Meet The Biggest Fan of OnlyFans... The Boss
After netting a dividend of $338m, Leo Radvinsky is laughing all the way to the bank.
When the annual report came out recently from Fenix International, you might have been forgiven for giving the results a miss. However, if you’d realised that the UK based parent company owned OnlyFans, you might have reconsidered.
Within the report came the staggering dividend payment of $338m that was paid to the owner of the business, Leo Radvinsky. This was out of the pot of $525m total profits that the firm reported.
Arguably the most surprising element to this is the fact that few appreciate how profitable the business actually is, with such a simple business model.
The history of OnlyFans
The business was started in the UK back in 2016 by Guy and Tim Stokely with a £10k business loan. It was bought in 2018 by Leo for an undisclosed sum in the millions.
The growth of the company was relatively tame until the pandemic hit. Lockdowns presented a unique opportunity for a captive audience and OnlyFans was able to exploit this.
The 2021 report showed a huge surge in figures, with the business suddenly posting a profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
This momentum has continued since then and even accelerated when we’ve been out of the pandemic. In the past year alone the number of creators rose by 47% to almost 3.2 million, while the number of users rose by 27% to close to 239 million.
The simple business model
OnlyFans provides the infrastructure and platform for “creators” to post visual content to subscribers and charge for it.
Given Leo’s past (which we come to later) in the adult industry, the site is mostly dominated by adult content, although there are others such as fitness instructors and cooks that make use of the site.
The firm takes a 20% cut of the payments made by users, and passes on the other 80% to the creator. Given that users spent a staggering $4.8bn on the site last year, it’s easy to see how profitable that 20% can be.
Given the simple business model, OnlyFans only employs 53 people. Low overheads and operational costs make it a very efficient business. That’s one reason why Leo could take $338m out of the $525m profit from the business. There’s very little that needs to be retained in order to sustain and grow the company.
For the rest of the article, we’ll consider:
The business history and net worth of Leo Radvinsky.
The direction of OnlyFans going forward.
If retail investors can get a piece of the action.