OnlyFans, the UK adult video platform, is in talks to sell a minority stake to a US investor that will value the business at more than $3bn (£2.2bn), while the company’s creators keep splitting subscription proceeds 80:20 with the platform. The London-based company is in advanced talks to sell a stake of less than 20% to the San Francisco-based investment firm Architect Capital, according to the Financial Times, with sources familiar with the process confirming the talks to the Guardian.
Who Holds the Power
The deal talk is not happening in a vacuum. OnlyFans has decided that offloading a minority stake is the best guarantee of stability for a business dealing with the death of its owner, Leonid Radvinsky. Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American billionaire, died of cancer last month at the age of 43. The company’s future is being discussed in terms of ownership structure, investor confidence and control, while the people producing the content that keeps the platform profitable remain locked into the platform’s terms.
OnlyFans is a highly profitable business synonymous with pornography, which is provided by creators who charge subscribers for access to their material. The site has a strict 18+ age limit. According to the latest accounts filed by OnlyFans’ parent business, Felix International, it has 4.6m accounts registered to creators who split the proceeds from their subscriptions 80:20 with the platform. The site has 377m fan accounts, enabling users to buy videos from, and send messages to, their favourite performers. The scale is enormous, but the arrangement is simple: creators generate the value, the platform takes its cut, and investors circle the business like vultures around a cash machine.
The Money Flowing Upward
OnlyFans posted revenues of $1.4bn in the year to 30 November 2024, with a pre-tax profit of $684m — a rise of 4% over the prior year. Payments to creators were $7.2bn over the same period, an increase of almost 10%. Those figures show the platform’s machinery at work: huge sums move through the site, but the ownership and control remain concentrated at the top.
Radvinsky was paid $701m in dividends from OnlyFans in 2024, on top of the more than $1bn in such payments he had already received from the business. The article’s numbers make the hierarchy hard to miss. The creators split subscription proceeds with the platform, the platform posts massive revenue, and the owner extracts hundreds of millions in dividends. The business is profitable enough to attract new investors, but the wealth generated by the labor of creators keeps flowing upward through the ownership structure.
OnlyFans is interested in a deal with Architect because the firm has expertise in the financial services sector, reflecting the UK company’s interest in offering banking products to its creators, who have struggled to access such services owing to the nature of their work. That detail points to another layer of institutional control: creators are not just dependent on the platform for distribution, but also face barriers in the financial system itself. The company is now looking to a financial firm to help it expand into banking products, because the existing system has already made access difficult for the people doing the work.
Control, Stability, and the Next Owner
In January OnlyFans was reported to have been in talks with Architect about selling a majority stake of 60%, which followed reports the previous year that the company had been in talks about a sale to a consortium led by the Forest Road Company, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. The current talks are different in structure, but the same logic remains: ownership is up for negotiation among investors while the platform’s creators continue producing the revenue.
If OnlyFans pushes ahead with a minority sale, it will mean control of the business will be with the family trust that holds Radvinsky’s shares. That means the formal power structure would stay in place even if a new investor comes in. The article does not describe any worker control, creator control, or horizontal governance — only a reshuffling of capital around a platform built on creator labor.
OnlyFans declined to comment. Architect Capital has been contacted for comment. The silence from the company and the investor fits the usual script: the people at the top move in private, while the people whose work sustains the platform are left to watch the valuation climb past $3bn and the ownership game continue above their heads.