How OnlyFans made its secretive owner a billionaire despite site being just 8-years-old

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.