The Financial Times podcast Hot Money described how Tim Stokely founded and launched Britians biggest app, Only Fans. It also outlined how it was eventually taken over by the owner of Myfreecams , Leonid Radvinsky. The sexually explicit content of Only Fans created a whole new world of content creators. Chaning the face of the Adult industry and liberating adult and babe channel performers.
Only fans has been in the news recently when details of its financial affairs in 2021/22 were released. The Guardian reported that OnlyFans has paid out more than $500m (£433m) to its Radvinsky in the last two years. The site’s Ukrainian-American 40-year-old owner, is the sole shareholder in a business that has seen its profits boom, as users spent $4.8bn on the site last year.
According to a spokesperson for OnlyFans, Radvinsky "is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the firm," and Gan, the company's former chief of marketing, is in charge of operations and safety investment.
Radvinsky almost never gives interviews and has only recently begun to reveal titbits about his personal life, philanthropy and investments.
Radvinsky was born in Odesa, Ukraine, and his family moved to the United States when he was a child. From an early age, he was fascinated by IT and settled in Chicago. According to investigative website Forensic News, he worked on the video game X-Com: Apocalypse as a teenager.He quickly put his coding talent to use in the booming world of online pornography.
In 1999, when Radvinsky was aged just 17, he helped incorporate Cybertania Inc. The company was behind a flurry of sexually-explicit ventures, many of which were sites redirecting users to adult content. It launched websites including Ultra Passwords, which claimed to offer “hacked” passwords and “illegal teen passwords”, Forbes wrote about it, according to Forbes. According to an investigation by Forbes and the Internet Watch Foundation, these links did not actually lead to unlawful material, but rather were a kind of underhand marketing strategy intended to redirect viewers to other lawful porn videos. By directing traffic to pornographic websites, Radvinsky's corporations would earn affiliate profits. In 2004 Radvinsky set up the highly successful adult streaming website MyFreeCams, where adult models broadcast themselves stripping or performing sex acts online in exchange for tips from viewers.
His early ventures were hit by legal complaints. Amazon and Microsoft sued Cybertania in 2004 for sending spam emails. Amazon said at the time: “Radvinsky sent millions of illegal and deceptive e-mail messages to [Microsoft] MSN Hotmail customers, including messages that were falsely labelled as coming from Amazon.com.” The case was settled out of court. Still, MyFreeCams was a success, claiming to reach 30 million users each month. It became one of the most visited sites on the internet.
OnlyFans enjoyed modest growth in its early years but got a shot in the arm when founder Tim Stokely received a cold email from Radvinsky in 2018. He agreed to buy 100pc of the business. It is not clear what he paid, although OnlyFans later paid £23m to buy a separate business owned by the Stokely family.
OnlyFans grew in popularity during the covid pandemic. By April 2020, it had become so popular that it was mentioned in the song "Savage" by pop singer Beyonce and fellow star Megan Thee Stallion. The site's legitimacy was bolstered by the name check, which boosted public recognition.
Despite the world reopening from Covid lockdowns, analysts believe it is still expanding fast. According to Scarlett Woodford, a senior analyst at Juniper Labs, performer sign-ups increased by 33% in May compared to January, indicating that OnlyFans is gaining popularity.
Only Fan is as close as Britain has gotten to having a consumer technology success story comparable to Silicon Valley, and it's based in the UK. According to the company's most recent Companies House filings, it is utilized by 2.2 million performers and generated a pre-tax profit of $433 million last year.
When the firm's banks threatened to terminate payment processing services last year, the business was on the verge of removing all pornography from its servers. This helped to lead to a replacement in management, which resulted in the appointment of former marketing head Amrapali Gan as CEO. The banks eventually caved and allowed adult material to stay.
She said: “We are empowering creators to monetise their content and have real control over it. Our unwavering commitment to our creators has powered our success over the last 12 months.
“We will continue to invest in the creator economy by enhancing safety, developing original OFTV content, and continuing to grow our community of creators and fans.”
