The meteoric rise of OnlyFans, which is owned by Fenix International Limited, tells an unconventional, innovative and amazingly true start-up success story.
Founded by Timothy Stokely, OnlyFans, an Internet content subscription service based in London and a social media platform, which enables content creators to monetise their content and develop connections with their fans, has achieved stupendous growth since its inception in 2016. Content on the platform is user-generated and monetized through monthly subscriptions, tips, and pay-per-view. The OnlyFans platform keeps a 20 percent cut of the revenue generated by the content creators while the content creators get the rest.
Win-Win Situation
According to a report in a renowned business news website, gross payments made through OnlyFans increased from $4.8 billion in 2021 to $5.6 billion in 2022, which is about 17 percent. This represents the amount of money that the content creators of OnlyFans generated from OnlyFans’s subscribers for photos, videos, chats, etc. OnlyFans grew in popularity during the Covid pandemic, which isolated people in their homes. Between March and April 2020, the user and creator base of OnlyFans experienced a huge jump of 75 percent.
As a result of this stupendous growth in gross payments, the revenue of Fenix International Ltd., the parent company of OnlyFans, rose from 932 million USD in 2021 to 1.09 billion USD in 2022. It sounds almost insane that a seven-year-old company reached more than a billion dollars in annual revenue, but this is true statistics for this wonder start-up.
The number of content creators on OnlyFans platform also escalated by 47 percent between 2021 and 2022; it increased from 2.2 million in 2021 to 3.2 million in 2022. The total number of registered consumers for OnlyFans also significantly increased from 188 million in 2021 to 238.8 million in 2022. The top content creators on OnlyFans are earning millions of dollars a year. The total number of subscribers of OnlyFans is more than two-thirds of the population of the US. All these have made OnlyFans one of the hottest companies in the Creator economy.
Sleaze and Success
However, the only problem is that OnlyFans deals with pornographic content, though it hosts the work of other content creators too. In fact, Tim Stokely, who founded OnlyFans, had years of experience of working in adult entertainment business. He used to run the softcore pornography website named GlamGirls prior to founding Customs4U, a website where customers could request custom videos from pornographic models. He introduced OnlyFans in 2016, with a £10,000 loan from his father and his innovative platform for content creators to monetise their content and interactions directly was lapped up by adult entertainers and the rest they say is history.
Soon OnlyFans’ revenue simply exploded. Just two years later in 2018, investor Leonard Radvinsky bought a 75 percent stake of Fenix International Ltd. and became one of the company’s directors. As the current owner of Fenix International Ltd., Leo Radvinsky took home a whooping dividend of 338 million USD in 2022. After Leo Radvinsky’s entry OnlyFans’present image as a site focused on pornography gained traction. In April 2021, the globally renowned publication Time named OnlyFans in its Time 100 Most Influential Companies list.
It is noteworthy that even after the pandemic is long over and many other entertainment options have resurfaced, the popularity of OnlyFans shows no signs of waning, which indicates the world’s love for explicit sexual material. It also shows the rising trend of mainstreaming of adult content.
One of the top content creators for OnlyFans is Bryce Adams who sells explicitly sexual content through OnlyFans to continue growing her empire whose annual revenue runs into several million dollars. She has several people on her payrolls. However, though the OnlyFans market is growing, signs of its saturation are also getting surfaced.
Image and Investors
Despite its stupendous success, according to an Axios report of 2021, OnlyFans was struggling to find outside investors despite the fact that the start-up was valued at over 1 billion USD in August 2021. Probably the porn heavy content of OnlyFans discouraged the investors though in recent years the site has made a sincere endeavour to change its image.
The OnlyFans’ website positions itself as an inclusive platform, home to a diverse range of content creators but it attracted popularity mainly because of its adult content and it is finding difficulty to escape that image.
According to OnlyFans’ newly appointed CEO, Keily Blair, “OnlyFans is an inclusive platform and values driven business that enables our diverse community of content creators to be paid fairly for the work they produce. It has empowered millions of creators around the world and continues to play a significant role in the growth of the creator economy.”
The success of OnlyFans through the trying Covid times indicates global popularity for explicit content and the recession-proof character of the adult film industry. Going by the trend, the brand seems to be poised for enviable growth, whether or not it gets support from a bevy of outside investors in the future or not.
