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OnlyFans – how Leonid Radvinsky became a porn billionaire
Bhad Bhabie – Danielle Bregoli – is one of the top earners on OnlyFans. On her 18th birthday she launched her channel and made six million US dollars in one day
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Leonid Radvinsky has already earned 1.5 billion euros with the OnlyFans portal. The network is growing rapidly – but hardly anyone wants to talk about it.
OnlyFans is a British social media platform that takes a completely different path to Instagram, Facebook, and the like. Nothing is free here. Customers have to subscribe to a channel for a fee in order to get something. “Free” is just some of the information about the channel. OnlyFans grew up with erotic, if not pornographic, content. This leads to the paradox that the offering is growing rapidly, customers are willing to make larger monthly contributions – but nobody identifies themselves as a subscriber.
Radvinsky bought OnlyFans during the crisis
Radvinsky did not invent the fan subscription site, that was the Briton Tim Stokely, with his father Guy Stokely (The Zuckerbergs of porn – the family behind OnlyFans). Both are veterans of internet erotica. But in 2018, the up-and-coming company was threatened with a serious crisis. Financial service providers had discovered morality and threatened to stop making payments to pornographic companies. OnlyFans – and other services too – were on the verge of collapse. Without sex, there were no subscriptions. But with sex, there were no money transfers.
At that moment, Leonid Radvinsky stepped in and bought three quarters of the company. The Ukrainian-born man was already a dazzling figure at the time. He started around the turn of the millennium with sites that supposedly cracked passwords and could thus give their customers cheap access to paid porn sites. Then in 2004 he founded “MyFreeCams” – a streaming site for erotic content (cam girls – the illusion of maintaining dignity in front of the sex camera). The OnlyFans business model replaced the era of cam girls. By buying OnlyFans, Radvinsky invested in the future of the industry and triumphed when the crisis passed and the money tap was not turned off.
Not just porn on OnlyFans
Then he was lucky again: the Covid pandemic broke out. People all over the world were under “house arrest”. They were bored and found distraction on Radvinsky’s channels, the site grew and tended more and more towards porn during this time.
Erotica may still be the main business area, but for some time now OnlyFans has been moving in a different direction. More and more celebrities – actors, models, athletes – are flocking to the platform.
The calculation is very simple: a person with a lot of followers online can convert some of his fans into subscribers. Content must then be produced continuously for them, but it does not have to be of an erotic nature. Fans love to watch their star at breakfast. Or chat with him about the football season. Thanks to the isolated channels, a sports fan who follows his idols does not even notice the pornographic environment. With monthly prices between 10 and 40 euros, a few thousand loyal fans already provide a regular income. Not all athletes and actors are multimillionaires. The top earners at OF have an annual income of over 50 million, but these are exceptions.
OnlyFans: Low costs, high profits
The income from subscriptions usually only makes up a small part of the turnover. Even more is generated through individual chats and the sale of pictures and videos. Some fans spend hundreds of euros on their creator every month. The whole thing is not without controversy. In order to achieve this willingness to pay, the creators create the illusion of a real emotional relationship with their fan.
OnlyFans receives 20 percent of every euro on the site. The majority of sales are made in the USA. In 2023, it was $863 million, while Europe and the rest of the world brought in $443 million. The share of profit in sales is staggering, because the costs are low. According to Forbes, OnlyFans’ parent company employs just 42 full-time employees.