41-year-old Ukrainian-American entrepreneur and OnlyFans owner Leo Radvinsky pocketed more than US$300 million (AU$467.5 million) in dividends last year, according to a report by the website’s UK-based parent company Fenix International.
Released last week, the annual report holds some fascinating insights into the rapidly growing success of OnlyFans, claiming the website’s creator base rose 47% in 2022 to an impressive 3.2 million. Users saw a spike as well, with a surge of 27% to bring in a total of 238.8 million visitors. Such strong numbers have pushed the OnlyFans valuation up by 17% to US$1.09 billion (AU$2.96 billion).
Who Is Leo Radvinsky?
Radvinsky, who to date has never given an interview to a media outlet, first purchased a stake in OnlyFans from the founding father and son team of Guy and Tim Stokely, who built the burgeoning empire in 2016 with an investment of just US$12,500 (AU$19,476).
While the Stokely family reportedly founded OnlyFans with the intention of the website being varied across a variety of skills, it has quickly become known for its pornographic content and direct line between adult content creators and subscription-based users.
Radvinsky, who has been a budding pornographer since the age of 17 when he started trading domain names for porn sites, comes from a successful background in online adult content. So it’s not really surprising that the Stokely family’s original intent took a turn shortly after the website was founded.
At the age of 20, Radvinsky set up porn site MyFreeCams with “models” offering live sex shows on webcams to paying customers. According to its Wiki page, that website has around 200,000 registered models. Which, of course, is nowhere near the mammoth user base he is currently dealing with.
According to Business Insider, the OnlyFans owner has earned more than US$500 million (AU$779 million) in the past two years just from OnlyFans. This places Leo Radvinsky’s net worth at just over US$2 billion (AU$3.1 billion) according to Forbes.
As per Fenix International’s previous reports, Radvinsky received US$284 million (AU$442 million) in 2021 and $223 million (AU$347.5 million) after November 2021.
Radvinsky is one of the more elusive digital entrepreneurs of our time. You won’t find much information about the man. He is apparently training to become a helicopter pilot and his personal website shows that he has a venture capital firm that offers company founders investments up to US$1 million (AU$1.5 million).
He might also be fairly hands-off with his main money maker. The company appointed Keily Blair as the CEO of Onlyfans just months ago after former CEO Ami Gan stepped down after less than two years in the role.
How Does OnlyFans Make Money?
OnlyFans simply makes its money from subscriptions. Creators post exclusive content, typically amateur porn, on their own page and users usually pay a subscription fee to view that content and chat with the creator.
The creator usually sets their own prices with the website taking a hefty 20% cut of each transaction. To put this into scope, the most successful OnlyFans creator, Blac Chyna, once claimed she would make US$20 million per month from the platform.
Keep in mind that, according to IncrediTools, the average OnlyFans content creator only makes around US$180 (AU$280) per month. Yet with 3.2 million creators, you can see just how much money is flowing through OnlyFans each day.
As above, OnlyFans was not originally intended to be a porn site, however, it didn’t take long before the domain tipped towards amateur pornography. The website has been shrouded in controversy ever since, with OnlyFans even attempting to “clean it up” in 2021 with an intention to ban explicit content.
As it turns out, investors actually like making money and so that decision was quickly reversed. As such, OnlyFans has only doubled down on its pornographic content and is now the biggest success story in online porn since PornHub, which was sold for an undisclosed amount earlier this year.
