ENTER LEO
The new owner was media-shy and socially awkward, said three people who’ve met him – very unlike Stokely, whose Instagram account brims with images of fast cars, porn stars and villas in Ibiza.
Radvinsky brought a wealth of experience in the rapidly evolving business of online porn.
As a boy, in the dying years of the Soviet Union, he and his parents left Ukraine for the U.S. He grew up in Illinois, where his first company, Cybertania Inc, was registered by his mother, Anna, in March 1999, according to company filings. Radvinsky was then only 16.
His mother couldn’t be reached for comment.
Radvinsky would describe Cybertania’s business in a 2014 court declaration as “online entertainment.” One of its earliest ventures was a website called Ultrapasswords.com, which promised links to porn-related websites, according to a 2021 story by Forbes.
It was a lucrative enterprise. A court filing by Cybertania said Ultrapasswords was generating income of about $5,000 per day in 2002 – the same year Radvinsky turned 20. The site is no longer active.
Two years later, with an economics degree from Northwestern University outside Chicago, Radvinsky started his first big porn venture: MyFreeCams, where models performed sexual acts on a live webcam feed. Viewers paid by the minute or bought virtual tokens to tip the performer.
By 2010, XBIZ, a news outlet for the porn industry, was calling MyFreeCams “one of the world’s largest adult webcam communities,” with 100,000 models on its books. It is still around today and owned by Radvinsky’s U.S.-based MFCXY, Inc.
MyFreeCams was part of a wave of “cam sites” that capitalized on faster internet speeds. They marked a major shift in porn, which until the early 2000s was primarily made by studio-based performers and distributed on videotape, and later CDs and DVDs, or via pay-per-view TV.
Then came so-called “tube sites” in the mid-2000s. These websites didn’t produce their own porn but provided a platform for content uploaded by users – professionals and amateurs alike. Sites such as Xtube, Pornhub and xHamster, which attracted hundreds of millions of users, mainly made money through ads and by selling user data. Consumers got limitless content for free.
“Porn was more accessible than ever before, but performers were making less and less money off of it,” said Maggie MacDonald, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto who studies porn platforms. For the next decade, as the tube sites dominated internet porn, many performers struggled.
“And then OnlyFans comes along,” said MacDonald, an adviser to the private equity firm that owns Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company.
Under Radvinsky, Tim Stokely stayed on as CEO for the next three years, with his brother Tom as chief operating officer and their father Guy, a former merchant banker, as a co-director with Radvinsky.
The company’s fortunes soared with the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns.
Millions of isolated, horny people flocked to porn sites. OnlyFans saw a surge in creators, users and revenue in the U.S. and Europe, its main markets. Between 2019 and 2021, its pretax profits rose from $5.6 million to $432.9 million, according to corporate filings.
Although free porn was readily available online, OnlyFans seemed to offer something different that people would pay for: personal connection. Subscribers could directly message creators, and seek companionship and intimacy. Creators made money through subscriptions, tips and sales of custom-made content.
OnlyFans offered its creators an alluring mix of gig work, sexual expression and financial freedom – and, for some influencers, a rare chance to convert big social media followings into small fortunes, so long as they were willing to strip off.
One creator who reaped huge profits is Danielle Bregoli, a rebellious teen who became famous for her 2016 TV appearance with her mother on “Dr. Phil.” In a segment titled, “I Want to Give Up My Car-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Year-Old Daughter Who Tried to Frame Me for a Crime,” she taunted the audience to fight her outside: “Cash me outside, how bout dah?” The catchphrase launched her career as the chart-topping rapper Bhad Bhabie, gaining her millions of followers on social media.
In April 2021, six days after her 18th birthday, she created an OnlyFans account, posting sexually suggestive photos. In the first six hours, she earned more than $1 million, Bregoli told Reuters. A year later, that sum had reached almost $42 million, she said.
“I had no idea it would make this kind of money,” she said. “Nobody did.”
While top creators cashed in, others scraped by. “It’s incredibly rare that you speak to someone who’s making loads of money,” said Hanne Stegeman, whose doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam focused on the experiences of online sex workers, including OnlyFans creators. “Much more often people are working quite hard to make something similar to a minimum wage.”
Roxie Roots, a former OnlyFans creator from Germany who joined OnlyFans in 2018 and left in 2021, found the work harder – and the earnings much smaller – than she’d expected.
“I kept going for years because I was like, Oh my God, I need to come out with something – at least some savings,” she said.
A ‘MASSIVE EXPLOSION IN CONTENT’
One former employee had a ringside view of what he called the “massive explosion of content” during the pandemic years. Zak Hembry joined OnlyFans in 2019 and worked as a content moderator from his home in Bishop’s Stortford, north of London.
Content was screened by a “programmable bot” that flagged suspect material for human moderators to review, Hembry said. He scanned this material for illicit content, which was then blocked or removed. “I’ve seen all kinds of things I wish I hadn’t seen on there,” he said, including content featuring children, animals or feces, as well as a creator who was “overeating on purpose.”
In its early years, said Hembry, OnlyFans took a “zero-tolerance” approach to creators who broke its rules. But as content flooded in under Radvinsky’s ownership, top earners were treated more leniently, said Hembry and another former contractor in the U.S.
Those whose accounts might have been shut down in the past began to receive warnings instead, Hembry said.
For instance, he said he once suspended an account showing an incestuous sexual encounter between adult twins – violating OnlyFans’ terms of service. Later, he said, he was exasperated to see that someone above him had reactivated the account.
“Why should you give them another chance?” he said. Hembry concluded that “money was more important” at OnlyFans than rules. The former U.S. contractor agreed; creators who made millions of dollars for the platform could “upload whatever the hell they want,” she said.
By 2021, Hembry said he knew of more than a dozen people in the UK who worked as OnlyFans moderators.