[00:00] to now have just 42 full-time employees. Yeah. 1.3 billion on 42 employees, man. Good lord. OnlyFans continues to build its adult empire.
[00:12] Thanks to International, the parent company releases financial This is what I was working for. for end of year November 30, 2023. Gross payments to total amounts of users spend on the platform jumped 19% to 6.6 billion. So, like, this is so crazy.
[00:25] Revenue and profit grew 20% year over year, reaching $1.3 billion and $485 million respectively. The platform's growth shows no signs of slowing. The number of users or fans surged 28% to 305 million,
[00:38] while the number of creators increased 29%. Outside of fan companies, I don't know if there's a single company that's doing better than OnlyFans. It's actually crazy. OnlyFans does model straightforwardly. It takes a 20% cut. Top creators can earn millions annually through subscriptions
[00:51] and paid messaging and tips. It's, like, actually so insane. OnlyFans billionaire owner pockets $472 million dividend. Is this an AI voice for Forbes? Is Forbes making AI videos?
[01:03] The billionaire owner of OnlyFans earned more than $1.2 million a day from the social media subscription site best known for hosting adult content. I mean, if you're crushing this hard,
[01:29] like, if you're making... OnlyFans is owned by one person, right? Do they have venture funding at all? So, like, if you're pulling $6.6 billion in gross payments,
[01:41] No, your revenue is $1.3 billion. Okay, your revenue is $1.3 billion. So he's paying half of that out to himself? That's crazy. That's up from the previous year when the business paid Radvinsky a $338 million dividend.
[01:55] He could only do this if he was a 100% owner. Venture capitalists must be just like going crazy with how good that is. The new financials show that transactions processed over the platform grew 18.9% to $6.6 billion in 2023.
[02:11] Bro, this is why I'm not a big believer in VC. If you can actually manage to grow your company organically and hold on to your equity, you just can crush it so hard. Imagine if this guy had like 5% of the company left because he did like three rounds to get here.
[02:23] If he's like a Travis from Uber or something like that. But OnlyFans claims that around 80 cents of every dollar spent on the platform goes to its creators. revenues also grew to 1.3 billion dollars from 1 billion dollars in 2022 and profits grew by a fifth
[02:39] to 485.4 million dollars last year god damn that growth stems largely from non-subscription based revenues yeah for sure so when we were when we ever whenever we do adult campaigns and we activate
[02:54] OnlyFans creators, the amount of money they are making isn't even from their subs. The amount of money that OnlyFans girls make, all of their money comes from paid videos
[03:06] and like paid opportunities. So they go, okay, like I've got a new video series and you can bid to unlock the videos. And so, I don't know why I'm telling you guys all this. You probably know how it works already. But you can bid to unlock the videos. And so you can
[03:21] did like $100, $150, $200, whatever, and unlocked the videos. And so there's two ways that the girls like monetize this, okay? So the first way is that they do these things,
[03:36] that's what they mean by non-subscription revenue. And the second thing they do is OnlyFans agencies hire full-time people to message their top subscribers and their top followers as the girls.
[03:50] So the girls, it's just some dude behind a keyboard, but they have, like, a, so the girls do photo shoots. They'll do a photo shoot for, like, a day or two, and they'll get, like, 500 photos in different costumes, in different stuff, like, right?
[04:03] And then they'll get these full-time people to message the dudes, and then they'll be like, hey, oh, wow, like, yeah, do you want, like, a picture of me? And it's like, oh, like, yeah, I've got, like, I want you, like, I want a black bikini, goddamn, you know.
[04:17] I don't know how those people talk. I just assume they talk like that. And then, like, you're like, oh, yeah, I'll put on a black bikini for you. Like, here I go. And then, like, I assume, I don't know how these people talk. I just assume they talk like that. And then, like, they go through their fucking photos,
[04:32] and they're like, black bikini photos, send it. And this guy thinks he's, like, legitimately talking to the creator, but there's, like, 20 people doing this full time, except to unlock that image of the black bikini, right,
[04:44] is, like, $50 or whatever. So it's like, oh, I'll do the plastic-neating. That'll only be like $75. And then imagine this happening like every single second with like three full-time people going through your messages.
[04:56] And that's how the top girls are monetizing. And they're just, this prints. It prints. It prints. It's so much money. I actually had a friend of mine having that as a full-time job.
[05:08] He had a hard time believing it. Yeah, yeah. No, it's just a dude that's messaging people as a girl. like we've gone full circle back to like old school MMO days before uh before um before discord and before like team speak where it like I a crazy night elf girl that can wait do you have a do you have any great epic items for me Like we just all the way back around Like human nature never changes
[05:33] It's an honest man. We're just all the way back. And then this is going to become such a shit show when AI hits, because now you're going to not even know that the person you're talking to behind it is real,
[05:49] and you're going to get voice logs and everything. Like, already a lot of, like, these OS girls are working on AI-created voices that are trained in their likeness, and they're, like, super close.
[06:02] Like, I think for the – because a lot of people don't understand that the vast majority – like, we on the Internet, most of you watching this stream are probably power users. so like
[06:14] if there's like a kind of 5 to 10% variance in a voice you'll be able to probably pick up on it and you'll be like oh that sounds like AI to me but that realization like doesn't affect
[06:26] the 45 year old divorce dude who's like the number one subscriber for this like OnlyFans chick that dude will never make that decision he'll just be like oh my god this girl is talking to me and that will only become more true
[06:38] that will only become more true until it's individual You and I won't be able to detect the difference between an AI voice and a regular voice, I think, inside of like a year or two. And so shit is going to get really fucking crazy when that happens.
[06:53] And we're not as far out from it as people think, trust me. But that's what, so when they're saying the non-subscription, long way of saying that when they say non-subscription revenue, that's what they mean.
[07:05] And it's like this crazy monetization status that's like OnlyFans has done a monetization style that kind of nobody has ever done in terms of platform success.
[07:18] The only thing I could equate this to is TikTok, where TikTok does those where you just slam the button to give money to the people. you buy the credits up front, and that's how those NPC streams that came along, which I
[07:33] didn't, I wasn't live, wasn't live streaming when those NPC streams came along, if I had been, you would have seen me talking a lot more about that, because that was such a fascinating
[07:45] trend, where you have, like, the dudes, like, and the girls, like, mmm, ice cream so good, ice cream so good, and, like, you have some fucking idiot on the other end, like, slamming, like, ice cream so good, ice cream so good, five dollars, ten dollars, ten dollars, say
[07:57] ice cream bitch like go you know i don't know how they sound i assume they sound that way like like that that is such a crazy thing that that works that way you know um jesus like
[08:09] marketing is so interesting non-subscription revenue is so interesting one-time purchases of pics or videos that grew to 765 million dollars in 2023 up from 567.6 million dollars in 2022
[08:21] Subscription revenue recorded a more modest increase of $540.8 million. Oh, that wasn't, that wasn't, that wasn't increased? That wasn't total? Videos that grew to $765 million in 2023.
[08:35] Grew to? Up from $567.8 million in 2022. Okay, so $200 million more. Subscription revenue recorded a more modest increase of $540.8 million from $522.1 million in 2022.
[08:51] the total number of subs from about 240 million to 305 million. So the subscribers went up 60 million. Well, the number of OnlyFans creators jumped 29% from 3.2 million to 4.1 million.
[09:06] There's so much more room on OnlyFans. There's so much more room to create on this platform. That's something interesting about platforms that a lot of people don't realize. If you look at the number of people that consistently create
[09:19] is actually really small on most platforms. So if you look at the number of people that have uploaded seven or more YouTube videos, it's like, because a lot of times people are like, oh, there's too many YouTubers, I can't start a YouTube channel.
[09:31] But they don't realize that like, there are a ton of YouTubers, right? But there aren't a lot of consistent YouTubers. There's very few of those. So the number of people that are watching and consuming content is so much greater
[09:43] the number of people that are actually consistent creating. So you always, always have room. That's one of the reasons like, Twitch is, like, such a bad platform to get started on is because, like, there are... The streamer-to-viewer ratio, which you can find, actually, if you go to, like, a website like Slowdome,
[09:57] you'll see a number called viewer ratio, the number right here. And the problem with this number is this means that there's 25 viewers for every one streamer. That's not very good. That means that, like, if you consider a successful stream to be, like, 400 or 500 viewers,
[10:12] that means that's basically impossible for the average broadcaster. So with a platform like YouTube, that number looks more like, God, it's like thousands per potential. So that's why it's always better to look at the ratio of viewers and people that think like, oh, I can't be a content creator.
[10:32] Like, oh, I can't do this. You absolutely can't. Because number one, the number of people that are consistently uploading, it's something like less than 2% of podcasts have ever... Here, I can find the data people are interested in. I can find the specific stats. but something like less than 2 of podcasts ever get past seven episodes It something like less than 5 of YouTube channels ever get past seven videos uploaded So people always think of like oh there so many creators on YouTube
[10:56] but they don't realize that, like, there are, there's almost no one that does it consistently. If all you do is just make, like, make a lot of stuff. Yeah, so someone's saying on OnlyFans, it's, like, 75 per creator.
[11:08] Yeah, right, it's way better than Twitch, but consider how many OnlyFans girls start a page, make one or two photos and leave, like almost all of them, right? So again, there's so much room for creators.
[11:22] We, well, a lot of people kind of live in like scarcity, but that's just not true. There's like, there's so much room for creators. There's, we need creators. Like we need people on these platforms. I have people at YouTube and people at Twitch telling me this all the time.
[11:34] I'm sorry, I mean people at YouTube have told me that. Yeah, it's like 20 podcast episodes, like there's a top 0.5%. This is why, like if you go look at my shorts videos this stuff, I have a lot of motivational videos about how you don't have to work hard.
[11:46] It's because it's backed by these stats. The number of people that have actually literally just consistently uploaded anything is so few. I don't think anybody at Twitch that I talk to really cares about or understands
[11:58] this ratio. This is a kind of pretty meta topic. If I were Dan Clancy, the CEO of Twitch, I would be looking at this number really carefully, but this is not how Twitch dictates their success. Twitch themselves
[12:10] really only dictate their success via hours watched. So their only definition of success is like how many people are coming into the platform and how many people are spending their time understanding like on the platform.
[12:23] So like to them, getting this hours watched number up is a better metric than anything else. And they don't really pay attention to anything else. So they don't care about peak viewers. They don't care about number of streams. But if you were very sophisticated, what you should be looking at is
[12:35] what is the actual distribution of viewers to streamers on my platform? because then I can determine that it's more likely these people are going to watch longer because the distributions are healthier and there's more interesting streams for them to discover.
[12:50] If this number gets higher, it means that viewers are more interested on average in streams than normal. And the problem is that if you go to Twitch, right, and you look at the directory, all the people that are watching streams are watching these same streams every single day.
[13:06] Like if you watch Zachwar, your 43,000 viewers are watching Zach. You're just watching Zach do this every single day. You're watching Sean every single day. You're watching Hassan every single day. And that's why this number is low, because all of the viewer ratio is top-heavy to these broadcasters,
[13:20] the kingmakers, right? Versus if you are a healthy website and the number is higher, you're distributed across a greater number of creators, if that makes sense. That's how that works. So OnlyFans or, like, YouTube are, like, healthier because viewership is more distributed over platforms,
[13:34] over creators, giving the platform a more healthy atmosphere because viewers are consuming way more stuff on average than just single streamers. Would it be more advantageous for Twitch for small creators to have higher averages?
[13:47] Yeah, of course, because that would mean that more viewers are finding those streams and finding them interesting. So the healthiest ecosystem for Twitch is for the average streamer to have 5,200 viewers, which would mean that...
[13:59] And the reason that doesn't happen is because Twitch's discovery is dog shit. So Twitch doesn't allow you to discover those streamers, So you would never know, like, this is really easily demonstrable, right? Go to any category.
[14:11] I automatically go to Path of Exile because that's my jam. But let's go to a bigger one to advocate this. Go to GTA. And you see the Kingmakers here have 14,000, 12,000, whatever. By number five, it drops off dramatically.
[14:23] This guy only has 4.8. Tell me how a person down here gets discovered on Twitch without any other, like, help, like YouTube or whatever. It's just not possible, right? So they have an unhealthy distribution of viewers on these streams
[14:38] because Twitch's discovery is bad. They can't get discovered, which is not true on YouTube. It's not true on OnlyFans and et cetera. They have way better discovery systems for what you want. So a healthier distribution across these streamers, like ideally Twitch would have some kind of algorithmic data,
[14:52] like TikTok or like any other platform, that would just drive you to this broadcast because it just turns out that you are the type of viewer that would really enjoy this and you get recommended it. But Twitter's recommendation system is a joke, and they don't have any of that data.
[15:06] ...for the bulk of the London-based company's revenues, totaling some $863 million in 2023. Damn, that's like 80% is US. That's crazy. Europe and the rest of the world account for $443.2 million.
[15:20] The profits are extraordinary, given that OnlyFans' parent company claims to now have just 42 full-time employees. $1.3 billion on 42 employees, man.
[15:32] Good lord. Like the average employee is worth like...
[16:02] In 2018, Radvinsky bought the then much smaller OnlyFans site from its British founders, Tim Silkley and his father Guy Silkley The site boomed during the pandemic largely as a showcase for pornographic material but moved to ban sexually explicit content in August 2021
[16:22] after coming under pressure from bank and credit card companies following reports it had hosted child sexual abuse contests. That would have been the absolute worst decision OnlyFans could have made, would be to ban pornography. I totally understand why they did it, though.
[16:35] OnlyFans reversed course just a few weeks later, saying it had, quote, secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community. The initial announcement of OnlyFans' pivot
[16:47] drew heavy criticism from the site's creators and sex work advocates. The British media regulator, Ofcom, opened an investigation into OnlyFans' age verification measures in May
[16:59] after the company revealed a, quote, technical glitch meant its minimum age threshold was set to 20 years old instead of 23. A separate Reuters investigation published in...
[17:11] Is it always this chargeback stuff that makes companies try to go away from pornography? No, it's not chargebacks. It's that this is a really interesting topic. I won't go too deep into it, but banking is a massive mafia.
[17:24] And so one of the things that... So banks are beholden to many different regulations, especially international banks. So payment processors, one of the regulations they have is that they can't transmit adult content.
[17:40] So, like, if you're using Stripe, which is the main payment processor, Stripe can't transfer any adult payments or they get in trouble with the bank. And we can get into why the regulations for the banks are that way,
[17:52] but, like, don't need to suffice to say that. The transactions that Stripe oversees cannot be adult-based content. when they find out that there is adult-based content and you get kicked off of Stripe
[18:05] or equivalent payment processor platforms, you have to start going to much senior platforms that can handle adult content. And the difference in transaction fees is like crazy. Like on Stripe, you might pay like 1% to 2% or less on like $100.
[18:20] But on an adult platform transaction website payment processor, you'll pay like 8% to 9%. So like $8 to $9 on $100. It's like literally eight times more. So that adds up really quick for those companies.
[18:33] And that is why OnlyFans is like, holy shit, we're being kicked off of our payment processor. So if we don't figure out a way to fix this, we are going to have to, like literally we're out of business. So that's why they temporarily were like, okay, we're going to go to like some other thing.
[18:48] This happened to like tons of people like Tumblr got kicked off. Like basically, if you've been operating with adult content for a couple of years, you eventually will get caught by a payment processor. Though we've actually had situations where we have had to use adult payment processors
[19:05] because we're paying creators for adult stuff for our brands, and then we get flagged by Stripe and they take us off. So that's happened quite a few times. The big banks are pretty scary.
[19:17] I thought the reason that banks went away from adult stuff was chargebacks. No, it's like a holier-than-thou type of thing. The banks are in with the U.S. government and with the big government, and they don't want to be associated with adult content
[19:30] because of how that looks from a legislative point of view. Do you have any opinion on the class action lawsuit someone is trying against OF on DMing criticism to DMing a call center employee? They're trying to argue it's fraud. That's going to come down to, like, government, individual government.
[19:44] So I think we just have to see how it plays out. How does Pornhub get money then? They pay a huge amount in adult processing fees. So, like, all porn websites pay a huge amount in processing fees. Huge amount.
[19:56] Like, 8-9% of their income is just the cost of doing business for adult companies. Now, Pornhub still prints money like crazy, right? Because people are still... Like, the cost of producing pornography and hosting pornography is low,
[20:08] and the margin is quite high on people that will pay premium for it. Isn't a lot of adult content gang-affiliated and owned for laundering? Yes, it is. 140 instances in which men and women complain sexually explicit content
[20:20] have been posted without their consent. Still, OnlyFans seems intent on broadening itself beyond the sex industry. In 2021, the company launched OFTV, a YouTube-style video streaming platform promoting, quote,
[20:35] safe-for-work videos. Yeah, I don't think they're interested in expanding beyond pornography at all. I think this is like when you have so much money and you literally don't have to make any updates to the website. You have like 42 employees doing nothing.
[20:48] They just do shit like this. cooking and music hosted by OnlyFans creators. And also this just boosts, like, having girls on a platform doing normal stuff just boosts people back to their OnlyFans, right? If only there was a platform where that happened on a platform where, like,
[21:02] you can livestream safer work content and then it could drive people in a funnel to your OnlyFans. Yeah, can't think of a platform like that. For full coverage, check out Ian Martin's piece on Forbes.com.
[21:16] Thanks. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Good topic. Good find. Yeah, OnlyFans is insane. 42 employees that I can't get over. So that's $30,952,380 per employee is what that's worth.
[21:36] Oh, man, that's insane. That's so crazy.