OnlyFans is a British subscription platform founded in 2016 by a well-heeled Briton. Its current owner, a secretive Ukrainian-American, has reportedly sought to sell the company for $8bn. The platform is used by 4.6m creators and has 380m users, who together spend over $7bn a year.
OnlyFans charges users to watch videos, with extra fees for bespoke content, merchandise and personalised chats. Much of this, though not all, is sexual in nature. OnlyFans keeps a 20% cut of what users pay—slightly less than Uber and about the same as Airbnb. Because it is not on the app stores run by Apple and Google, it does not have to pay them a share of its takings.
In its fiscal year to November 2023 OnlyFans brought in revenue of $1.3bn. At around 50%, its operating margin was higher than those of Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft. It paid creators $5.3bn in the same period. In the 2024 financial year OnlyFans made over $1.4bn in revenues and $520m in profits.
Keily Blair is the chief executive. She compares the platform's account-verification process to the know-your-customer process used by big banks. In some markets, including Britain, OnlyFans uses third-party technology to estimate a viewer's age based on a facial scan. For creators, it requires a government ID and bank details. It has nearly 1,500 people verifying accounts and checking that videos meet its rules. In May 2025 OnlyFans rejected about two-thirds of the 187,305 applications it received for new accounts. The site is not end-to-end encrypted, allowing the firm to monitor what is published. There is no algorithm pushing posts.
OnlyFans allows content that is machine-tweaked but not fully machine-made, betting that real-life porn will continue to draw users even as the internet fills with AI-generated material. Amrapali Gan, the former chief executive, left to launch Vylit, an adults-only social platform on which AI-generated content is clearly marked.
OnlyFans was fined over £1m ($1.4m) by Britain's media watchdog for providing faulty information about its age-verification process. An independent review in Britain of the porn industry, published in February 2025, argued that "the competition for clicks is driving the production of increasingly disturbing content". In June 2025 the government announced that the depiction of strangulation in porn would be made illegal. On July 1st 2025 Sweden introduced rules meaning anyone paying for custom images or videos on porn sites could face up to a year in prison.
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