(Reuters) – OnlyFans is on a mission to redefine porn.
With $1.3 billion in revenue and over 300 million users, the fast-growing company has fused sex work with the online creator economy so successfully that it has branched out into comedy, music and motor-racing.
But for all its ambition and influence, the inner workings of OnlyFans remain opaque.
It has just a few dozen employees even as its user base has almost quadrupled in recent years. Its billionaire owner is rarely seen in public or even mentioned in talks by its CEO. There’s no company sign outside its registered London address, and a significant but secretive part of its operations – including content moderation – is based in Ukraine, a country at war.
Reuters traced OnlyFans’ journey from an obscure, porn-free site created by a British family to an adults-only social media phenomenon turbocharged by erotic performers and celebrity influencers, worth billions of dollars. As it’s grown, OnlyFans has sought to use explicit content – its seemingly bottomless source of revenue – as a springboard to greater scale, positioning itself as a tech pioneer with a place among social media giants such as Instagram and X. Key to that effort is making porn more socially acceptable and distancing the company from the abuses often associated with the industry.
The public face of OnlyFans is CEO Keily Blair, an Irish lawyer and self-described feminist and “safety nerd” promoted to the top job in 2023. In public appearances, Blair, 42, presents the platform as lucrative and empowering, particularly for women, and often mentions her two daughters. “I want them to have a good online life,” she told delegates at a UK child-protection conference in 2023. “I want the same for your kids.”
People flock to OnlyFans, she says, because it offers “ethical” porn – although she prefers not to use what she calls the “P-word.”
But the P-word drives the business. Creators typically make money from subscribers by posting porn and chatting with them online. Created in 2016, OnlyFans says it has paid out over $20 billion to its creators, who now number 4.1 million. The company takes a 20% cut of creators’ revenue.
OnlyFans didn’t respond to Reuters’ requests to interview Blair or the company’s owner, Leonid Radvinsky. The company and its parent, Fenix International Ltd, didn’t respond to most questions for this story.
This account of the company’s rise is based on interviews with more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of OnlyFans’ operations, along with dozens of creators, former creators, and experts in the porn industry, content moderation and online safety. Reporters also reviewed corporate filings, court records, websites and speeches related to OnlyFans and its key staff.
OnlyFans pledges publicly that it’s building “the safest social media platform in the world.” It operates behind millions of creator paywalls, however, which make this claim almost impossible to independently assess. Those paywalls can hide serious harm. In a series of investigations published this year, Reuters examined police and court records that documented multiple cases of sexual slavery, child sexual abuse material, and nonconsensual or “revenge” porn on OnlyFans between 2019 and 2024.
OnlyFans says it prohibits child sexual abuse material and “modern slavery,” including sex trafficking, and removes illicit content as soon as it is detected. The company also has said it invests heavily in content moderation, vetting “everything” on the site, and works closely with law enforcement globally to support their investigations.
Radvinsky, the owner Blair rarely mentions in public, bought OnlyFans in 2018 and is its sole shareholder. Now 42 years old, he has paid himself at least a billion dollars in dividends over the past three years, corporate filings show.
For a head of a famous company, he is little known.
Even with specialized search tools, Reuters could find only six different photos of Radvinsky online. Of four websites that appear to belong to him, only one mentions OnlyFans by name; none reveals that porn is a major source of his fortune.
Instead, they describe him as an angel investor and philanthropist who dedicates “a huge amount of time, effort and money to non-profit causes.”
FISH & CHIPS & PORN
Radvinsky cashed in on OnlyFans. But he didn’t create it.
That was British businessman Tim Stokely, a native of Essex, a county northeast of London. As a schoolboy, Stokely’s “first entrepreneurial endeavor” was charging classmates to collect their orders from a local fish and chips shop, according to an archived version of timstokely.com, a personal website.
But as an adult, it was porn that made Stokely rich – after a couple of false starts.
In 2011, he launched Glam Worship a fetish site that allowed users to send gifts and money to dominatrixes. Slogan: “Your new addiction.” A year or two later, he unveiled Customs4U, where women uploaded personalized porn videos for paying customers.
Both ventures failed. Stokely tried again. After an inspirational chat with friends, according to timstokely.com, he set out to create a website “that made it easy for all creators to monetize their content” – in other words, a social media platform with a pay button.
That platform was OnlyFans.
“The team hit the ground running, pulling late hours to bootstrap the company: From writing code to create a minimal, easy-to-use interface to personally messaging early adopters,” Stokely’s website said.
Stokely’s family – described as “very close-knit” by the website – played a central role. OnlyFans launched in 2016 with Tim as CEO and, by year’s end, his parents Guy and Deborah as directors. His brother Tom became chief operating officer in 2018.
Another of the early directors of OnlyFans was Petra, a self-described silent partner in the business who spoke on condition her surname be withheld. An American citizen living in the Netherlands, Petra worked for the porn site FreeOnes and was an expert in raising the visibility of websites on search engines. She said her main job was to drive traffic to OnlyFans. “It was never meant to be a porn site, though,” she said.
Initially, OnlyFans’ terms of service banned explicit content. Petra said the company had hoped to attract musicians and influencers from YouTube and Instagram, but couldn’t get enough of them interested.
“So we just decided to go back with what we know,” she said. “And that’s adult.”
By the end of 2017, OnlyFans had lifted its ban on porn – and the platform took off.
To expand in the U.S., said Petra, the Stokelys relied on Bill Fox, a prominent figure in California’s porn industry. Fox recruited dozens of adult performers to join OnlyFans, she said. They were known at the company as “Bill’s Girls,” two former contractors told Reuters.
While Fox in California provided the A-list performers, the Stokelys made the business decisions in England, said the contractors, and the company expanded rapidly and chaotically.
Former Thai-British porn star Keni Styles, who worked for OnlyFans in the early years, said the company’s direction was a matter of fierce debate. He recalled one Skype meeting, around 2018, descending into a yelling match between Fox and Tim Stokely.
“Bill wanted it to be just a straight-up adult porn site. Tim had this vision that he was going to challenge Facebook, he was going to challenge Instagram. He was going to bring mainstream YouTube content-creators to OnlyFans.”
Tim, Tom and their parents couldn’t be reached for comment. Bill Fox died in 2019.
The goal wasn’t to hold onto OnlyFans long-term, Petra said. “We wanted a project that we could basically go off and sell,” she said.
In 2018, a buyer appeared: Radvinsky. How much he paid for OnlyFans has never been disclosed.
