Entertainment for adults: how a native of Odessa bought OnlyFans on time and earned $500 million from it

Leonid Radvinsky, owner of OnlyFans, has made $500 million in profits over the past two years thanks to the popularity of a platform where celebrities and regular users sell nude content to subscribers. MCToday.

Photo: IStock

OnlyFans was launched in November 2016 as a platform where people can offer clips and photos to their subscribers for a monthly subscription fee. Tim Stockley founded the company with his older brother Thomas by borrowing $11 from his father, Guy Stockley, who told him, "Tim, this will be the last money I give."

After 2 years, a native of Odessa, Leonid Radvinsky, the owner of MyFreeCams, acquired 75% of Fenix ​​International Limited, the owner of OnlyFans, and aimed the service at erotica.

39-year-old Radvinsky avoids publicity and does not give interviews, reports VCTR. This is not surprising: before the advent of the OnlyFans era, he had a number of porn projects in his life that he didn’t really want to brag about.

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Basic information about Leonid Radvinsky is known to us thanks to journalistic investigations and modest information on his personal website. Radvinsky is a Jew and an emigrant from Odessa in the first generation. He has been interested in technology since childhood. Even on his grandfather's computer, he got acquainted with the BASIC programming language.

“Lenya was an insanely talented boy. He wrote his first virus at the age of nine. And he always gravitated towards pornography, was engaged in dating sites, all that, ”said Leonid’s father, Savely Radvinsky.

The Radvinsky family was related to the Odessa seaport and oil trade. When Leonid was six years old, he moved to the USA with his family. His family settled in the suburbs of Chicago (Illinois). Then, in the 1990s, his parents were involved in about 40 major American real estate transactions.

Radvinsky was behind the cult project Suicide Girls, an online community that hosted erotic content with informal girls.

The domain of the resource, which was launched in 2001, is registered to Radvinsky's mail. In addition, his ex-wife, Ekaterina Chudnovskaya, headed SG Services.

The site was popular among representatives of subcultures. The models whose photos appeared on the site could have piercings, tattoos, hair of bright colors or a non-standard figure. In 2004, Radvinsky launched MyFreeCams, a resource where girls broadcast erotic videos using webcams.

Based on the data on Radvinsky's personal website, it is difficult to suspect that he is one of the most influential people in the porn industry. There he positions himself as a business angel and philanthropist. In particular, he helped medical research centers.

Radvinsky is also an active supporter of open source software. According to him, it "revolutionized technology and paves the way for innovation and global cooperation."

The pandemic and lockdowns have fueled the unprecedented growth of the OnlyFans platform. If in 2019 the platform had only 20 million users, then in 2020 there were 120 million of them.

The site continued to grow when singer Cardi B and actress/singer Bella Thorne joined the platform.

After Beyoncé remembered the site in her remix of Megan Thee Stallion's "Savage" in April 2020, the number of visitors skyrocketed. Bella Thorne set an OnlyFans record by earning more than $1 million within 24 hours of joining the platform in August 2020 and more than $2 million in less than 1 week.

How much OnlyFans earned

Dividend payments to Radvinsky were disclosed by the British company on September 8 as it showed a 7-fold increase in earnings. Payouts of $284m in 2021 and $233m in 2022 make Radvinsky one of the highest paid internet startup owners in the UK and highlight OnlyFans' explosive growth since the pandemic.

OnlyFans allows content creators such as fitness instructors, musicians and erotica stars to sell video clips, messages and items directly to fans paying between $5 and $50 per month, of which the website takes 20%.

In its annual report, the company said pre-tax profit for the year to November 2021 rose from $61 million to $433 million, while revenue rose from $358 million to $932 million.

Overall, OnlyFans users spent nearly $4,8 billion on the platform in 2021 on porn, workout tips, and cooking tips, most of which went directly to the creators. Stockley left the company at the end of 2021.

You may be interested in: top New York news, stories of our immigrants, and helpful tips about life in the Big Apple - read it all on ForumDaily New York.

OnlyFans makes more money than MindGeek, the adult entertainment empire that owns sites like Pornhub and YouPorn. In recent years, OnlyFans has tried to create a more mainstream brand, claiming that more of its creators are selling non-sexual content. But he has yet to reveal numbers about his earnings.

The company faced a wave of criticism and ridicule last year when it unexpectedly banned porn from the site, before reversing its decision. Stockley's founder said at the time that the banks pushed for the move out of concern that they might be associated with pornography.

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