OnlyFans owner dividends topped $700m before his death

Fenix International, the London company behind OnlyFans, paid its owner more than $700 million in dividends in and after its most recent financial year, according to its annual accounts.

Leonid Radvinsky, who owned the business, received $535 million in dividends in the 2025 financial year and a further $174 million after the year end. He was paid $497 million the year before. The payments were first reported by the Financial Times.

The company made a pre-tax profit of $715 million last year, a 5 per cent increase on 2024. Revenue for the year to 30 November 2025 rose 10 per cent to close to $1.6 billion.

Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American entrepreneur who acquired OnlyFans from its British founder in 2018, died of cancer in March at the age of 43. His wife, Yekaterina Chudnovsky, took control of the company after his death.

The dividends were paid against the backdrop of a sale process that has yet to deliver a full exit. In January, Radvinsky tried to sell 60 per cent of the business for $8 billion but did not find a buyer. He was in talks with Architect Capital, an American firm, over a deal valuing the company at $3.5 billion when he died. In May, Architect agreed instead to buy a 16 per cent stake in a deal valuing the business at $3.15 billion. The revised terms and lower valuation reflected the fact that Architect would no longer take control.

The site says it is used by more than 2.5 million content creators to “connect with fans”, of whom 132 million have active accounts, and to make money from the material they upload. It is best known for its use by pornographers but is also used by musicians and comedians. The company takes a cut of the revenue generated.

Its biggest market is the United States, followed by the UK and continental Europe. The filing shows the company employed only 47 people on average, though it also works with about 1,500 outside content moderators. On those figures the business generated roughly $34 million of revenue for every employee on the payroll, a ratio that owes almost everything to a model in which the cost of making the product sits with the creators rather than the company, and the cost of policing it sits largely with contractors.

That structure has drawn regulatory attention in the UK. Ofcom, the communications regulator, opened an investigation in May 2024 into whether OnlyFans was allowing children to see pornography on its platform. The regulator closed the case in March last year without a finding on the underlying question, but fined Fenix £1.05 million for failing to provide accurate information in response to statutory requests about age checks on the platform. Fenix had told Ofcom that the challenge age on its facial age estimation technology was set at 23 when it had in fact been set at 20 since November 2021. The penalty included a 30 per cent reduction for settling and for self reporting the error.

The point for any company that answers to a regulator is that the fine was for the answer, not for the conduct being asked about. Ofcom still considers OnlyFans an adult site, despite its efforts to broaden its appeal beyond pornography to content posted by celebrities and sports stars.

There are also concerns that mainstream social media platforms are being used to funnel users towards explicit content on OnlyFans. TikTok, which is itself under Ofcom investigation over its age checks, said last month that it had taken action against accounts highlighted by The Times for violating guidelines banning certain types of body exposure or sexualised behaviour.

OnlyFans was founded by Tim Stokely in 2016 with a £10,000 loan from his father. His brother, Thomas Stokely, became chief operating officer and their father worked as head of finance. The site initially sought to attract musicians and social media influencers, then lifted its ban on pornography in 2017. Stokely stood down as chief executive in 2021.

Jamie Young

Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the ‘covid era’ and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine’s coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk