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The billionaire owner of OnlyFans has quietly put the booming smut site up for sale — but the London-based company is struggling to find a buyer because of its X-rated business model, The Post has learned.
Leonid Radvinsky, a 40-something computer programmer who bought OnlyFans in 2019, is reportedly looking to unload the money-minting platform, three sources close to the situation said — despite profits that have pushed his net worth to $3.8 billion, according to Forbes.
A US citizen who, as a child, immigrated to Chicago from Odessa, Ukraine, Radvinsky studied economics at Northwestern University and now lives in a Miami penthouse with his wife, according to a source. He reaped an eye-popping $472 million in dividends from OnlyFans during the fiscal year ended November 2023, according to public records.
That’s nearly all of the $485 million in profits generated that year by the company, which is said to have about 40 employees. From 2021 to 2023, his total payouts ballooned to more than $1 billion from OnlyFans’ holding company, Fenix International Ltd., according to the last-available UK financial filings, first cited by Bloomberg. Radvinsky is the sole owner of Fenix.
An OnlyFans spokeswoman confirmed that the company is up for sale.
“OnlyFans is a revolutionary platform which continues to lead the creator economy. As with any business of this scale it is natural that we are open to discussions about how we continue to build on our success,” she told The Post on Wednesday.
Despite their tantalizing profits, the filth factor in porn businesses generally limits their price tags to a relatively modest three to five times Ebitda — a closely watched investing metric, a source familiar with the space said.
That would peg OnlyFans at between $1.46 billion and $2.42 billion — a stiff premium in the porn sector that makes it tricky to find a deep-pocketed buyer, insiders said.
“You’re looking to find billionaires and trying to sell it as not an adult content company but just a platform like X that allows adult content,” the source said. “But I think most people right now view OnlyFans as an adult content company.”
OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair said 59% of revenue comes from creators selling add-on services like pay per view messages and live streams, while 41% come from subscriptions, according to a video published by the Wall Street Journal last December.
The company takes a 20% cut from its 4 million creators, who make content for 300 million subscribers. The site is not on App stores so no revenue is shared with Apple or Google. Two-thirds of its revenue is generated from US customers, $863 million of $1.3 billion, according to the UK filing.
Other adult content sites sold in recent years have failed to arouse major investor interest. Pornhub — the 19th most visited website in the world, according to SimilarWeb — was on the market for about three years before finally finding a buyer in 2023, the industry source said.
A private equity firm, Ethical Capital Partners, was formed by investors who wished to remain anonymous before completing the deal. Neither Ethical Capital nor Pornhub’s former owner MindGeek revealed the final price, but the industry source said he knew it fell well short of $1 billion.
Other private equity firms were not interested in Pornhub because most raise money from state pensions and other investors who are not allowed to own adult content companies, and media businesses did not want the porn taint, the source added.
Playboy went public in 2021 with listed blank check company Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp. Plby Group traded at $1.47 a share on Wednesday, a $138 million market cap. At its peak in the 1970s, the company founded by Hugh Hefner was worth $200 million, about $1.6 billion when adjusted for inflation.
Visa and Mastercard in 2021 and 2022 cut off payments to Pornhub due to allegations of illegal content like videos of child sex abuse. Pornhub then shut down Pornub Premium and turned more to ads for its free site.
Credit card companies charge more than a 10% rate for adult content sites to process transactions but so far has charged less to OnlyFans, the industry source said.
Blair had told the Journal that the company was working hard to crack down on minors either being creators or customers.
“Absolutely there is risk associated with [our business] but there’s often the same risk associated with general social media platforms as there is with OnlyFans,” she said.
Radvinsky bought OnlyFans from Tim Stokely and his family, which launched the site in 2016 as an outlet for musicians and influencers. A year later he lifted its ban on porn and the company took off.
OnlyFans exploded during the COVID pandemic. In 2021, Radvinsky briefly banned sexually explicit content after getting pressure from financial institutions who were reluctant to process credit card payments. He reversed course days later.
OnlyFans relies on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to protect itself legally from the content generated by its 4 million creators claiming it is not responsible for videos it does not produce.
“The key to success was plausible deniability,” the industry source said.
But now the question is growing that OnlyFans not knowing what creators are doing is willful ignorance that may not be protected by law, the industry source said.
“The pressure on the industry to monitor their sites is getting worse and worse,” the industry source said.
