Top 10 Crazy Facts About OnlyFans

OnlyFans creator Tim Stokely was given a loan of £10,000 (about $13,700 US dollars) in order to start up his new venture. He was also told that this loan would be “the last one.” The creditor was actually his father – retired financial advisor Guy Stokely. He started the company with his brother, Thomas, who became the COO, while his dad Guy was the first head of finance. Although Tim Stokely’s previous ventures included the founding of the adult performance website GlamGirls and Customs4U, OnlyFans started out as more family friendly when it launched in 2016. That began to change in around 2018. Fast forward to 2021, and the company is worth over one billion dollars!

Part of the company’s growth lies in the sale of a 75% stake to Ukrainian-American businessman and MyFreeCams owner Leonid Radvinsky in 2018. But although Radvinsky is based in Florida, the OnlyFans brand is actually British. Tim Stokely and family are from Harlow, Essex; the company was–and remains–based in London. This means that it’s one of relatively few British exports in the adult Entertainment business. Tim Stokely stepped down as CEO in 2021, to be succeeded by Indian-American businesswoman Amrapali Gan. But the company continues to be London based.

There’s a lot of stigma that surrounds the OnlyFans name. Indeed, the site has experienced its fair share of controversy since its founding in 2016. That said, it has been lauded too, especially for its content creators’ charity drives and spotlights on important causes. The pioneer of these efforts came in response to the Australian wildfires of 2020, when creator Kaylen Ward used her not-safe-for-work content to raise more than $1M for relief efforts. After having her Instagram account closed for promising nude shots for donations, the influencer turned to OnlyFans and raised funds there instead.

A significant uptick in membership came in April of 2020 when the one and only Beyoncé name-dropped the platform. In the lyrics for the remix of "Savage" with original artist Megan Thee Stallion, Beyonce makes a brief reference to OnlyFans. This simple line was associated with a 15% increase in traffic! According to Stokely, after the song’s release the platform was “seeing about 200,000 new users every 24 hours and 7,000 to 8,000 new creators joining every day." The lyric has been credited with bringing OnlyFans into the public lexicon.

OnlyFans boasts a variety of content, such as from musicians, physical fitness experts, and more. However, much of the platform is famously dedicated to content that is very much not safe for work. That almost changed in 2021. On August 19th, OnlyFans announced that due to pressure from banks, it would ban explicit material from its platform. It came amid concern that OnlyFans hosted content from underage users. However, the announcement led to a major backlash from content creators and users, leading OnlyFans to do a U-turn and reverse their decision just six days later.

As we mentioned, there are content creators from many areas that use the OnlyFans platform to reach their followers. This includes people who already have a following elsewhere. A number of singers, actors, and athletes have found OnlyFans to be a great way to connect with their – well – fans. Those who have joined OnlyFans include musician DJ Khaled, boxer Floyd Mayweather, athlete Terrell Owens and superstar Cardi B. The latter nearly broke Twitter when she announced she had a page. The news even made the pages of the LA Times. With the announcement came quite the increase in subscribers to the site, though her content has remained safe for work …

Actress, model, and singer Bella Thorne broke the internet in August 2020 when she joined OnlyFans. She also broke records, becoming the first person to make over one million dollars within 24 hours of joining the platform. She made another million by the end of the week. But many “fans” cried foul when the $200 photos she was selling were bikini shots and the like, despite having allegedly promised that they’d be “naked”. Afterwards, new rules prevented creators earning too much in one go. Thorne’s record was broken in April 2021 by Bhad Bhabie, who made one million dollars in just six hours! However, this proved to be controversial too, as she’d only just turned 18.

From 2020 onwards, the global pandemic forced a lot of people to stay in their homes. With more time on their hands, many people in search of distraction turned to OnlyFans for … entertainment. But it wasn’t just the number of subscribers that went up on the platform. The number of content creators also rose. From March to April alone in 2020, new user and creator accounts went up by 75%! One reason for this is that many people who’d been relying on retail and hospitality jobs to pay the bills now needed to find new forms of income.

OnlyFans had only been online for half a decade when its significance was recognised by Time Magazine. In 2021, Time debuted a prestigious new list - an index of businesses that are “making an extraordinary impact around the world” and “shaping our future”. Among these 100 Most Influential Companies was Only Fans, alongside such names as Disney, FedEx, and The LEGO Group. They described the platform as “boosting the creator economy” by “monetizing human connection”. It’s pretty mind-blowing to think that such a relatively new platform can have such a big cultural impact.

Sadly, it appears that the wealth of OnlyFans reflects the wealth of the real world in some regards. According to the XSRUS article “The Economics of OnlyFans”, the top 1% of content creators are making approximately 33% of the site's overall earnings. It goes on to note that the top 10% are making 73% overall. Mind you, OnlyFans takes a 20% cut on users’ transactions. Many of the top earners were already celebrities before their move to OnlyFans. While the platform has opened up new avenues of income to many, it also tends to tell the same old story: the rich get richer!