00:00What do a cliff diver, a pop star, and a porn actress
00:25all have in common?
00:30I'm OnlyFans. OnlyFans is me.
00:34OnlyFans is not where you go to get famous. OnlyFans is where you go to get paid.
00:38What's so great about OnlyFans is you can pay creators directly,
00:41and you know that it's going to that creator.
00:43OnlyFans has emerged as the biggest and most interesting
00:47of these subscription-based creator platforms.
00:49They've paid their creators more than $20 billion,
00:52and they've got 380 million users,
00:55which is a little bit more than the population of the United States.
00:59The overwhelming majority of their content is adult content.
01:03And despite what OnlyFans says is rigorous oversight,
01:06it has attracted some of the worst actors
01:08with allegations of sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence.
01:12The worst accusations around the company are around child sexual abuse material.
01:17As with any platform that then becomes very lucrative,
01:20you have a lot of other unscrupulous people who see an opportunity to make a buck.
01:24This is one of those byproducts of social media and of sex industry in particular.
01:29As they aim to clean up their act and potentially put a multi-billion dollar sale on the table,
01:34OnlyFans could face some obstacles, from financial opacity to concerns over content moderation.
01:41While the platform is legal, they still have their work cut out for them.
01:45Financial institutions in general are wary of being in business with adult content.
01:49So, can OnlyFans become the Netflix of the creator economy?
01:53Or is it destined to remain the world's biggest porn empire?
01:58OnlyFans keeps trying to be something more than a porn site,
02:01but it has thus far failed to shed that label.
02:04The story of OnlyFans is still a bit of a mystery to most people.
02:14We know that OnlyFans was founded by Tim Stokely in 2016.
02:18We know that he sold a majority stake in the company to the investor, Leo Rudvinsky, in 2018.
02:25Since then, Rudvinsky is the majority shareholder.
02:28Rudvinsky is such an interesting character.
02:30He doesn't do a lot of interviews. He's not very public.
02:33But what we do know about him, he is an engineer, an entrepreneur.
02:37He got his start doing some of these cam sites in the early 2000s.
02:42The dividend that Rudvinsky gets is truly extraordinary.
02:46He's become a billionaire off of this site.
02:49They say very little about how the economics of it work.
02:52Their net revenue is between 1.2 and 1.4 billion.
02:56And their profit is about half that.
02:58So that's a margin of like 50%, which is pretty much unheard of.
03:01Other than that, we don't know a whole lot.
03:04What we do know is how OnlyFans makes its money.
03:07And it's by taking a percentage of what fans directly pay their favorite creators.
03:12So Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, these are all advertising-built businesses.
03:17Advertising requires you to appeal to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.
03:22Whereas you can make pretty good money charging 2,000 people or 5,000 people the right amount of money.
03:28OnlyFans opened up a whole new way for this sort of emerging class of content creators to charge their most passionate fans for things.
03:36Hi!
03:39Hi, my name is Addis Fouché.
03:43First and foremost, I'm a Virgo.
03:45But also, I'm an adult performer.
03:47I'd say a solid half of my income comes from OnlyFans.
03:51So he's buying these messages for sexting.
03:53And then he sent a little tip.
03:54My journey into adult content actually started with OnlyFans.
03:58I actually joined after the pandemic.
04:00I thought that OnlyFans was really appealing and really cool and really accessible to me.
04:04So I thought, why not try it?
04:06And here we are, 30 years later.
04:09OnlyFans has really democratized who can be a porn star and who can monetize off of their sexuality.
04:15Sure, we all know sext sells, and it's made OnlyFans a very successful company.
04:22But questions remain about how much they can grow without either more capital or a sale.
04:28When OnlyFans tried to sell itself earlier this year, it was asking for a price of $8 billion,
04:34which was about the value of the recent merger of Paramount and Skydance.
04:40But anybody who has sold anything knows sort of your asking price and what you actually sell for can be very different things.
04:47There's not a big public bidding process for the company yet.
04:51So whether it would actually be an attractive target for an acquirer, especially at that price, really remains to be seen.
04:58Its true value could hinge upon whether or not the platform could move beyond its roots.
05:03If they can become a site that anyone and everyone uses to sell subscriptions,
05:07it opens them up to just a much bigger market.
05:10It also makes it much easier for them to do deals with traditional financial institutions.
05:14Mainstream creators and celebrities are increasingly joining OnlyFans.
05:18And some are using a body-positive approach to make the platform work for them.
05:24I am making more money from a handful of fans on OnlyFans versus like the millions of fans that I have worldwide listening to my music.
05:36The cost of everything that it takes to tour has gone up quite drastically.
05:42Yet musicians' wages have not.
05:45And so lots of bands are finding themselves in positions where they cannot afford to go on tour.
05:52Here I am outside the Spotify building.
05:54The streamers and the major labels are stealing from artists.
05:59My song Foundations has over 100 million streams.
06:06You'd think I'd be a millionaire. I'm not.
06:09That's because Spotify pays between 0.003 and 0.005 cents per stream.
06:15So you'd need around 500,000 streams per month to get the equivalent of a US minimum wage.
06:21And that's before label cuts, management fees and publishing splits.
06:26I play shows and I wear clothes where it might be revealing.
06:30I'm used to sort of being exposed.
06:33I use my body as part of my work, as part of entertainment quite a lot.
06:37And I thought it would be quite fun to start the OnlyFans account on the first day of the tour
06:42and call it Butts for Tour Buses and sell pictures of my bum and just see what happens.
06:49I'm here with Butts for Tour Buses.
06:51Butts for Tour Buses.
06:52My new campaign.
06:53You may have learned about it.
06:54I caused a media frenzy.
06:58It's an exploitative industry that's making it harder and harder for anyone to do music.
07:05And I think that's wrong.
07:06And that's why I'm selling pictures of my bum.
07:08Feeling cut out of mainstream industries is driving all sorts of creators to take the leap.
07:17Three, two, one, send it!
07:20Woohoo!
07:23My name is Ellie Smart and I'm a professional cliff diver.
07:29I rely on OnlyFans for over 50% of my income right now.
07:33There's not always a lot of money in these small niche sports.
07:37Exploring different ways to make side income is very, very important.
07:43A lot of my content was being taken and shared in so many different platforms.
07:49But I didn't see any money or, you know, really any results or perks of those videos being shared.
07:56I'm not feeling that .
07:58Which led me to OnlyFans.
08:00Content like Ellie's plays into the push OnlyFans has made to make the platform more safe for work.
08:06Hello!
08:07They've been really pushing hard into things like personal trainers and chefs and stand-up comedians and sort of safe for work content.
08:18They've got something called OnlyFans TV, which is supposed to be just safe for work.
08:21Hi, OFTV!
08:22The pivot that they're attempting is the same pivot they've been attempting for three or four years, which is we are not just porn.
08:28OFTV, which was supposed to be sort of more Hollywood-like programming, it remains unclear how popular any of this is.
08:37Despite the OFTV launch, we know that most of their content is adult content.
08:41With that comes a reputation that might be hard to shake.
08:46Popularity of OnlyFans has gone a long way toward reducing the stigma of doing a sort of sex work or nude modeling, but that definitely still is there.
08:56Teachers by day and OnlyFans stars by night.
08:59I personally don't do any nudity or porn or anything like that, but as a professional athlete, I am literally in a swimsuit all the time.
09:11Like, I am already pretty much, you know, naked.
09:15How silly is that, that you can post it on one place for free and it's totally okay, but then society can have a different opinion when you post it and you actually profit off of your hard work.
09:27I don't think that the stigma is necessarily gone.
09:30I think that there's just more people who are making more money despite the stigma.
09:36You just have to push past it.
09:37How are you?
09:38OnlyFans does have reputational challenges, which is why when they have tried to raise outside capital, it's been hard.
09:46There's already the sort of uneasiness in some circles with the very notion of pornography, but then you fold in all the things that may be happening on the platform that you're not aware of.
09:55You might not even find out until after you own it.
09:58I don't like it.
10:00Such due diligence could unearth serious allegations made about OnlyFans in the past.
10:04The BBC and Reuters have done quite a lot of investigations into issues on OnlyFans, including a problem with child sexual abuse material.
10:14Non-consensual videos showing up on the platform.
10:18An investigation into police reports where a woman said her rape was broadcast on OnlyFans.
10:25OnlyFans is being used by children.
10:28Children on occasions are being blackmailed and exploited.
10:31We go above and beyond what many other social media platforms do in terms of content moderation.
10:38We review every single piece of content that appears on the OnlyFans platform.
10:42A 2024 report by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children attributed 352 of the 20.5 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation to OnlyFans.
10:54In 2025, OnlyFans was fined over a million pounds for breaches relating to age verification.
11:02OnlyFans accepted the findings and changed its policy.
11:06OnlyFans has so much at stake with making sure that none of the content is illegal, that it all meets their standards.
11:13They have a process in place. It's actually pretty rigorous.
11:18When you set up an account, you have to have proof of your identity.
11:22So you have to have a driver's license.
11:24You have to take a selfie with your driver's license.
11:27You have to give them your social security number.
11:29You have to do a selfie check-in periodically after you have a creator account to prove that you are still who you say you are.
11:35Like what I really like about OnlyFans is I'm in complete control.
11:45It would be great if people could start actually having less shame and if we could support people creating their own content.
11:53Don't think OnlyFans needs to hide what the majority of their content base is.
11:59It's creating a lot of great livelihoods for millions of people around the world.
12:02I think that they're only going to continue to grow and become a really big media empire.
12:11Despite the controversies, they're definitely a huge part of the creator economy and a big cash machine for their owner.
12:18The business as it is makes so much money. It's very sustainable and probably will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
12:23Oh because you think I'm truly a우 to the world
12:33because you think I'm interested I'm proud to be with you
Be the first to comment