The owner of OnlyFans, the mostly pornographic subscriber platform, paid himself $338m (£267m) in dividends last year as the UK-based company made pre-tax profits of $525m.
Leonid Radvinsky, 41, the site’s Ukrainian-American owner, is the sole shareholder in the company, which was founded by the Stokely family in Essex in 2016.
Last year’s dividend, which works out at $1.3m for every working day, takes the total Radvinsky has collected from the site over the past three years to $889m.
OnlyFans acts as a marketplace for adult performers, who upload their own material and keep 80% the revenue. The remaining 20% goes to OnlyFans and covers the cost of running the business, handling credit card processing and providing a very healthy income for Radvinsky.
The site, which claims it provides more than just porn with musicians, athletes, and comedians also creating content, has 3.2 million registered “creators”, up from 2.1 million a year earlier. The number of registered “fans” who can subscribe to content from their favourite performers and buy extra pictures and videos hit 239 million – up from 188 million in 2021.
The company’s 2022 accounts, which were filed with Companies House on Thursday, show that pre-tax profits increased by 22% to $525m as payments made through the platform hit $5.6bn, up from $4.8bn in 2021.
The amount of revenue made by the site increased to $1.1bn from $932m in 2021. The company had just 53 members of staff, down from 61 a year earlier. That means the company made more than $20m per employee. The firm paid $121m in tax to the UK exchequer.
“In the financial year ending 30 November 2022, OnlyFans recorded sustained growth and profitability,” OnlyFans said in the filing for its parent company, Fenix International. “This reflects both the platform growth, in terms of number of content creators and fans, as well as growth in existing content creators earnings.”
Lee Taylor, the company’s 35-year-old chief financial officer, said the site had “revolutionised the creator economy by committing to build the safest social media platform and providing unparalleled opportunities to content creators and fans”.
“OnlyFans mission is to empower content creators to own their full potential,” he said. “The group’s subscription-based business model was founded on the premise that content creators should financially benefit from the content which they produce.
“OnlyFans is proud to pay 80% of all fan payments made on the platform to content creators, which means that content creators make $4 for every $1 retained by OnlyFans.”
Taylor said the site was investing in “the scaling and development of the platform and product development to better serve the creator community and to enhance its best in class safety controls”.
“This continued focus on platform development and safety has resulted in over a million new creators and 50 million new fans joining the platform during this reporting period.”
When OnlyFans was founded seven years ago, Tim Stokely was chief executive and his ex-banker father, Guy, was a director. At various points Tim’s brother and mother were also involved in the business. The company was sold to Radvinsky in 2018.
