OnlyFans, which still has its headquarters in the UK, finds itself in an uneasy financial and cultural position. Corporate filings show the entire company was sold to a low-key Florida-based businessman, Leonid Radvinsky, in 2018, although the Stokely family still extracted tens of millions of pounds from the business in the last year. The Stokelys continue to be the public faces of the business in the media and run the company on a day-to-day basis, but they no longer own any shares in its parent company. Stokely’s brother, Tom, is chief operating officer, and his mother, Deborah, was also a director of its parent company. OnlyFans was originally a family business, backed with a loan from Stokely’s banker father Guy, a former executive at Barclays Bank who continues to sit on the board. The site has undergone rapid transformation since it was founded in 2016 as the latest project from Stokely, a member of a wealthy Essex family. It’s like running a bricks-and-mortar shop and being chased out of town by religious zealots every six months.” Every time a site goes down, our client base is fractured. “The community is very on edge at the moment. “Considering that they’ve said ‘suspended’ the ban – not that they aren’t going through with it - I think they’re going to go through with the ban in a few weeks’ time,” said Lola Hunt, a Melbourne-based sex worker. It thanked its “diverse” community but held back from outright acknowledgment of the importance of explicit content on the website. On Wednesday, the day after its co-founder and adult performance entrepreneur Tim Stokely had given an interview blaming the decision on banks refusing to work with the platform, the firm announced it had struck a deal that would allow normal service to resume. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the pivot was abandoned. They worried the company was seeking to do what so many others had: build a business on the back of adult content then abandon it when mainstream success came calling. They also expressed fears that the decision could serve to drive the business back underground – or back on to the street – after losing one of the few sites that allows individuals to earn real money from adult content. Anyone can post pictures or videos, charge for views and, if they’ve got the fans, make a living.Īfter news of the impending ban broke, sex workers began sharing advice about other platforms that would still work with them. The site’s name has become shorthand for homegrown pornography thanks to its slick interface, easy user experience and, importantly, loose content policy.
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