Episode 7: Porn Meets OnlyFans

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Before we start, a warning.

Our investigation looks into power and the porn industry.

This episode contains adult themes.

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.

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

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

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

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

You may have heard its name.

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

We're talking about OnlyFans.

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.

We are not the average demographic.

We are on the more mature side of your typical webcam broadcaster.

This is Peppermint.

It's the stage name she uses for the adult enterprise she runs with her husband Dusty.

Also a stage name.

Our shows can run anywhere between four to eight hours.

Eight hours?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

OnlyFans is a platform that launched in 2016.

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

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

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

Visitors pay you to view it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The platform has allowed them to generate a modest, steady income.

It made it easier than ever to make money from porn.

Until the moment OnlyFans announced that porn wouldn't be welcome anymore.

Can you tell us about the day that OnlyFans banned porn?

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.

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

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.

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

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

Then Just one week later, OnlyFans changed its mind.

Porn was okay again.

They cancelled the cancellation.

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

And what about then when they reversed the ban?

How did you feel then?

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

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

Why are they going to do it this time?

What happened?

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

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

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

And yet, they somehow confirmed.

Power in porn is all about the payments.

I'm Alex Barker.

I'm Patricia Nelson.

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

Act one

financial domination

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

and

he

turned up in a Savile Roy suit

with a briefcase.

and a copy of the Financial Times under his arm.

It's just a bit...

who is this guy?

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.

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

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.

And he was like, right, okay, Danny,

if you

just like, just sit over there and

he's like,

just look at the camera.

He was so underprepared.

He was so nervous.

This was Tim's first shoot for glam worship.

Danny was the first model.

He used his briefcase as a camera stand.

And here's the extraordinary part.

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

This fetish for financial domination.

Out of the photo shoot would emerge Goddess Danielle.

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

Girls would talk about financially dominating men.

That's what the fetish was.

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

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

Seeing me grow from strength to strength.

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

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

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

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

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

The tech was still clunky, almost hacked together.

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

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

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

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.

A site that actually worked.

OnlyFans.

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

Including...

Yes,

payment.

With OnlyFans taking a 20% cut.

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

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

I was like, what?

They can tip you.

He was like, yeah.

I was like, okay, that's a game changer.

This was the start of a new era.

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

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.

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.

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.

They hated it.

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.

It gave them freedom

And the power that comes with money.

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

Today, Danny is still on the platform.

Not as goddess Danielle, but under another name.

She crowned herself the queen of OnlyFans.

After all these years,

she is still friends with the Stokely family.

And that's who we spoke with next.

That's after the break.

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There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

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Knowing San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

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Act 2.

The Stokelys

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

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

Patricia, where are we going and why?

I don't even know how to pronounce it.

Bishop Stortford.

Great start.

Podcast gone already.

Go on, Patricia.

We're in the car.

We're on our way to meet up with Tim and Guy Stokely.

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.

It feels pretty rural.

There's a thatched roof over there.

Which is not what you expect.

This does not make me think adult content.

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

My first podcast.

Yeah, yeah.

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,

that's not how he came across at all.

He was almost shy.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

And I think

content behind a paywall model really, really suited.

How did you raise the money for it?

That was my father, Guy.

Guy Stokely is a former merchant banker.

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

Before OnlyFans, Guy was retired.

He's mild-mannered and ever so polite.

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

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

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

Picture that thought bubble coming from Guy's head.

Oh god, not again.

There was a healthy amount of scepticism.

Guy had invested in some of the previous platforms.

Some had gone really well, some really badly.

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

Okay,

but this is the last one.

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.

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.

OnlyFans launched in 2016.

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.

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

They ended up with £2.4 million.

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

They don't seem like porn people.

Mention nudity and Guy almost starts to blush.

I didn't think of it as being adult.

I wasn't interested in adult, but

it was about supporting Tim.

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.

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.

They sold OnlyFans, but stayed stayed on as the executive team.

Within a year of selling, their platform just exploded in popularity.

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?

I think I'm gonna start an OnlyFans.

Please do it, Lonnie Love.

Michael B.

Jordan's mustache.

Beyonce even name-dropped OnlyFans in a song.

Hipstick type one-eyed dance.

On a demon time,

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

A significant proportion of them were buying or selling porn.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

just because he was involved in running OnlyFans.

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

you know, that's what happened.

Then in the summer of 2021, the dam burst.

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

Performers were totally stunned.

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

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.

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

And

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

Well, it certainly wasn't a strategic move.

Really?

Yeah, absolutely.

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.

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

The precise trigger of their decision remains unclear.

Here, Tim is describing the choice as a practical matter.

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.

The abrupt announcement completely threw the industry.

The uproar from performers was deafening.

Big stars or less well-known performers like Peppermint and Dusty.

They relied on OnlyFans for their livelihoods.

And they were furious.

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

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

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

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.

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.

To everyone watching, the handling looked totally botched.

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

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

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

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.

The banks gave him the assurances he needed.

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

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.

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

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

Well,

I think

what this put a spotlight on was the discriminatory policies within the banking system.

And that's where the focus is, I think.

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.

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

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.

After that, basic finance dries up.

Banking becomes harder and a lot more expensive.

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.

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

That's entirely false.

I think we've perhaps been victim to some

unfair reporting, which

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

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?

Could we have handled it in a different way?

Yes, of course we could.

But

we're happy with where we ended up.

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.

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?

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

We'll be right back.

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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.

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Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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Act 3.

Reading the fine print.

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

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

Just like that, the Stokelys had gone.

We'll admit it, we were confused.

We called them to ask what happened.

We didn't get much of an answer.

Now, the story of the Stokelys and OnlyFans that you heard earlier, that was all true.

The family business, the way OnlyFans democratized porn.

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,

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

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

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

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

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.

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

He's not one for publicity.

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

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

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

Remember, in 2018, OnlyFans was a fast-growing business, but it hadn't really caught fire.

The good times were ahead.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Which raises one blindingly obvious question.

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

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

I think I found something,

but I have a little confession to make.

Yeah, what's that?

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

Well, you've sent me one.

Should I read it out loud?

Go ahead.

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

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

No.

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

So no porn.

OnlyFans didn't allow explicit content from the start.

Nothing.

Exactly.

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.

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

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

It was claiming to be porn-free.

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

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

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%

or more.

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?

Exactly.

It's amazing.

So

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It's just in the nature of the business.

And suddenly,

you think of all that.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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,

that's OnlyFans' future.

Fitness instructors and musicians.

And that explains a lot.

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

In reality, it was Leo's call.

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

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

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

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?

So it makes it, you know, very precarious.

Peppermint and Dusty stuck with OnlyFans

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

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.

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.

So handing the reins over to somebody else could possibly be a good thing.

That's my hope, indeed.

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

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

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

What all their stories taught us was this.

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

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

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

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.

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

What does this all mean for porn today?

That's our next episode.

The season finale.

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

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.

Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer.

Edith Roussellow is our associate producer.

Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Amanda K.

Wong is our engineer.

Music composition by Pascal Wise.

Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez-Cusado.

Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein.

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.

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This is Justin Richmond, host of Broken Record.

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This is an iHeart podcast.