OnlyFans is a content subscription service headquartered in London and founded by brothers Tim and Thomas Stokely in 2016. Helped by a £10,000 loan from their father, the brothers envisioned a space where creators could monetize content without advertising.
OnlyFans was acquired by billionaire investor Leonid Radvinsky in 2018. Since the acquisition, the platform has become predominantly associated with adult entertainment.
As the provider of a platform for paywalled content, OnlyFans has a simple yet lucrative businessmodel. Creators charge for access to their work via subscriptions and exclusive paid content while also receiving tips. In each case, the company takes a 20% commission.
OnlyFansOrigin Story
OnlyFans is a content subscription service headquartered in London and founded by brothers Tim and Thomas Stokely in 2016.
Tim Stokely envisioned a site where creators could monetize their content without resorting to advertising.
This included musicians, artists, and fitness experts, but it also included sex workers.
Many such workers, he noticed, were trying to sell their services on social media sites such as Instagram and having their posts deleted because of inappropriate content.
With a £10,000 loan from their father, the Stokely brothers launched the OnlyFans platform.
It incorporated a news feed not dissimilar to Twitter or Instagram, and users were required to pay a monthly subscription to view the content of their favorite entertainers.
What’s more, users could pay additional money to unlock valuable content.
OnlyFans was a near-instant success with creators, who appreciated the ability to reach a high percentage of their fans with a single post or interact with them directly.
In 2018, American investor Leonid Radvinsky acquired 75% of the company. After the acquisition, OnlyFans became increasingly associated with adult content.
Two years later, the platform experienced rapid growth as many were stuck at home and left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic.
A name-drop from musician Beyonce in a music video was also beneficial to the company’s bottom line.
Today, OnlyFans boasts an impressive set of figures.
The term “crowdsourcing” was first coined by Wired Magazine editor Jeff Howe in a 2006 article titled Rise of Crowdsourcing. Though the practice has existed in some form or another for centuries, it rose to prominence when eCommerce, social media, and smartphone culture began to emerge. Crowdsourcing is the act of obtaining knowledge, goods, services, or opinions from a group of people. These people submit information via social media, smartphone apps, or dedicated crowdsourcing platforms.
In an asymmetric businessmodel, the organization doesn’t monetize the user directly, but it leverages the data users provide coupled with technology, thus have a key customer pay to sustain the core asset. For example, Google makes money by leveraging users’ data, combined with its algorithms sold to advertisers for visibility.
In an asymmetric businessmodel, the organization doesn’t monetize the user directly, but it leverages the data users provide coupled with technology, thus having a key customer pay to sustain the core asset. For example, Google makes money by leveraging users’ data, combined with its algorithms sold to advertisers for visibility. This is how attention merchants make monetize their business models.
A marketplace is a platform where buyers and sellers interact and transact. The platform acts as a marketplace that will generate revenues in fees from one or all the parties involved in the transaction. Usually, marketplaces can be classified in several ways, like those selling services vs. products or those connecting buyers and sellers at B2B, B2C, or C2C level. And those marketplaces connecting two core players, or more.
The wholesale model is a selling model where wholesalers sell their products in bulk to a retailer at a discounted price. The retailer then on-sells the products to consumers at a higher price. In the wholesale model, a wholesaler sells products in bulk to retail outlets for onward sale. Occasionally, the wholesaler sells direct to the consumer, with supermarket giant Costco the most obvious example.
A retail business model follows a direct-to-consumer approach, also called B2C, where the company sells directly to final customers a processed/finished product. This implies a business model that is mostly local-based, it carries higher margins, but also higher costs and distribution risks.
A B2B2C is a particular kind of business model where a company, rather than accessing the consumer market directly, it does that via another business. Yet the final consumers will recognize the brand or the service provided by the B2B2C. The company offering the service might gain direct access to consumers over time.
While the term has been coined by Andrew Lampitt, open-core is an evolution of open-source. Where a core part of the software/platform is offered for free, while on top of it are built premium features or add-ons, which get monetized by the corporation who developed the software/platform. An example of the GitLab open core model, where the hosted service is free and open, while the software is closed.
Open source is licensed and usually developed and maintained by a community of independent developers. While the freemium is developed in-house. Thus the freemium give the company that developed it, full control over its distribution. In an open-source model, the for-profit company has to distribute its premium version per its open-source licensing model.
The freemium – unless the whole organization is aligned around it – is a growth strategy rather than a businessmodel. A free service is provided to a majority of users, while a small percentage of those users convert into paying customers through the sales funnel. Free users will help spread the brand through word of mouth.
A freeterprise is a combination of free and enterprise where free professional accounts are driven into the funnel through the free product. As the opportunity is identified the company assigns the free account to a salesperson within the organization (inside sales or fields sales) to convert that into a B2B/enterprise account.
In a franchained businessmodel (a short-term chain, long-term franchise) model, the company deliberately launched its operations by keeping tight ownership on the main assets, while those are established, thus choosing a chain model. Once operations are running and established, the company divests its ownership and opts instead for a franchisingmodel.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
