OnlyFans is taking over porn. And how!

Fans of OnlyFans have been pumping money into the platform, helping the not-just-porn-but-definitely-porn site record a whopping $6.63 billion in revenues in the 2023 fiscal.

The 2023 figures were a 19 per cent year-on-year increase from 2022 figures, when the company recorded $5.55 billion in revenues.

While that might not sound like much on its own, its important to put it into perspective.

For starters, porn giant Aylo (formerly MindGeek), which owns sites such as PornHub and Brazzers, is estimated to be half the size of OnlyFans in terms of revenue, while PlayBoy, once a leading brand in pornography, is a fraction of its size.

While OnlyFans seems to be well ahead of (indirect) competition, given that it doesn't market itself as a site exclusively for pornography and has other non-pornographic content as well, revenues generated by the platform exceeded amounts earned by top athletes in some of the world's biggest sporting leagues.

NBA players, for instance, cumulatively earned $4.9 billion in the 2023-24 season, while Premier League players earned just under $5.3 billion in the same timeframe.

Given OnlyFans' 20-80 revenue sharing model with content creators, the $6.63 billion it earned in revenues translates to roughly $5.32 billion for its creators, eight per cent more than NBA players earned, and slightly higher than the amount earned by Premier League players.

While it's true that the aforementioned sporting leagues have 500-1,700 players, as opposed to the 4.1 million creators on OnlyFans, it should be noted that the former comprises elite athletes while the latter accomodates any legal adult with a bank account.

The average OnlyFans creator reportedly grosses around $1,800 (around Rs 1.51 lakh) annually, but it should be noted that creators in the top 0.1 per cent earn 15 times as a creator in the top 1 per cent, and 100 times that of creators in the top 10 per cent.

It should also be noted that OnlyFans last year posted a 50 per cent operating profit margin, far ahead of Meta (35 per cent) and Google (27 per cent).

So what's behind this phenomenal success?

Launched in 2016, OnlyFans' story did not properly begin until the Covid-19 pandemic, when the company saw phenomenal growth in both user and creator bases as lockdowns across the world forced people look for content online.

It should be noted that during the pandemic, the site found mention songs by Beyonce, Megan Thee Stallion, an Carbi B, among others, while other celebrities also joined the platform and posted non-pornographic content.

But porn is where OnlyFans struck gold. As more and more pornographic content made its way on to the platform, its user and creator base soared, hitting 120 million collectively in 2021.

However, after the platform faced backlash over concerns about child sexual abuse material being circulated online, it decided to ban pornographic content, only to reverse the decision six days later after an even greater backlash.

For OnlyFans, success lay in porn, and the platform made no qualms about it.

As Business Insider notes, "there's no secret to what OnlyFans has done: It has connected one of the internet's favorite things (porn), with one of its favorite content strategies (getting users to create all of its content, for free), and one of its favorite monetization strategies (payments and subscriptions)."