banking system. And it's even worse if you're a big business like OnlyFans. And they were getting backed into a corner. On August 19th, 2021, they did something pretty crazy. They announced that on October 1st, they would no longer allow adult-oriented content to exist on OnlyFans. And by this point, like, that was the name of the business. That's what the whole business is, is an adult website. They were suddenly saying, hey, OnlyFans, we're not going to allow any more of that going forward. Stokely, who was still involved in leading the business, he basically went on media tours and said, hey, the banks have forced us to do this. We can't be in the adult business anymore. Creators went and started to look up on other sites like one's called Fansly and stuff like that. Also never seen that one. But, but in the end, like Tim and his folks said, the reason we have to do this is we have to be connected to the money system to be a business. And here was OnlyFans unable to do that. But in a crazy turn of events, 6 days later, OnlyFans came out and said, well, we're reversing that decision. Suddenly they had managed to find banking partners. What had happened in the background was creators and the public had started to pressure the banks. Tim going out and being public about the banks causing the shutdown of adult content had caused all those people who were on both sides of those transactions to put pressures on those banks. In reality, there had been kind of a standoff. Also, those banks, they want to make money, and the way they make money is by having money flow through their system. And here was a big source of that money about to be totally cut off. The reality is all of these kind of shadow industries— ammo, guns, adult content— cannabis, they all exist in kind of a gray area, and there's an inherent tension there. The banks and all the financial system, they want to be making money from those transactions. There's a lot of cash there. At the same time, they're getting pressure from the other side, which is like, gray area is gray for a reason. It's sometimes outside the law, and sometimes there's a lot of people in those industries doing not good stuff. And the interesting thing of where America's gone, so much of our regulation and expectation about the morality of society is getting not done by the government or by the courts or by the laws or by legislatures. It's getting done by the whims and decisions being made by big corporations. And it's kind of crazy if you look at it now. It's become a normal expectation that we expect all these folks who are running businesses to become both the morality and legal police for the American society. Stokely had had enough. 4 months later, he stepped down in December 2021. There was a new CEO for a bit, and then in 2023, they brought in a new CEO to run the company. Company. That person, well, is a lawyer. That person's name is Keely Blair. And that tells you what's going to be the real battles for OnlyFans going forward. Over the next 4 years, Radwinsky ran the company his way. Stokely out of the way. The company had one mission, and that was to put money in the pocket of Radwinsky. Over the next 4 years, the company has distributed $1.4 billion in cash to this one man alone. Even after all that distribution, the company was making $46 million per employee. Basically makes it more efficient per employee than almost any other company in the world. I mean, you go look at Google and Microsoft, Salesforce, Tesla, some of the great giant enterprises of the world, like, they make nowhere near that. A lot of them are making $200,000 or $300,000 per employee, not $46 million. Reason is the business model. OnlyFans has software that they run, they rent data centers, and all they do is just take 20 cents of every dollar that flows through the platform Creators do all the work creating the stuff. The customers break out their credit cards. While no politician would ever visit their office in the UK, for good reason, in total OnlyFans pays more tax than Starbucks, IBM, and Microsoft combined each and every year. $167 million in the past year, for example. But remember the rise of all those kind of agencies that were creating fake relationships on behalf of creators and basically scamming the customers? Well, people started to notice this. Law firms have started to file class action lawsuits lawsuits. The first few have been dismissed, but more and more are coming in. The public is starting to learn that the whole thing's kind of a scam. But that's not the biggest problem happening. The biggest disruption coming at this next point into 2022 and beyond is AI. On a positive note, the creators using AI scheduling tools and AI automation could stop needing these kind of scammy agencies to come in that were taking 30 to 50% of revenue. On the other half, well, the AI is coming for the creators themselves. You're starting to see the first fully AI-generated artificial creators on the platform. People who are basically able now to run entire organizations and entire businesses on OnlyFans without any real people involved at all. One platform called FanView, a competitor to OnlyFans, claims already that 15% of its revenue comes from AI-generated creators. And one of those creators is named Aitana López. She makes €10,000 a month. The problem? Well, she's not actually really a Spanish woman. She's a fiction. She's totally AI-generated. So that brings us to 2025. You have this underlying banking problem for OnlyFans where there's any moment the possibility that the whole thing gets cut off from the financial institutions. You have this situation where customers are figuring out that the whole thing is basically a scam. You're talking to some call center in Pakistan, not a real person. And the technology is coming where AI promises to basically disrupt the entire thing. And remember, OnlyFans exists because there is a marketplace being made of buyers and sellers. Why are all the buyers there, the viewers Well, because that's where all the creators are. Where are all the creators there? Well, that's because that's where all the buyers are. But when AI comes in and basically cuts all that out, the whole platform risks falling apart. Ratvinsky is not stupid. In May 2025, almost a year ago, the news broke that he was exploring selling the business at an $8 billion valuation. If you took the exact numbers of revenue and growth that OnlyFans was doing and made it a software company, that business might trade at 15 to 30 times earnings. Here was Radwinsky going out to try to sell it for 12x earnings. So Radwinsky was actually trying to sell it at a discount relative to that. But in practice, it would prove to be something else. And then the first kind of bidder to come through was an LA private equity firm. Its executives had tried to actually take OnlyFans public in a SPAC a number of years before, and that had failed. And here they were trying to put together a deal to buy the company at $8 billion. And a big part of that reason was the adult audience, basically, and content of the business makes the entire thing untouchable for huge pools of capital capital in the world. If you go look at private equity, hedge funds, a lot of those different types of funds, they are unable to put money into certain types of businesses. And one of those businesses is adult content. So while those folks might be willing to pay huge multiples for Salesforce or Microsoft stock, there's no way they're doing it for OnlyFans. And you can see this across the industry for adult businesses. They throw off a ton of cash. Their buyers are few and far between. Pornhub, which is kind of the leading, I guess, YouTube for pornography, basically sold in 2023 for $400 million. Not a huge multiple. Patreon, remember, basically the Main Street version of OnlyFans. Well, it sold for $4 billion in 2021 despite never being profitable. You can see the dichotomy here. The deal with these LA investors, Forest Road, at $8 billion, it fell apart. They couldn't put the financing together. Then just last month, the thing that precipitated this video creation was the Wall Street Journal reported that a new firm called Architect Capital had entered the picture and they were going to be paying $5.5 billion. To buy OnlyFans. Architekt is a weird firm. Basically, they play in kind of oddball assets, tech-enabled and stuff like OnlyFans. The problem is they only have about $100 million under management according to public reports, and they had to go find the rest of the money. And as I've watched posts on social media and people talk about this deal— and remember, Architekt mostly does debt. They don't do private equity and they're just an oddball firm. There are people who are out there trying to raise money on their behalf. To participate in the deal. And the stuff I read is that they're having a hard time doing it. Almost everybody with allocation or invites to invest in the deal doesn't want to have anything to do for all the reasons I talked about earlier in this video. Even still, Architekt and his promoters are saying that they expect to fix the banking problem for OnlyFans and the financial kind of Achilles heel that it has, and then take the whole thing public in 2028. And look, nobody understands this business better than Rodvinsky. He basically has pulled $1.4 billion out in dividends, but he sees all this this stuff's happening. He's been in the adult business for a very long time. It's crazy that after, you know, pulling out $700 million last year, he's pulling the plug and selling it at what is not a very big multiple. And I think the only plausible answer for why he's doing that is because he sees all the headwinds and problems that are going to be coming for OnlyFans in the future. And look, that's a pattern you see amongst really smart investors. They know to get out when the getting's good. You saw that in my video that I did on Blockbuster. In fact, Blockbuster was sold twice. By billionaires who knew exactly when to get out because they knew the future wasn't as bright as it had been when they got in. And to me, I think that's the big lesson of OnlyFans. Well, there's probably two lessons. The first one is, look, there's a lot of money out there to be made if you're willing to compromise your values and ethics. For me, it's not worth it. I'd rather be broke than be in some of these businesses that people get in. But the second thing I think is, you know, you as a business owner, you as an investor, you have to pay attention to what's going around you and your business in the world. And in the case of OnlyFans, here you see some folks doing exactly the right move, which is, well, they're going to get out when the getting's good. And, uh, the future is not so bright for that business. All right. Hopefully I navigated being able to present, uh, the wild business story of OnlyFans in a way that won't get me canceled. We'll see how I did. Let me know in the comments below. Catch you next time. So, hey, this is Michael about 3 weeks after I recorded the video about OnlyFans. Because yesterday they announced that Leonid Radvinsky, the guy behind it and the key figure in the story, he died at age 43 from cancer. And it's kind of a fascinating dénouement to the whole thing, to be very Frenchy. Hmm. I didn't even say a word. But the reality is, I think it is a fascinating testament to the idea that we on the outside, and I built that whole video, like feeling like I had researched a lot about OnlyFans and knowing about it. But in reality, there was a key data point, like I didn't know, like the guy was putting the business up for sale because he was dying and maybe he kept that pretty close to himself. but in the end, I think that's a big life lesson and a big business lesson, especially when you're dealing with competitors or partners or employees in tough situations. There's always stuff you don't know about the story. And, uh, that was a perfect case in point here. Even still, I think the rise and fall is a compelling story, so I hope you enjoyed it, but wanted to add this little bit extra before we published it. See you next time.
