Welcome back. Today, we are doing something a
little different. We are looking at a platform
that, frankly, everyone has heard of, but very
few people actually understand the mechanics
of. We are talking about a company that has fundamentally
changed the Internet, you know, for better or
for worse. And to set the scene, I want you to
just look at the calendar. It is February 2,
2026. The platform we are discussing today is
massive. It's it's monolithic. It really is.
But the scale of it is what really blew my mind
when I started digging into this stack of research
you brought today. It is staggering. And I think
before we even say the name of the company, though,
everyone knows who we are talking about. We need
to look at a number that dropped in October 2025.
Oh, yeah. It's a financial milestone that really
contextualizes everything we are about to discuss.
Yeah, this is the jaw dropper for me. In October
2025, this company announced that since its inception
in 2016, it has paid out $25 billion to its creators.
$25 billion. $25 billion. That is with a B. To
put that in perspective, that is comparable to
the GDP of entire small nations. Wow. It is a
transfer of wealth that is almost unprecedented
in the, quote, creator economy. But as we are
going to explore, that wealth isn't exactly evenly
distributed. Right. We're talking about OnlyFans.
And the hook for me here, the reason I wanted
to do this deep dive, is that we need to move
past the headline that it's just a porn site.
I mean, obviously, that is a huge part of it.
But this is a story about a massive shift in
how we value online interaction. It is a story
about the top 1 % making millions while the average
creator is scraping by with peanuts. Exactly.
If you look at the data, the average creator
makes about, what, $1 ,300 a year? A year. Not
a month. A year. So for every superstar buying
a Ferrari, there are thousands of people making
essentially pocket change. Yeah. But our mission
today is to unpack the machine itself. We need
to investigate OnlyFans as a technology company,
a financial juggernaut, and a lightening rod
for controversy. And we have quite the stack
of sources to help us do that. We've got financial
reports, investigative journalism from Reuters
and the BBC, corporate histories, and even some
court documents. Yep. We are going to figure
out. How a family founded startup in London became
an $8 billion valuation target as of 2025. And
how it survived a near -death experience with
the global banking system, which we will definitely
get to. It is a London -based tech giant that
has redefined intimacy in the digital age. But
to understand where we are in 2026, we have to
go back to the very beginning. Let's rewind the
clock. Take us back to 2016, because when I look
at the origins of OnlyFans, it doesn't look like
your typical Silicon Valley garage startup story.
It's distinctly British and distinctly family
oriented, which is ironic given what the platform
became. It is a bit ironic, yeah. The company
was founded in London by a guy named Tim Stokely,
and the seed money wasn't from a venture capital
firm on Sand Hill Road. Right. No Sequoia Capital
here. No. It was a 10 ,000 pound loan from his
father, Guy Stokely. I love that. The dad bankrolled
it. But Tim wasn't exactly new to this world,
was he? He had been tinkering in this space before.
He had. Tim Stokely had a history of trying to
crack the code on monetizing social influence
and, frankly, adult content. He had founded sites
like Glam Girls and Customs4U. Customs4U. What
was that? Customs4U was interesting because it
was an early attempt at allowing users to request
custom videos for models. So, you know, the DNA
of direct monetization was already there. So
he was already thinking about that direct fan
-to -creator payment model. He was, and it really
was a family affair. You had Tim running the
show, his brother Thomas was the chief operating
officer, and his dad, Guy, was running the finances.
Imagine that Thanksgiving dinner table conversation.
So, son, how's the site going? Well, initially,
the conversation might have been quite tame.
This is a detail a lot of people forget. When
OnlyFans first launched, strictly speaking, it
wasn't a porn site. Right. They actually banned
it. They did. They actually banned explicit content
in the very early days. The original pitch was
to attract mainstream influencers, fitness trainers,
chefs, musicians who wanted to share exclusive
content with superfans. That is the classic pivot,
isn't it? They wanted to be Patreon before Patreon
was huge. Pretty much. But then they flipped
the switch. By 2017, the ban on pornography was
lifted. Why do you think that happened? Was it
just pure economics? It's almost always economics.
They realized the friction in the market. People
wanted to see adult content and creators wanted
to sell it. But the existing platforms were clunky
or, you know, pirated everything. We were just
leaving money on the table. A ton of it. Only
fans offered a walled warden. But the real turning
point, the moment the rocket ship actually ignited,
was in 2018. Okay, this is the ownership shift,
right? Yeah. Because up until 2018, it's this
British family business. Yep. Then enters a new
character. Enter Leonid Rudvinsky. He is a Ukrainian
-American businessman, a first -generation immigrant
with a deep history in the adult industry. He
owned a site called MyFreeCams, which is a huge
cam girl site. So he knew the space. A very big
player. A very big player. In 2018, he acquired
75 % of Fenix International, which is the parent
company of OnlyFans. So the Stokelys are still
involved, but Rudvinsky is the majority owner.
And this guy is a bit of a mystery, right? He's
not out there doing TED Talks. Far from it. He
is incredibly private, but his influence is undeniable.
When Radvinsky came on board, that is when OnlyFans
really leaned into its identity. It found its
product market fit. It absolutely did. He understood
the mechanics of the adult industry better than
anyone. He knew that if you could streamline
the payment process and give creators control,
you would win. This is where the platform gained
what we might call its pop culture reputation.
Let's talk about that mechanism, the gold rush
mechanics, as I like to call it, because the
business model is actually incredibly simple
on the surface. It is deceptively simple. It
is an 80 -20 split. The creator keeps 80 % of
every dollar earned and the platform takes 20%,
which compared to something like YouTube or Spotify
is incredibly generous. Oh, it's night and day.
I mean, Spotify pays fractions of a penny. Here,
if a fan pays $20 for a subscription, the creator
sees 16 of that immediately. Exactly. And unlike
YouTube or Instagram, which are ad -supported,
meaning the creator is essentially bait to get
you to watch a commercial. Right. You're the
product. You're the product. With OnlyFans, it's
direct monetization. It's a transaction. You
are paying for a subscription. You are paying
for tips. Or you are paying for pay -per -view
messages, which are locked posts sent via DM.
That pay -per -view or PPV aspect is crucial,
isn't it? That's where the whales spend their
money. It is. The subscription gets you in the
door, but the PPV is where the high margin revenue
sits. And we should probably talk about who is
actually spending that money. Do we have any
data on that? We do. We have demographic data
from a 2022 study. It found that the user base
was predominantly white married males. Married
males. That's an interesting demographic detail.
It's a very specific demographic. It speaks to
what the platform is actually selling. It's not
just content, is it? If you just want to see
naked people, the internet has terabytes of that
for free. It's not about the content. It's about
the connection. Or at least the illusion of connection.
The girlfriend experience. Right. But specifically,
a girlfriend who doesn't demand... anything from
you other than money it's a low stakes emotional
release it feels transactional it's entirely
transactional for a married man who you know
maybe feels ignored or bored only fans offers
a simulated relationship where he's always the
most important person in the room as long as
the credit card clears as long as the credit
card clears that's incredibly bleak when you
put it like that it is but it's also an eight
billion dollar business model okay so they have
the model they have the new owner they are growing
and then The world stops. 2020. COVID -19. The
pandemic was a tragedy for the world, but it
was, to put it bluntly, a winning lottery ticket
for OnlyFans. A perfect storm. A perfect storm.
On one side, you had millions of people stuck
at home, bored, lonely, and horny. Yep. On the
other side, you had people losing their jobs.
Bartenders, waiters, service workers who needed
income immediately. It was the symbiotic relationship
of the lockdown. I remember reading that between
March and April 2020 alone, the user and creator
base jumped 75 percent. 75 percent in one month.
It's explosive. That's insane. It is. But it
wasn't just the pandemic. There was a cultural
lightning strike in April 2020. Oh, I know what
you're going to say. Beyonce. Beyonce. The Savage
remix with Megan Thee Stallion. It's TikTok.
When I dance on that Demon Time, she might start
an OnlyFans. I'm impressed. But that lyric? It
was a game changer. It legitimized it, didn't
it? It brought it into the mainstream. It absolutely
did. Traffic spiked 15 % immediately after that
song dropped. It moved the platform from the
dark corners of the internet into the mainstream
conversation. It became a verb. I'm going to
start an OnlyFans. It became a viable career
option in the public consciousness, for better
or worse. But with that mainstreaming came the
celebrity invasion. And this is where things
get really messy. We have to talk about Bella
Thorne. The Bella Thorne incident of August 2020.
This is a case study in disruption and unintended
consequences. Okay, so set the scene. Bella Thorne,
the former Disney actress, joins the site. She
makes a million dollars in 24 hours. A million
dollars. And then two million in a week. Which
sounds like a huge win for OnlyFans, right? Look,
we're a celebrity. We're legitimate. It looked
like a win until the chargeback started. See,
the controversy was that she allegedly promised
nude photos in a $200 pay -per -view message.
Okay. Fans paid the $200. She sent a photo, but
she was wearing lingerie. And the internet turned
on her. Fast. The fans felt scammed. They demanded
refunds. The credit card processors panicked
because suddenly there was this massive volume
of chargebacks, which is a huge red flag for
fraud. And the fallout didn't just hurt Bella
Thorne, right? This is the part that really angered
the sex worker community that had built the platform.
Correct. This is the crucial part. To appease
the payment processors, OnlyFans had to change
the rules for everyone. For everyone. Everyone.
They capped the price you could charge for a
tip. They extended the time it took to get paid
out from days to weeks. Oh, wow. So you had sex
workers who were relying on that income to pay
rent suddenly finding their funds locked up for
weeks. All because a celebrity came in, made
a quick buck and broke the system. It created
this huge rift. You had the tourist celebrities
versus the workers who built the platform from
the ground up. A huge rift and a ton of distrust.
But Bella wasn't the only one putting up crazy
numbers. No. In April 2021, the rapper Bahad
Bobby. broke Bella Thorne's record. I remember
this. She made a million dollars in just six
hours. Six hours. And this was controversial
for another reason. She had essentially just
turned 18. Right. People were literally counting
down the days to her birthday, which brings up
a whole other ethical debate. A whole other can
of worms. And then you have the streamers getting
in on it. Amaranth. Amaranth is a phenomenon.
In 2022, she revealed she was earning one and
a half million dollars per month. Per month.
That's just it's hard to even comprehend that.
And Markiplier, the gaming YouTuber, he launched
an account for charity and literally crashed
the site. The servers couldn't handle the traffic.
The financial velocity during this era, 2020
to 2021, is just. Mind -boggling. It really is.
By 2021, revenue hit roughly $900 million, up
from $350 million the year before. That's more
than double in a year. And remember Radvinsky,
the owner? The silent owner. He took home $500
million in dividends just between 2021 and 2022.
Half a billion dollars. In cash. Straight into
his pocket. The cash flow this company generates
is staggering because their overhead is relatively
low. They don't buy content. They just host it.
their 20 but when you are generating that much
cash from adult content you paint a massive target
on your back a huge one and in august 2021 the
music stopped or at least it looked like it was
going to let's talk about the porn bam august
19th 2021 i remember where i was when this news
broke it was a bombshell only fans announced
that starting october 1st they would ban sexually
explicit content which to me sounded completely
suicidal It's like Netflix saying, we are banning
movies. We are just going to do menu screens
now. Right. Why would they kill their golden
goose? It wasn't a choice they wanted to make.
It was banking pressure. OK, let's unpack this,
because at the time, everyone blamed MasterCard.
That was the narrative. That was the rumor. And
MasterCard was making changes to its policies
for adult merchants. But CEO Tim Stokely later
came out and clarified. He said MasterCard actually
had no bearing on the specific decision. So it
wasn't them. Who was it? It was the bank. Banks
themselves, the big ones. Institutions like BNY
Mellon and JPMorgan Chase were rejecting transactions.
Rejecting them how? Like just refusing to process
payments. Exactly. BNY Mellon was reportedly
flagging every single wire transfer from Phoenix
International. Imagine trying to run a multi
-billion dollar company when your bank won't
move your money. So when we say they banks, we
aren't talking about the local branch manager
shaking his head. We're talking about the...
back end plumbing of the global economy. That's
the perfect way to put it. We need to distinguish
between the card networks, Visa and MasterCard,
and the custodian banks like BNY Mellon. What's
the difference? The card networks set the rules
for how a payment happens, but the banks actually
move the money. And for a bank like BNY Mellon,
which handles trillions in assets. Processing
a $10 payment for an adult site is a nightmare
of compliance. Is it just a moral stance? Or
is there a mechanical reason they hate it? It's
risk assessment. In the banking world, adult
content is labeled high risk. Okay. Not just
because of the nature of the content, but because
of the chargeback rate. If a user regrets a purchase
and disputes it, the bank has to investigate.
That costs money. And with this content, I imagine
the chargeback rate is higher than average. Much
higher. If the rate of disputes gets too high,
usually over 1%, the bank gets fined by the card
networks. So BNY Mellon looks at Phoenix International
and sees a compliance headache that might facilitate
money laundering, generates endless chargebacks.
And creates PR risk. And they realized the fees
they were collecting just weren't worth the trouble.
So they were effectively de -risking. Exactly.
They didn't ban porn. They banned the compliance
cost of porn. So they announced the ban. What
happened next? Chaos. Absolute chaos. The backlash
was immediate and fierce. Creators felt betrayed.
I can imagine. They had built their livelihoods
on this platform and suddenly they were being
told they were evicted. They started fleeing
to competitors like Fansly. Fansly is interesting
because it looks almost identical to OnlyFans.
It's like the lifeboat everyone jumped into.
It was. And OnlyFans saw the data. They saw the
user sentiment. And just six days later, they
did a complete 180. They scrapped the ban. They
put out a statement claiming they had secured
assurances from their banking partners. Which
feels a bit like a magic trick. Oh, never mind.
We fixed it. But the damage was done, right?
The trust was gone. The trust was eroded. That
legacy remains today. Every creator on OnlyFans
has that fear in the back of their mind. Will
they do it again? Right. It showed that their
livelihood could have vanished overnight. due
to a corporate policy change or a banker's whim.
And that leads us to another layer of deception.
We talked about the platform betraying the creators,
but what about the creators betraying the fans?
This brings us to the illusion of intimacy and
the chatter scandal of 2024. This is one of the
most fascinating and disturbing aspects of the
business. In 2024, investigative reports from
Reuters and Wired blew the lid off this practice.
So what did they find? They revealed that many
of the higher -earning creators, the top 0 .01%,
aren't the ones talking to you. What do you mean?
They hire third -party agencies to answer their
messages. So subscribers think they are sexting
their favorite model. But they're not. They are
actually texting a low wage worker, often in
a different country like the Philippines. These
workers are called chatters. Wait, hold on. I
want to circle back to this because I think we're
glossing over how insane that actually is. It's
wild. You're telling me that if I'm a subscriber
and I pay $50 to send a DM saying I had a hard
day and the response is, I'm so sorry, baby,
that response might be coming from a guy in a
cubicle somewhere. That is exactly what the Reuters
investigation found. These agencies have teams
of chatters, mostly men, who study the creator's
personality and mimic her speaking style. But
isn't that just straight up fraud? If I pay for
a personal connection with you, if you outsource
it. That feels illegal. It feels illegal, but
the terms of service make it a gray area. Technically,
you are paying for entertainment. A very expensive
form of entertainment. It is. But this is where
the class action lawsuits come in. They argued
that the specific promise of OnlyFans is intimacy.
If that intimacy is manufactured by a third party,
the product is defective. It's like buying a
handwritten letter from a celebrity and finding
out it was printed by a machine. The value proposition
just collapses. And yet... does it the revenue
numbers suggest the fans either don't know or
and this is the darker possibility they don't
care as long as the illusion holds up in the
moment and in 2024 it went a step further it
wasn't just human chatters no some creators were
found using ai chat bots so you weren't even
talking to a human you're talking to a large
language model trained to extract money from
you So you're sexting with a robot. You're sexting
with a robot pretending to be a model who is
in reality probably asleep. It's industrializing
the girlfriend experience to the point of automation.
It's a don't ask, don't tell policy for ghostwriters.
Oh, basically. But there is a darker side to
the platform than just fake text. Yeah. We have
to talk about safety. Because when you have user
generated content at this scale. Moderation becomes
a nightmare. This is the heavy stuff, but it's
necessary to understand the regulatory pressure.
We are talking about child sexual abuse material
or CSAM. The BBC did a report in 2021 and Reuters
followed up in 2024. What did they find? They
found failures, significant ones. Reuters documented
30 complaints involving over 200 explicit images
of children over a five year period. That is
horrifying. How does that even get onto the platform?
I thought they had verification. They do. And
to be fair to OnlyFans, their verification is
stricter than almost anywhere else. They require
something like nine pieces of identification.
Nine pieces. Yeah, selfies, holding your ID,
government documents, social handles. OnlyFans
claims to be an industry leader in this. So how
does it slip through? It's the tension between
volume and moderation. Even with 99 .9 % accuracy,
if you have millions of uploads a day, things
slip through. It's a numbers game. It is. Or
accounts get sold. Or hacked. The National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children, NCMEC, has
actually praised OnlyFans for their voluntary
reporting initiatives, so they are trying, but...
The police reports persist. And this brings in
the political pressure. You have U .S. Congress
involvement, right? And Wagner has been a vocal
critic, pushing the Department of Justice to
investigate. And you have pressure groups. You
do. Groups like Exodus Cry and the National Center
on Sexual Exploitation. These groups put pressure
on the banks. So it's a cycle. The safety concerns
fuel the banking pressure, which threatens the
business model. Speaking of business tactics,
there was a weird story about... Shadow banning
involving Meta. What was that about? This was
a lawsuit alleging that OnlyFans actually bribed
Meta employees to terrorist blacklist their competitors.
Whoa, wait, to put competitors on a terrorist
list? That was the allegation. The claim was
that creators who were on rival sites like Fansly
were getting their Instagram accounts banned
because they were falsely flagged as affiliated
with terrorist organizations. That sounds like
something out of a spy novel. It does. Now, it's
very important to note the case was dismissed
in 2023 on jurisdictional grounds, and a judge
later ruled that the plaintiffs failed to prove
unfair competition. So it wasn't proven. Not
proven in court. But the fact that such an accusation
was even made reveals how cutthroat this industry
is. It's a war for attention and for creators.
OK, so they're fighting banking wars, legal wars
and moderation wars. So what do they do? They
try to pivot. They try to go mainstream. Let's
talk about OFTV. OFTV is the safe for work pivot.
It launched in 2021. It's a streaming app that
has zero nudity. Which means it can actually
exist on the Apple App Store and Google Play
Store, which, you know, famously ban adult apps.
Correct. It's a branding exercise. They are trying
to say, look, we are a media company. We aren't
just porn. So what's on it? They have shows like
Model Farmers, which is exactly what it sounds
like. Influencers working on a farm. I have to
admit, I watched a clip of Model Farmers. It's
surreal. It is. They also had the Creative Fund
Fashion Edition with Rebecca Minkoff. They had
comedy specials with Whitney Cummings. What's
the strategy here? Is anyone actually subscribing
to OnlyFans for the comedy specials? Probably
not. But it provides a fig leaf of legitimacy.
It allows the CEO, currently Kylie Blair, to
go on news programs and talk about their creators
without immediately having to defend pornography.
It normalizes the brand name. It's funny because
this is what Tim Stokely originally wanted, wasn't
it? Yeah. He wanted the chefs and the fitness
instructors. He did. He wanted the Patreon crowd.
So they've kind of come full circle, at least
in their PR. In their PR, yes. But the money
is still coming from the same place. Speaking
of normalizing, let's talk about that visa loophole.
This was a Financial Times report from January
2026. This blew my mind. The O -1 visa. This
is a U .S. visa designated for individuals with
extraordinary ability or achievement. Right.
Usually this is for Nobel Prize winners, world
-class actors, top scientists. People at the
absolute top of their field. And now, OnlyFans
models. The report found that over half of U
.S. O -1 visas were going to influencers and
OnlyFans models. That is wild. So the U .S. government
is officially recognizing that... Being really,
really good at monetizing intimacy is an extraordinary
ability. In a way, it is. It's a recognition
of the economic power of these creators. They
are bringing in foreign revenue. They are running
businesses. But it certainly bends the original
intent of that visa category. To say the least.
And we can't ignore the geopolitics. OnlyFans
is a global platform, but the world is fracturing.
Right. In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine,
Russian and Belarusian accounts were restricted.
Payments were paused. So sanctions hit them directly.
Directly. It showed that digital platforms are
not neutral. They are subject to sanctions. And
more recently, in 2024, China blocked access
entirely. So the map is shrinking in some places,
even as it expands in others. So bringing us
to the present day, it is 2026. Where does the
company stand? Financially, it is a behemoth.
2023 revenue was $1 .3 billion, up 20 % from
the previous year. Still growing at a crazy rate.
Still growing. And they paid $150 million in
U .K. corporation tax alone. That buys a lot
of goodwill with the British government. And
there are rumors of a sale, right? As of 2025,
Phoenix International was in talks to sell to
a U .S. investor group, the Forest Road Company,
at an $8 billion valuation. $8 billion. From
a 10 ,000 pound loan from dad. It is a staggering
return on investment. And under CEO Kylie Blair,
who was appointed in July 2023, the mission has
been to dispel misconceptions. That's the PR
term for it. That's the term. They want to be
seen as a legitimate tech unicorn. They want
the valuation of a tech company, not the discount
of a porn company. So what does this all mean?
We have looked at the history, the money, the
scandals, the pivots. I think OnlyFans is the
ultimate case study of the modern internet. It
proves that direct monetization works. It proves
that people are willing to pay for connection.
A simulated connection. A simulated connection,
yes. But it also exposes the flaws in our digital
infrastructure. The power of banks, the difficulty
of moderation at scale, and the blurry line between
reality and fantasy. It's a platform of liberation
for some. We can't deny that. Creators keeping
80 % is life -changing money for single moms,
for students, for people who couldn't work traditional...
jobs. Absolutely. It democratized the adult industry.
It took power away from shady producers and gave
it to the talent. That is the positive legacy.
But on the flip side, you have the chatters.
You have the industrialization of I love you.
You have the safety risks. And that duality is
what makes it so fascinating. It's messy. It's
profitable. And it's not going anywhere. I want
to leave the listeners with a thought that's
been nagging me since we started researching
the chatter scandal and that O -1 visa thing.
Go on. OK, so we have established that the U
.S. government is giving extraordinary ability
visas to these creators. Oh, right. But we also
know that many of these creators are hiring ghostwriters
to do the actual connecting with fans. With chatters,
yeah. So if the person you are paying for intimacy
is actually a ghostwriter in a call center. And
the extraordinary ability recognized by the U
.S. government is just the ability to monetize
that illusion. Have we completely redefined what
it means to be a public figure or an artist in
the 21st century? That is the question, isn't
it? Are we rewarding the art or are we rewarding
the efficiency of the extraction? Think about
that and think about where the line is drawn
between the creator economy and digital exploitation.
It's a line that moves every day. Thanks for
listening to this deep dive. we will catch you
on the next one stay curious