Episode 7: Porn Meets OnlyFans

much to performers. Now we're going to tell you about the company that reset the ballot, 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. He became so popular during the pandemic. Even my mother had heard its name. We're talking about

Only Fans. Only Fans as 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 sides 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 time. 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 pawn event in la where Dusty

and Peppermint were promoting their business and meeting fans. They're mainly known for their live video work on campsites those a tower 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've branched out selling clips on video platforms and reaching

their most loyal supporters through an only Fans account. So with the explosion of people turning to only Fans, turning to content creation, turning to online work, I think there is a lot more acceptance of it in the mainstream audience. Only Fans is a platform that launched in twenty sixteen. 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 only Fans 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 earned their living. Influencers, musicians, fitness instructors, but especially porn stars. Only Fans made the industry's most famous performers seriously rich. Some have earned millions and allowed them to make videos at home on their

own terms. Most Only Fans creators are and big stars, but more like Peppermint and Dusty, the PM has allowed them to generate a modest study income. It made it easier than ever to make money from porn until the moment Only Fans announced that porn wouldn't be welcome anymore. Can you tell us about the day that Only Fans banned porn? We had actually been on a trip up to the mountains, and we had gone just to a different locations so we could shoot some new content specifically

for only Fans. I opened up the app on my phone and I see Twitter, and I see all these posts about only fans banning porn. So I remember driving down the mountains seeing our follower account 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 pawn industry decided to ban pawn to become a safe for work service. Then just one week later, Only

Fans changed its mind. Pawn was okay again. They canceled the cancelation. It was so farcical. Only Fans made headlines around the world. And what about them when they reversed the band? How did you feel them? 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 only fans 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 and porn is all about the payments. I'm Alex Barker, I'm Patrician Nelson from Pushkin Industries. And the Financial Times. This is hot Money, Act one financial domination. We set out to follow Only Fans 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 Only Fans when it launched. Hi everyone, my name's Danny. Welcome to my Only Fans page. Come enjoy me have a little chat. Can I 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 twelve years ago. Danny was in her late twenties making her living as a glamor model and one day a man called Tim walked into her life with a mad cat

plan to transform her into goddess Danielle. So can you tell us when and where you first met him? He contacted me for a photo shoet, having seen me on TV, and he turned up in a all roy suit with a briefcase and a copy of The Financial Times under his arm. It was 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 side called glam Worship. He sort of looked like he was just about to go for a board meeting, not a photo shoot. That he was young, a fairly good looking guy, and just very smart and very well spoken. And he's like, right, okay, Danny, and if you just like just sit over there, and he's like, just look at the camera. He was so wonder prepared. 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 Only Fans can be traced straight back to the kink the website served this fetish for financial domination. Out of the photoshoot 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 the finndom 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 strengths? 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 was gripped 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 twenty sixteen, something new came together a sight then actually worked Only Fans a platform that combined interaction, tailor made content, and a direct connection between the fan and the performer, including yes payment, with only Fans taking a twenty percent cut. Danny was one of the first to hear Tim's idea, It's like, so people can tip you on that. I was like, what, they can tip you?

It's like yeah, I was like, okay, that's a game changer. This was the start of a new era. If video streaming made pawn three, Only Fans was one of the sites that began to turn the tide. People were paying for pawn 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 Only Fans. Danny found a way to tap her Instagram and Twitter. Following I went from earning one month between three and six thousand dollars. My next earnings was twenty two thousand. Tim asked Danny to spread the word, so she spoke with friends at the Glamor TV channel where she performed Girls as this website, you have to join it. You look at my bank statement. To look at the statement. This is what I'm being paid,

this is what you could earn. They're like, wow, so quickly find 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 in the changing room walled saying that you're not allowed to film any content for only fans, 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 only Fans 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 porm was sorely lacking. Today, Danny is still on the platform, not as God as Danielle, but under another name. She

crowned herself to the Queen of Only Fans. 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 act two, The Stokelease. 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 Stokelease, but not a typical spot for a company headquarters, which I should Where are we going and why? I don't even know how to

pronounce it. The Bishop's destroyed great staff podcasts already. We're in the car. We're on our way to meet up with Tim and guys Stokely. We are walking past the only Fans headquarters, which are in a converted barn called Fish Barn. It looks like the south of Sweden, but we're just next to us are a couple of grain silos. It feels pretty rural. There's a thatched roof over there. Who's not why you expect businesses 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 Abitha and sharp cut suits, but when we met him, that's not how he came across at all. He was almost shy, hardly the guide 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 Only Fans was planted when Only Fans 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 payball 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 only fans Guy

was retired. He's mild mannered and ever so polite. Tim phone me and said, I've got this really good idea, Dad, and I kind of explained that 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 skepticism. Guid invested in some of the previous platforms. Some have

gone really well, some really badly. After many attempts that 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 Only Fans. 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. Only

Fans launched in twenty sixteen. 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 to the platform. Guy thought Tim's goal of half a million pounds revenue in twenty seventeen was totally ridiculous. They ended up with two point four million pounds. A lot of the creators were adult performers and sitting with the stoke. Please, that's something you can easily forget. They

don't seem like pawn. People mentioned 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 sporting. Tim. This was genuinely a family business. Tim was CEO and guide, the chief financial officer and supportive father. Tim's sister and his two brothers were involved. Two. But then in twenty eighteen, at a point when only Fans was growing fast and showing it had real potential, the Stoke please did something surprising.

They decided it was time to bring in an outside of fester. They sold only Fans but stayed on as the executive team. Within a year of selling, their platform just exploded in popularity. Only Fans is massively a part of the pop cultures. Igeist right now, Cardibi's on the platform, Chris Brown, Now, why are you tipping this? Rich man? I think I'm gonna start a holy fans Please do it? Lonny Love, Michael B. Jordan's mustache. Beyonce even name dropped only fans in a song if she might start at

only fans. During the pandemic, it reached two million creators and one hundred and eighty million users, A significant proportion of them were buying or selling pawn. Only Fans gave the tired old pawn 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 pawn, but also unease over only fans, normalizing pornography, making it seem just like any other career a lot of men and women saw the huge payout 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 Only Fans 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 Only Fans 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 Only Fans became, the more its reputation was associated with a pawn 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 Only Fans. It's a very strange way to act, but it was, you know. That's what happened. Then, in the summer of twenty twenty one, the dam burst

Only Fans. The platform that changed the adult industry announced it was going to ban pawn Performers were totally stunned. Only fans will prohibit the posting of any content containing sexually explicit kind act. That leaves a lot of people worried about what's going to happen into the At least tens of thousands of creators on the platform, who, particularly during the pandemic, have made a lot of money from

the safety of their haunts. Hiss, think back to the decision to ban explicit content, and yeah, what were you trying to achieve when you first made that announcement. Well, it certainly wasn't a strategic move really, Yeah, absolutely, Here, 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 through the industry. The uproar from performers was deafening. Big stars or less well known performers like Peppermint and Dusty. They relied on only fans for their livelihoods, and they were furious. And after a week of mayhem, only Fans reversed its decision. Porn went from banned too okay again all inside seven days. People who earn money on the website only fans 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 only fans selling out. Only Fans 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 Domino's trying to

ban Peter. 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 brands straight after the ban, where he named some of the banks causing only fans 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 amount of concern an anxiety it caused. I mean for a lot of people it was it's like being cut down at the knees and why should they trust any fans not to do this again? And well, I you know, I think what this, 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 pawn on a platform. Twitter, for instance, permits adult content on parts of its platform and hosts lots of pawn without much trouble. The issue start when a company has so much pawn or makes so much money from pawn it

starts to look like a pawn company. After that, basic finance dries up, banking becomes harder and a lot more expensive. There are lots of people in the pawn industry who find it hard to believe that only fans got cold feet for a mundane reason like financing. They are still convinced the whole pawn band fiasco was actually a publicity stunt,

some cunning plan that's that's entirely false. I think we've perhaps been victim to some you know, unfair reporting, which you know it 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? I said, we could we have handled it in a different way. Years of course

we could. Um, but um, We're happy where we ended. Huh. At the end of our interviews, the Stoke Please took us to their office. In there was another brother wearing a wooly jumper that looked like an early Christmas present. There were ducks wandering around a patio, crooked trinkets on the desks. It seemed just a setting for a charming family business. But for only fans. Something didn't quite seem right, and it wasn't. We'll be right back Act three, reading

the fine print. Within three weeks of us visiting, the Stoke Please had left only fans. Tim stepped down as chief executive and guy and the rest of the family followed. Just like that, the Stoke Please 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 Stoke These and only fans that you heard earlier, that was all true, the family business, the way only fans democratized porn. But we later learned that was only

one side of the story. Like looking at a movie sets from a single camera. It didn't explain why the Stokelees left only fans, or that crazy hokey cokey over banning porn, or why they sold their company when it was doing so well in twenty eighteen. 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 only Fans from the Stoke Lease in twenty eighteen. Now, plenty of investors have attempted to

buy only Fans over the years, mainstream investors. But when the Stoke Lease sold, it was to a man called Leo Radvinski, a forty year old Ukrainian American who made his fortune in the pawn 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 joy to work with and such a smart guy, and there's a huge reason we

are where we are. Remember, in twenty eighteen, Only Fans was a fast growing business, but it hadn't really caught fire. The good times were ahead. So why did the Stoke Lease give it all up to Leo Radvinski. Tim was kg with his reasons for selling only Fans, 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. It's very kind of hands on and adds so much value to the technical part of the business. And then he also works to an extent on the

payments side. We didn't think much of it at a time Leo os tech. He made his career running a live video porn side 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 Stokely's sold Only Fans. I think I found something, But I have a little confession to make. Yeah, it was 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. Well those are the original terms and conditions for only Fans from twenty sixteen, So no, porn Only Fans 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 Only Fans launched even though there was lots of pawn on the site. I mean, this really transformed how I understood the whole Only Fans venture. It may well have been crucial to

the entire business model. Was claiming to be palm free, and if you don't have palm, you don't have payment trouble. The Stoke Please 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, Only Fans stood out when it launched because it only took a twenty percent cut of a performer's earnings, when most campsites take

an average of fifty percent or more. So one of the reasons they could offer that was cheaper payment processing. And so the Stoke Please 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 born on the side. In the spring of twenty eighteen, and that's when the Stoke Please introduced a new adult payment processor, a different financial service men to handle all the explicit accounts,

presumably a much more expensive payment processor. And people in the industry told me the only fans. Around this time began to struggle with payments in particular, and within six months, Hey, Presto the Stoke please had sold only fans. And remember Leo is known in the pawn business as a master of payments. You had to be to run at pawn camsite. I mean, there's lots of micropayments. 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 his bangs and payment processors on side, But like most of Pawn's biggest

money makers, he's not the time 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 only fans. For him, that's only fans' future fitness instructors and musicians, and that explains a lot. When we talk to the Stokeleys about the decision to ban Pawn last August, it never seemed like they really

believed in it. In reality, it was Leo's call to him the mainstream promise of only fans was not worth risking for Pawn, however much money it made. He has visions of bringing in mainstream investors or even floating only Fans on the stock market. Only Fans 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 only Fans because it's an important stream of income and it didn't seem right to be cutting off loyal subscribers. It's 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 Radvinski, 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 means somebody else is in charge. Only fans empowered performers by giving them away to receive direct payments from fans. But because only fans doesn't control its own payment system, it is caught in a bind. It is reliant on pornshy payment companies on one side to take in money, and on pornshy bangs on the other to pay it out. That's where to

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 or reported by me Patrician Elson and me Alex Barker.

Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer. Edith Russolo is our associate producer. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Amanda Kwong is our engineer. Music composition by Pascal Wise, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Kusado. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein. Special thanks to Renee Kaplan and Ruler Kalov at The Financial Times and Mia Lobel, Lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Thank you to a similar Web for providing

our web traffic data. If you want more from the ft, try our new app featuring eight essential stories every weekday search ft Edit in the iPhone app Store. Your first month is free, and it's ninety nine cents a month for six months after that.