The owner
of OnlyFans, a site known for its adult content that is credited with
revolutionising the online porn industry, has died at the age of 43.
Leonid
Radvinsky, who was born in Ukraine and grew up in Chicago, had purchased the
company in 2018 from its two UK-based founders, OnlyFans said.
The site's
popularity surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, landing him on Forbes' annual
list of billionaires just three years later.
He
"passed away peacefully after a long battle with cancer," OnlyFans
confirmed in a statement, which asked for privacy for his family.
Founded in
2016, OnlyFans is a social media platform where creators can post videos and
photos and charge subscribers for tips or a monthly fee.
Creators
share a range of content from cooking to fitness videos, but it is best known
for pornography and the way it encourages creators and fans to connect through
livestreams, personalised messages, and direct requests for custom-made photos
and videos.
In return
for hosting the material, OnlyFans takes a 20% share of all payments.
The company
generated $1.4bn (£1.04bn) in revenue from more than £7bn transactions and had
more than 377 million subscribers in 2024, according to its most recent
Companies House filing.
About 4.6
million creators were posting to the site that year, it said.
The boom in
size and popularity under Radvinsky's ownership also brought scrutiny from
lawmakers and regulators over its adult content.
In 2024,
British regulators launched an investigation into whether children were
accessing porn, an issue that the company at the time blamed on a technical
issue.
Ofcom
ultimately dropped that probe, but it fined the firm about £1m for failing to
respond accurately to its requests for information about the measures it had in
place to check the age of its users, who in theory must be 18 or over.
Several
years prior, the platform had been accused of failing to deal with illegal
content, including child sexual abuse material.
Amid
increased pressure and scrutiny over its content, OnlyFans outlined plans in
August 2021 to stop allowing sexual material on the platform.
However, it
dramatically u-turned on the proposal days later, after the plans were met with
intense backlash from users and adult performers.
The company
has also been involved in legal fights with users, including some who felt
scammed after learning that chats they thought they were having with OnlyFans
creators were actually handled by low-paid, third parties. Those cases have not
succeeded to date.
Radvinsky
graduated with an economics degree from Northwestern University and most
recently lived in Florida, according to his website. Forbes estimates his net
worth at $4.7bn.
He had been
exploring a sale of OnlyFans last year.
As well as
OnlyFans, he invested in tech companies via a Florida-based venture capital
firm, Leo.com.
His
philanthropy included donations to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,
according to his website.
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