Episode 7: Porn Meets OnlyFans

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Speaker 1 Before we start, a warning. Our investigation looks into power and the porn industry.

Speaker 14 This episode contains adult themes.

Speaker 1 In previous episodes, we've told you about men at the top of porn. Their ambition, their power battles, their relentless efforts to remain unknown to the world.

Speaker 1 We looked at how they cornered the most lucrative parts of the adult business, either by owning tech platforms or production studios or both.

Speaker 1 Porn profits flowed to owners and middlemen, but not so much to performers.

Speaker 14 Now we're going to tell you about the company that reset the balance.

Speaker 17 The company that, whether it intended to or not, managed to shift money and power back to performers in a huge way.

Speaker 23 You may have heard its name.

Speaker 17 It became so popular during the pandemic, even my mother had heard its name.

Speaker 20 We're talking about OnlyFans.

Speaker 2 OnlyFans is a social media platform, just like those you use already, but which allows you to set a monthly subscription price, ensuring that any media you upload is fully hidden until your fans pay your subscription.

Speaker 25 We are not the average demographic. We are on the more mature side of your typical webcam broadcaster.

Speaker 1 This is Peppermint. It's the stage name she uses for the adult enterprise she runs with her husband Dusty.
Also a stage name.

Speaker 25 Our shows can run anywhere between four to eight hours.

Speaker 1 Eight hours?

Speaker 25 Not all of that is sexual engagement. We have amazing conversations with our viewers.
We like to dive deep into the meaning of life and relationships and sexuality.

Speaker 19 We met at a porn event in LA where Dusty and Peppermint were promoting their business and meeting fans.

Speaker 22 They're mainly known for their live video work on camsites, those eight-hour shows that can include sex, fire spinning, acrobatic yoga and cooking.

Speaker 25 Trying to promote real sex between real people rather than a fantasy scenario created by a studio.

Speaker 1 Over time, they branched out, selling clips on video platforms and reaching their most loyal supporters through an OnlyFans account.

Speaker 25 So with the explosion of people turning to OnlyFans, turning to content creation, turning to online work, I think there is a lot more acceptance of it in the mainstream audience.

Speaker 17 OnlyFans is a platform that launched in 2016.

Speaker 19 It's basically a special kind of social media site.

Speaker 23 It lets you message followers or upload videos or posts just like Instagram or Facebook.

Speaker 10 The twist with OnlyFans is that your content lives behind a paywall.

Speaker 28 Visitors pay you to view it.

Speaker 22 They can even pay you to produce media just for them.

Speaker 20 This seemingly small difference, the paywall, changed how a whole generation of online stars earn their living.

Speaker 18 influencers, musicians, fitness instructors, but especially porn stars.

Speaker 22 OnlyFans made the industry's most famous performers seriously rich.

Speaker 20 Some have earned millions, and it allowed them to make videos at home on their own terms.

Speaker 1 Most OnlyFans creators aren't big stars, but more like Peppermint and Dusty.

Speaker 1 The platform has allowed them to generate a modest, steady income. It made it easier than ever to make money from porn.

Speaker 1 Until the moment OnlyFans announced that porn wouldn't be welcome anymore. Can you tell us about the day that OnlyFans banned porn?

Speaker 25 We had actually been on a trip up to the mountains and we had gone just to a different location so we could shoot some new content specifically for OnlyFans.

Speaker 25 I open up the app on my phone and I see Twitter and I see all these posts about OnlyFans banning porn.

Speaker 25 So I remember driving down the mountains, seeing our follower count just drop literally in half, which means we also lost half of our income.

Speaker 25 I think that these rules and these changes almost affect the smaller creators more so.

Speaker 20 The platform that totally transformed the porn industry decided to ban porn to become a safe for work service.

Speaker 23 Then Just one week later, OnlyFans changed its mind.

Speaker 20 Porn was okay again.

Speaker 34 They cancelled the cancellation.

Speaker 24 It was so farcical, OnlyFans made headlines around the world.

Speaker 1 And what about then when they reversed the ban? How did you feel then?

Speaker 38 You always kind of sit there and wonder when it's going to happen again.

Speaker 11 And, you know, what's going to be the next trigger?

Speaker 39 Why are they going to do it this time?

Speaker 8 What happened?

Speaker 1 We decided to seek out OnlyFans and where it came from.

Speaker 1 A close-knit family from Essex, the New Jersey of England.

Speaker 1 They're the most miscast porn barons you can imagine.

Speaker 1 And yet, they somehow confirmed. Power in porn is all about the payments.

Speaker 20 I'm Alex Barker.

Speaker 1 I'm Patricia Nelson.

Speaker 24 From Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, this is hot money.

Speaker 1 Act one

Speaker 1 financial domination

Speaker 10 We set out to follow OnlyFans to its source, and it brought us to a big gated house on the south coast of England, the home of Danny Harwood.

Speaker 22 Danny was the very first creator to join OnlyFans when it launched.

Speaker 40 Hi everyone, my name's Danny. Welcome to my OnlyFans page.
Come and join me, have a little chat, come and see all my sexy selfies, and let's have some fun boys

Speaker 32 but before we get to that part of the story we have to tell you how she first met tim stokely the mind behind only fans

Speaker 10 it all started about 12 years ago danny was in her late 20s making her living as a glamour model and one day a man called Tim walked into her life with a mad cat plan to transform her into goddess goddess Danielle.

Speaker 1 So can you tell us when and where you first met Tim?

Speaker 40 He contacted me for a photo shoot, having seen me on TV

Speaker 40 and

Speaker 20 he

Speaker 40 turned up in a Savile Roy suit

Speaker 40 with a briefcase.

Speaker 40 and a copy of the Financial Times under his arm. It's just a bit...

Speaker 40 who is this guy?

Speaker 1 Tim was carrying a Financial Times because his father was a banker. His brother was a banker and Tim may have become a banker too if he didn't have other interests he wanted to pursue.

Speaker 1 He was starting a new business, a fetish site called Glam Worship.

Speaker 40 He sort of looked like he was just about to go for a board meeting, not a photo shoot. He was young, a fairly good looking guy, and just very smart and very well-spoken.

Speaker 40 And he was like, right, okay, Danny,

Speaker 40 if you

Speaker 40 just like, just sit over there and

Speaker 40 he's like,

Speaker 40 just look at the camera. He was so underprepared.
He was so nervous.

Speaker 10 This was Tim's first shoot for glam worship. Danny was the first model.

Speaker 18 He used his briefcase as a camera stand.

Speaker 26 And here's the extraordinary part.

Speaker 28 The origins of OniFans can be traced straight back to the kink the website served.

Speaker 34 This fetish for financial domination.

Speaker 6 Out of the photo shoot would emerge Goddess Danielle.

Speaker 18 Her page told visitors it was the luckiest day of their pathetic existence.

Speaker 40 Girls would talk about financially dominating men.

Speaker 40 That's what the fetish was.

Speaker 1 So the woman is in charge and therefore they should give their money to the woman and because they're not worthy of that money financial domination the art of defendom is not something we have made up for a financial times podcast about money and porn we promise hello slaves

Speaker 40 Well, you've probably been watching me for quite a while now, haven't you?

Speaker 40 Seeing me grow from strength to strength.

Speaker 40 By now I have lots of loyal little followers, lots of loyal submissives.

Speaker 1 Some people will literally pay for the thrill of becoming a financial slave.

Speaker 1 Tim would script scenarios for Danny to perform to her fans or pay pets.

Speaker 28 Danny's financial slaves never actually handed over all their money.

Speaker 32 Even if they wanted to, they probably couldn't.

Speaker 26 The tech was still clunky, almost hacked together.

Speaker 14 Danny's pay pets could buy her stuff from an Amazon wish list or send checks to a numbered postbox.

Speaker 22 But the pay pets could never get Goddess Danielle's personal attention.

Speaker 24 They couldn't ask for her custom videos or directly fill her bank account with money.

Speaker 1 The flaws were obvious. Tim launched other ventures, hoping to solve them.
Many other ventures. And after some painful trial and error, in 2016, something new came together.

Speaker 1 A site that actually worked.

Speaker 1 OnlyFans.

Speaker 1 A platform that combined interaction, tailor-made content, and a direct connection between the fan and the performer. Including...

Speaker 8 Yes,

Speaker 1 payment. With OnlyFans taking a 20% cut.

Speaker 1 Danny was one of the first to hear Tim's idea.

Speaker 40 He was like, so people can tip you on that.

Speaker 45 I was like, what?

Speaker 40 They can tip you. He was like, yeah.
I was like, okay, that's a game changer.

Speaker 36 This was the start of a new era.

Speaker 10 If video streaming made porn free, OnlyFans was one of the sites that began to turn the tide.

Speaker 24 People were paying for porn again, actually getting their credit cards out, and not just to pay pornographers, a studio or a website owner, they were paying the performers direct.

Speaker 1 It was a slow start, but as new features were introduced, partly on Danny's advice, the money started rolling in. Through OnlyFans, Danny found a way to tap her Instagram and Twitter following.

Speaker 40 I went from earning one month between $3,000 and $6,000, my next earnings was twenty two thousand tim asked danny to spread the word so she spoke with friends at the glamour tv channel where she performed girls there's this website you have to join it you know look at my bank statement look at the statement this is what i'm being paid this is what you could earn they're like wow so quickly signed them up danny told us that performers started leaving because they were earning so much money from their only fans accounts and keeping most of it Going into the changing room one day, and my boss had put these posters up on the changing room wall saying that you're not allowed to film any content for OnlyFans, otherwise, you're going to get the sack.

Speaker 40 They hated it.

Speaker 1 Danny says she eventually became the first to have a million-dollar page. To her, and for many established performers, the control OnlyFans provided was a sort of liberation.

Speaker 1 It gave them freedom

Speaker 34 And the power that comes with money.

Speaker 32 They were being paid well enough to have leverage in the industry, something that, in an age of free porn, was sorely lacking.

Speaker 1 Today, Danny is still on the platform. Not as goddess Danielle, but under another name.
She crowned herself the queen of OnlyFans.

Speaker 1 After all these years,

Speaker 1 she is still friends with the Stokely family. And that's who we spoke with next.

Speaker 1 That's after the break.

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Speaker 8 Act 2.

Speaker 1 The Stokelys

Speaker 6 We hopped in a car with our producer Pete Sale and headed to Bishop Stortford, a rural commuter town to the northeast of London.

Speaker 32 It's near the home of the Stokelys, but not a typical spot for a company headquarters.

Speaker 5 Patricia, where are we going and why?

Speaker 1 I don't even know how to pronounce it. Bishop Stortford.

Speaker 33 Great start.

Speaker 5 Podcast gone already.

Speaker 5 Go on, Patricia.

Speaker 1 We're in the car. We're on our way to meet up with Tim and Guy Stokely.

Speaker 1 We are walking past the OnlyFans headquarters, which are in a converted barn called Fish Barn. It looks like the south of Sweden.
But where just next to us are a couple of grain silos.

Speaker 1 It feels pretty rural.

Speaker 6 There's a thatched roof over there.

Speaker 23 Which is not what you expect.

Speaker 1 This does not make me think adult content.

Speaker 32 We were greeted by the founder, Tim Stokely, and taken to a conference room overlooking a pond.

Speaker 45 My first podcast.

Speaker 45 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Tim doesn't often do recorded interviews. He has a bit of a Playboy image in the press.
His Instagram is full of glam shots of Ibiza and sharp-cut suits. But when we met him,

Speaker 1 that's not how he came across at all.

Speaker 1 He was almost shy.

Speaker 1 Hardly the guy that was once called the king of homemade porn.

Speaker 22 He first ended up in the adult industry in part because the financial crash hit the job market in the city of London.

Speaker 22 Since he couldn't follow his father and brother into banking, he tried something else, starting internet businesses from scratch.

Speaker 22 Lots of his ideas failed miserably, but the ones in the adult business pointed him in the right direction.

Speaker 39 A lot of the models we were working with were getting inundated with private requests asking to produce these tailored custom videos.

Speaker 1 The seed of OnlyFans was planted. When OnlyFans launched, it was intended to be for everyone.
There was no homepage with porn stars, no search function to find them. There still isn't.

Speaker 1 It was really designed to be an add-on service for the social media profiles that people already had. It allowed them to monetize their online following.

Speaker 1 But the creators, musicians or influencers or fitness instructors, had to bring their own fan base with them.

Speaker 1 And the first ones to do it were the porn stars.

Speaker 39 I think the adult industry is typically ahead of the curve when it comes to new tech. And I think

Speaker 39 content behind a paywall model really, really suited.

Speaker 14 How did you raise the money for it?

Speaker 39 That was my father, Guy.

Speaker 10 Guy Stokely is a former merchant banker.

Speaker 34 If Tim is an unlikely pornographer, Guy is a complete fish out of water.

Speaker 24 Before OnlyFans, Guy was retired.

Speaker 26 He's mild-mannered and ever so polite.

Speaker 47 Tim phoned me and said, I've got this really good idea, Dad.

Speaker 39 And I kind of explained the premise of paid social media.

Speaker 47 And he told me about it, and I said, yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 1 Picture that thought bubble coming from Guy's head. Oh god, not again.

Speaker 39 There was a healthy amount of scepticism. Guy had invested in some of the previous platforms.
Some had gone really well, some really badly.

Speaker 39 After many attempts to convince him, I remember Guy saying, okay.

Speaker 42 Okay,

Speaker 47 but this is the last one.

Speaker 1 The early days for Tim were a hard slog. He sent hundreds of emails to performers and influencers trying to explain how much money they could make on OnlyFans.

Speaker 39 I remember receiving one email from one influencer saying, this is hands down the most stupid business idea I've ever heard in my life.

Speaker 17 OnlyFans launched in 2016.

Speaker 30 One thing that really put the wind in its sails was a clever referral program, giving creators a cut of other people's earnings if they brought them to the platform.

Speaker 28 Guy thought Tim's goal of half a million pounds revenue in 2017 was totally ridiculous.

Speaker 15 They ended up with £2.4 million.

Speaker 30 A lot of the creators were adult performers and sitting with the Stokelys, that's something you can easily forget.

Speaker 13 They don't seem like porn people.

Speaker 15 Mention nudity and Guy almost starts to blush.

Speaker 47 I didn't think of it as being adult. I wasn't interested in adult, but

Speaker 47 it was about supporting Tim.

Speaker 1 This was genuinely a family business. Tim was CEO and Guy the chief financial officer and supportive father.
Tim's sister and his two brothers were involved too.

Speaker 1 But then in 2018, at a point when OnlyFans was growing fast and showing it had real potential, the Stokelys did something surprising. They decided it was time to bring in an outside investor.

Speaker 1 They sold OnlyFans, but stayed stayed on as the executive team. Within a year of selling, their platform just exploded in popularity.

Speaker 48 OnlyFans is massively a part of the pop culture zeitgeist right now. Cardi B's on the platform.
You have Chris Brown. Now, why are you tipping the switch, man?

Speaker 48 I think I'm gonna start an OnlyFans. Please do it, Lonnie Love.
Michael B. Jordan's mustache.

Speaker 1 Beyonce even name-dropped OnlyFans in a song.

Speaker 1 Hipstick type one-eyed dance. On a demon time,

Speaker 23 During the pandemic it reached 2 million creators and 180 million users.

Speaker 10 A significant proportion of them were buying or selling porn.

Speaker 22 OnlyFans gave the tired old porn industry a new lease of life, and everything on the site was behind a paywall, so much harder for children to access.

Speaker 24 But with the success came a lot of bad press for Tim.

Speaker 34 There were of course stereotypes about the bling Essex man making millions from porn, but also unease over OnlyFans normalizing pornography, making it seem just like any other career.

Speaker 1 A lot of men and women saw the huge payouts to top porn stars and thought, I can give this a try.

Speaker 1 But most couldn't build a big enough following, and some probably realized porn wasn't something you can just dabble in and regretted trying.

Speaker 1 Anyway, it's fair to say OnlyFans really caught a cultural moment and courted plenty of controversy. We, of course, focused on the business side and the money.

Speaker 1 What you need to understand is what makes OnlyFans different. It succeeded not just because it could take money, but because it could pay it out.

Speaker 24 It built a financial bridge from fans' credit cards straight to the bank accounts of creators.

Speaker 17 The bigger OnlyFans became, the more its reputation was associated with a porn revival.

Speaker 24 And the more nervous banks got moving its money around the world.

Speaker 17 So nervous, one bank even stopped providing a personal bank account to Tim's brother, a former banker.

Speaker 10 just because he was involved in running OnlyFans.

Speaker 39 It's a very strange way to act, but it was,

Speaker 39 you know, that's what happened.

Speaker 1 Then in the summer of 2021, the dam burst.

Speaker 28 OnlyFans, the platform that changed the adult industry, announced it was going to ban porn.

Speaker 18 Performers were totally stunned.

Speaker 43 OnlyFans will prohibit the posting of any content containing sexually explicit conduct.

Speaker 12 That leaves a lot of people worried about what's going to happen to the at least tens of thousands of creators creators on the platform who, particularly during the pandemic, have made a lot of money from the safety of their home.

Speaker 14 So let's think back to the decision to ban explicit content.

Speaker 45 And

Speaker 17 what were you trying to achieve when you first made that announcement?

Speaker 39 Well, it certainly wasn't a strategic move.

Speaker 7 Really?

Speaker 39 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 39 We have to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to creators globally each month. You know, when you have to move that amount of money, you depend upon large investment banks.

Speaker 39 And we were seeing an increasing amount of wires being flagged, with some investment banks citing things like reputational risk.

Speaker 1 The precise trigger of their decision remains unclear. Here, Tim is describing the choice as a practical matter.

Speaker 1 His company's transfers were being flagged, marked down for extra checks by banks moving their money around the world. A lot of banks don't want to be associated with porn.

Speaker 1 The abrupt announcement completely threw the industry. The uproar from performers was deafening.
Big stars or less well-known performers like Peppermint and Dusty.

Speaker 1 They relied on OnlyFans for their livelihoods. And they were furious.

Speaker 34 And after a week of mayhem, OnlyFans reversed its decision.

Speaker 26 Porn went from banned to okay again, all inside seven days.

Speaker 51 People who earn money on the website OnlyFans may have a bad case of whiplash tonight.

Speaker 49 What a walk back. I guess the question is, has the damage already been done? Some users really saw this as a move of OnlyFans selling out.

Speaker 48 OnlyFans said its original decision to ban porn was due to pressure from banking and payment services, but now it has secured assurances necessary to keep things as is.

Speaker 20 To everyone watching, the handling looked totally botched.

Speaker 32 It was mocked on social media and compared to dominoes trying to ban pizza.

Speaker 10 The lack of any convincing explanation at the time also fed all sorts of conspiracy theories.

Speaker 1 Tim actually insists the reversal was enabled by an interview he did with me over the phone last year.

Speaker 1 It was for a piece in the Financial Times that ran straight after after the ban, where he named some of the banks causing OnlyFans problems. After that article was published, he said the mood changed.

Speaker 1 The banks gave him the assurances he needed.

Speaker 50 Do you have regrets on how you handled it looking back?

Speaker 39 Not on how it was handled. I don't think we had much of a choice.
But I deeply regret the amount of concern and anxiety it caused.

Speaker 50 I mean, for a lot of people, it was like being cut down at the knees.

Speaker 50 And why should they trust OnlyFans not to do this again?

Speaker 39 Well,

Speaker 39 I think

Speaker 39 what this put a spotlight on was the discriminatory policies within the banking system. And that's where the focus is, I think.

Speaker 10 Tim here is talking about banks making life difficult for companies just because they're associated with adult content. The problem isn't necessarily allowing porn on a platform.

Speaker 17 Twitter, for instance, permits adult content on parts of its platform and hosts lots of porn without much trouble.

Speaker 22 The issues start when a company has so much porn or makes so much money from porn, it starts to look like a porn company.

Speaker 24 After that, basic finance dries up.

Speaker 31 Banking becomes harder and a lot more expensive.

Speaker 34 There are lots of people in the porn industry who find it hard to believe that OniFans got cold feet for a mundane reason like financing.

Speaker 24 They are still convinced the whole porn ban fiasco was actually a publicity stunt, some cunning plan.

Speaker 39 That's entirely false. I think we've perhaps been victim to some

Speaker 39 unfair reporting, which

Speaker 39 has led to some criticism that is based on moral outrage rather than evidence or facts or statistics.

Speaker 1 Couldn't you have had that conversation with your financial partners before? You know, if they were all happy, couldn't you have gone to your financial partners and said we might have to do it?

Speaker 47 Could we have handled it in a different way? Yes, of course we could.

Speaker 45 But

Speaker 47 we're happy with where we ended up.

Speaker 1 At the end of our interviews, the Stokelys took us to their office. In there was another brother wearing a woolly jumper that looked like an early Christmas present.

Speaker 1 There were ducks wandering around the patio, crooked trinkets on the desks. It seemed just a setting for a charming family business.
But for OnlyFans?

Speaker 14 Something didn't quite seem right, and it wasn't.

Speaker 6 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 9 They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test.

Speaker 9 And they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

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Speaker 9 With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

Speaker 9 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 9 And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, Supercharged.

Speaker 9 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.
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Speaker 1 Act 3.

Speaker 1 Reading the fine print.

Speaker 36 Within three weeks of us visiting, the Stokelys had left OnlyFans.

Speaker 28 Tim stepped down as chief executive, and Guy and the rest of the family followed.

Speaker 1 Just like that, the Stokelys had gone.

Speaker 1 We'll admit it, we were confused.

Speaker 20 We called them to ask what happened.

Speaker 1 We didn't get much of an answer.

Speaker 1 Now, the story of the Stokelys and OnlyFans that you heard earlier, that was all true. The family business, the way OnlyFans democratized porn.

Speaker 1 But we later learned that was only one side of the story, like looking at a movie set from a single camera. It didn't explain why the Stokelys left OnlyFans,

Speaker 1 or that crazy hokey cokey over banning porn, or why they sold their company when it was doing so well in 2018.

Speaker 1 To figure out what was going on, we need to rewind and look out of shot.

Speaker 10 And that starts with the current owner, the guy who bought OniFans from the Stokelys in 2018.

Speaker 19 Now, plenty of investors have attempted to buy OniFans over the years, mainstream investors.

Speaker 37 But when the Stokelys sold, it was to a man called Leo Rudvinsky, a 40-year-old Ukrainian American who made his fortune in the porn industry.

Speaker 19 We'd love to have spoken to him, but he declined.

Speaker 17 He's not one for publicity.

Speaker 36 Here's what Tim told us about Leo when we visited.

Speaker 39 You know, he's been absolutely a joy to work with and such a smart guy, and

Speaker 39 there's a huge reason we are where we are.

Speaker 1 Remember, in 2018, OnlyFans was a fast-growing business, but it hadn't really caught fire. The good times were ahead.

Speaker 1 So why did the Stopleys give it all up to Leo Radvensky? Tim was cagey with his reasons for selling OnlyFans, but he did give us a few clues.

Speaker 39 I mean what I can tell you is it's one of the best decisions we made. He's very kind of hands-on and adds so much value to the technical part of the business.

Speaker 39 And then he also works, you know, to an extent on the payment side.

Speaker 1 We didn't think much of it at the time. Leo knows tech.
He made his career running a live video porn site called My Free Camps.

Speaker 1 But when we listened back, we realized the intriguing part was the second half of that sentence. Tim said Leo also worked on the payment side.

Speaker 22 Which raises one blindingly obvious question.

Speaker 17 Why was Leo, the seasoned pornographer, helping a family of bankers with payments?

Speaker 19 So, you know, I've been looking for an explanation of why the Stokelys sold OnlyFans.

Speaker 10 I think I found something,

Speaker 33 but I have a little confession to make.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what's that?

Speaker 28 One of my new habits is reading the terms and conditions on porn sites, the legal fine print.

Speaker 1 Well, you've sent me one. Should I read it out loud?

Speaker 12 Go ahead.

Speaker 1 So it says, you may not create, upload, post, display, or distribute user content that is sexually explicit.

Speaker 28 It doesn't sound like a porn site, right?

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 10 Those are the original terms and conditions for OnlyFans from 2016.

Speaker 1 So no porn. OnlyFans didn't allow explicit content from the start.
Nothing.

Speaker 6 Exactly.

Speaker 24 And it more or less stayed that way for a year and a half after OnlyFans launched, even though there was lots of porn on the site.

Speaker 10 I mean, this really transformed how I understood the whole OnlyFans venture.

Speaker 28 It may well have been crucial to the entire business model.

Speaker 32 It was claiming to be porn-free.

Speaker 20 And if you don't have porn, you don't have payment trouble.

Speaker 22 The Stokelys could benefit from easier, cheaper payment processing they'd get like any mainstream platform.

Speaker 1 Well, that's a big advantage in the porn business. I mean, OnlyFans stood out when it launched because it only took a 20% cut of a performer's earnings, when most camsites take an average of 50%

Speaker 8 or more.

Speaker 1 So one of the reasons they could offer that was cheaper payment processing. And so the Stokelys just sidestepped higher costs by denying there was any porn on the site?

Speaker 29 Exactly.

Speaker 1 It's amazing. So

Speaker 1 when did they admit that there was porn on the site?

Speaker 22 In the spring of 2018, and that's when the Stokelys introduced a new adult payment processor.

Speaker 10 A different financial service came in to handle all the explicit accounts, presumably a much more expensive payment processor.

Speaker 10 And people in the industry told me that OnlyFans around this time began to struggle with payments in particular.

Speaker 29 And within six months, hey Presto, the Stokely's had sold OnlyFans.

Speaker 31 And remember, Leo is known in the porn business as a master of payments. You had to be to run a porn cam site.
I mean, there's lots of micro payments.

Speaker 28 It's just in the nature of the business.

Speaker 26 And suddenly,

Speaker 10 you think of all that.

Speaker 30 Everything that Tim said about selling to Leo just made a lot more sense.

Speaker 10 When the payments side got more difficult, they had to turn to an expert.

Speaker 39 What I can tell you is it's one of the best decisions we made. It's not much value in speculating where we'd be if we hadn't done it.

Speaker 1 We'd love to ask Leo how he does it, how he keeps his banks and payment processors on site.

Speaker 1 But like most of porn's biggest money makers, he's not the type to give interviews. Neither would his new management team, who are usually very media friendly.

Speaker 1 The reason is partly Leo's vision for the company. He came from the porn world, but he always saw the mainstream potential of OnlyFans.
For him,

Speaker 1 that's OnlyFans' future. Fitness instructors and musicians.

Speaker 32 And that explains a lot.

Speaker 22 When we talked to the Stokelys about the decision to ban porn last August, it never seemed like they really believed in it.

Speaker 32 In reality, it was Leo's call.

Speaker 28 To him, the mainstream promise of OnlyFans was not worth risking for porn, however much money it made.

Speaker 14 He has visions of bringing in mainstream investors or even floating OnlyFans on the stock market.

Speaker 10 OnlyFans has promised not to ditch porn performers again, people like Peppermint and her husband Dusty, who we heard from earlier in this episode.

Speaker 25 I mean, they say one thing, and then a week later they say another thing, and it makes one very, very hard to trust what's happening with the site itself. When is this going to happen again?

Speaker 25 So it makes it, you know, very precarious.

Speaker 1 Peppermint and Dusty stuck with OnlyFans

Speaker 1 because it's an important stream of income and it didn't seem right to be cutting off loyal subscribers.

Speaker 25 It felt in some ways like going back to an abusive partner. You know, you don't want to really stay there, but you're kind of stuck.
You don't have a lot of choice.

Speaker 25 I'm hoping that it means only good things. You know, maybe Tim Stokely was tired of having to deal with the credit card companies and all the legislation and the rules.

Speaker 25 So handing the reins over to somebody else could possibly be a good thing. That's my hope, indeed.

Speaker 6 There is a weird parallel between all the people we've spoken to and told you about in this episode.

Speaker 22 Peppermint and Dusty, the Stokely family, and Leo Radvinsky, the pornographer trying to go mainstream.

Speaker 19 You could even make a link to Danny, the goddess of financial domination who had no way to be tipped by her pay pets.

Speaker 18 What all their stories taught us was this.

Speaker 22 If you're not the master of your business's payment system, very simply it means somebody else is in charge.

Speaker 1 OnlyFans empowered performers by giving them a way to receive direct payments from fans.

Speaker 1 But because OnlyFans doesn't control its own payment system, it is caught in a bind.

Speaker 1 It is reliant on porn-shy payment companies on one side to take in money and on porn-shy banks on the other to pay it out. That's where the real power lies.

Speaker 1 A finance world that seems to have a muddled and bizarre relationship with the porn industry and the money it brings.

Speaker 6 What does this all mean for porn today?

Speaker 24 That's our next episode.

Speaker 30 The season finale.

Speaker 53 Instead of the government defining what is and is not considered sexually acceptable, it's a corporation.

Speaker 1 Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Patricia Nilsson, and me, Alex Barker.

Speaker 18 Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer.

Speaker 6 Edith Roussellow is our associate producer.

Speaker 16 Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Speaker 34 Amanda K.

Speaker 14 Wong is our engineer.

Speaker 36 Music composition by Pascal Wise.

Speaker 16 Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez-Cusado.

Speaker 30 Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein.

Speaker 1 Special thanks to Renee Kaplan and Rula Khalov at the Financial Times, and Mia Lobel, Lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton, and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries.

Speaker 1 Thank you to SimilarWeb for providing our web traffic data.

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Speaker 2 This is an iHeart podcast.