New reports are revealing that the owner of a major do-it-yourself pornography subscription website made over $1 million a day last year. According to financial statements, OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky netted over $338 million in 2022, a little over $1 million per working day, in addition to his regular annual salary, which was not disclosed.
The financial statements were filed by OnlyFans’ U.K.-based parent company, Fenix International Ltd. According to the documents, OnlyFans saw major growth last year, with $1.09 billion in revenue (up from $932 million in 2021), over $5.6 billion in gross payments online, and a 47% increase in “content creators.”
Originally founded in 2016 and purchased by Radvinsky in 2018, OnlyFans allows “content creators” to share homemade pornography, to which website users may then subscribe. Lina Nealon, vice president and director of Corporate Advocacy at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told The Washington Stand, “OnlyFans has preyed upon vulnerable people by presenting itself as an empowering, glamorous, and fast way to make money, but the reality is that OnlyFans facilitates prostitution and profits from revenue earned from women, men, and even children.”
Although he presents himself as a businessman and philanthropist, Radvinsky has a long history of involvement in the online porn industry, including brushes with child pornography. In the late 1990s, Radvinsky founded a website called Cybertania, which operated a series of websites selling access to “illegal” pornography sites, including child pornography sites. According to Forbes, some of those sites catered almost exclusively to pedophiles, advertising “illegal pre-teen” pornography, “the hottest underaged hardcore,” and even “the hottest bestiality site on the web.” Forbes noted that its investigation did not find evidence that Radvinsky’s ventures actually linked to illegal content, simply that he advertised it in order to direct users to “legal” pornography sites. In 2004, Radvinsky also founded MyFreeCams, a website allowing pornographic webcam shows.
While Radvinsky’s Cybertania venture may not have actually provided access to child pornography, OnlyFans does. Earlier this year, a man in Florida was arrested for reportedly using an OnlyFans account to request and receive child pornography for three years. Last year, U.S. investigators found multiple instances of child pornography produced and distributed on OnlyFans, including some featuring children as young as five years old.
A previous BBC report found that OnlyFans’ lax age verification process for “content creators” allowed for minors across the globe to create accounts and produce and sell pornographic content. The report also found that several children reported as missing were identified in OnlyFans content. OnlyFans also permits moderators to give “content creators” multiple warnings for distributing illegal content (such as child pornography) without removing or restricting the accounts.
“OnlyFans has been used for exploitation and criminal activity, with evidence of child sex abuse material, sex trafficking, child online exploitation, harassment, doxing, [and] cyberstalking,” Nealon commented. “OnlyFans claims to have robust age and consent verification, but evidence suggests that these are insufficient given reports that young children have been exploited on the site.”
She went on to describe the deceptive nature of OnlyFans’ business model.
“OnlyFans has been disturbingly successful in normalizing and glamorizing the commercial sex industry,” Nealon told TWS. “As a result, adults and children have turned to OnlyFans to make money or achieve popularity and social influence. But this means children have self-generated child sexual abuse material through their OnlyFans accounts. And OnlyFans fuels this trend by blurring the lines between mainstream social media and commercial sex, their deceptive marketing, and their ‘pyramid scheme’-style platform. Sadly, much of the exploitation that happens on OnlyFans may not even be recognized as exploitation, but rather normalized as a ‘simple business venture.’”
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation placed OnlyFans on its 2023 Dirty Dozen list and issued a petition demanding the U.S. attorney general investigate the company for permitting and profiting from child sexual exploitation material.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
