OnlyFans - pay a subscription fee to get access to the exclusive content of your idols (celebrities, stars). The founder, Tim Stokely, observed a trend in a demand for adult content on platforms such as Reddit, Instagram, and Snapchat. Adult industry performers were selling X-rated stuff illegally there.
Tim got a loan from his father to found OnlyFans.com. He also helped Tim with his earlier startup, Customs4U. It was a website with custom videos on demand. First OnlyFans creators came to the platform from Customs4U. Stokely reached out to (through social media) porn influencers and encouraged them to move to OnlyFans.
The seed money was small next to what the platform is worth now: a 10,000 pound loan from Stokely's father Guy, a retired investment banker who told him, "Tim, this is going to be the last one." The company stayed a family operation through its first years, with Stokely's brother Tom running daily operations and their father managing the books. The detail that mattered most for growth was something Stokely built in specifically because his earlier site hadn't had it: a referral system that paid outside people for bringing new creators onto the platform, not just the direct outreach Stokely was already doing himself.
The platform's identity wasn't fixed from day one. Despite pulling its earliest creators from an adult site, OnlyFans banned pornography when it first launched in November 2016 and tried to build a base of musicians and general influencers instead. That didn't hold, and by 2017 the company lifted the ban. What adult content then did for growth showed clearly in spring 2020: between March and April, OnlyFans' user and creator numbers together grew 75%. Growth jumped again after Beyonce name-checked OnlyFans in the April 2020 remix of Megan Thee Stallion's "Savage", which Stokely said lifted traffic by 15% on its own, with roughly 200,000 new users signing up every day during that stretch.
- Stokely sold 75% of OnlyFans' parent company to Leonid Radvinsky in 2018, two years after founding it.
- By May 2023 the platform had 3 million registered creators and 220 million registered consumers.
- By October 2025 the company said it had paid creators $25 billion in total since launching in 2016.