What OnlyFans tells us about the price of a brand

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

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Here’s a valuation puzzle I can’t stop turning over.

There’s a business that made $700 million in profit last year. It has 46 employees. No debt. Revenue of $7.2 billion flows through it annually. It pays more UK tax than Starbucks, IBM, and Microsoft combined. On raw numbers, it’s one of the most efficient money machines in the history of the internet…roughly $46 million of revenue per employee, against the couple of hundred thousand you’d see at Google or Salesforce.

If that business were a boring SaaS company, it would trade at 15 to 30 times earnings. Tens of billions. Instead, its owner spent over a year trying to sell it, watched an $8 billion deal collapse, and eventually settled for $5.5 billion from a firm most people have never heard of, which reportedly had to scrape the financing together because nearly everyone invited to invest said no.

The business is OnlyFans. And the gap between what it earns and what it’s worth is one of the cleanest demonstrations I’ve ever seen of something we in brand land say constantly and prove rarely: brand isn’t a soft metric. It’s a structural input to value. Sometimes it’s the whole discount.

The origin story is almost comically small. In 2016, Tim Stokely, a serial founder of unglamorous adult sites, borrows £10,000 from his dad. One last loan, his dad says. See what you can do with it.

What he builds is, initially, not an adult platform at all. OnlyFans launches with adult content banned. The pitch was Patreon with sharper teeth: creators connect directly with fans, keep 80% of the revenue. The problem was that Patreon already existed and was doing a perfectly good job of being Patreon.

So in 2017, quietly, the ban gets lifted. Adult performers flood in for the first time able to earn directly from an audience without a middleman taking most of the cut. In 2018, a famously reclusive operator named Leonid Radvinsky buys 75% of the company. Then COVID hits, the world locks down, and the user base grows 75% in a single month. Beyoncé name-drops the platform and traffic jumps 15% overnight. By 2021, net revenue is nearly a billion dollars.

A £10,000 loan becomes one of the most profitable businesses on the internet. And almost nobody wants to own it.

Before we get to the valuation problem, there’s a brand problem underneath it that I find far more interesting.

What OnlyFans actually sells, the thing the customer believes they’re buying, isn’t content. It’s connection. A direct line to a real person. The parasocial relationship is the product.

Except, at scale, it wasn’t. As creators grew, an entire shadow industry of agencies emerged to run their accounts and specifically their DMs, where the real money was made. The customer thought they were messaging the creator. They were messaging a stranger in a call centre, possibly managing five of these “relationships” simultaneously, whose sole job was to get the credit card out as often as possible. The New York Times gave the practice a name: e-pimping.

This what i call the expectancy violation; the gap between promise and delivery doesn’t just disappoint people, it makes them feel betrayed, and betrayal makes people loud. This is that, industrialised. The entire value proposition rested on authenticity, and the operational reality was its exact opposite. The class action lawsuits have already started. The first three were dismissed. More are coming.

When your product is trust and your operations are a lie, you don’t have a business. You have a countdown.

Here’s the part of this story that I think matters most for anyone building anything, in any category.

OnlyFans was never really regulated by governments. It was regulated by other brands. In 2019, Metro Bank shut down its accounts with no notice. In 2021, Mastercard introduced a policy requiring adult platforms to verify and review every piece of content and every creator’s government ID, a compliance burden that nearly killed the business model outright. JP Morgan and others cut off wire services. At one point, OnlyFans announced it would ban adult content entirely , the thing the entire company was, because the banks left it no choice. It reversed the decision six days later, only after public pressure made the banks blink.

Think about what that means. The morality policing of the modern internet isn’t being done by legislatures or courts. It’s being done by risk committees at payment networks. Mastercard has more practical power over what exists online than most governments do.

And this is the mechanism behind the valuation discount. Huge pools of capital , pension funds, most private equity, most institutional money, are simply not allowed to touch this category. It doesn’t matter what the numbers say. The stigma isn’t a reputational inconvenience; it’s a structural exclusion from the buyer pool. Fewer eligible buyers, lower price. Pornhub, throwing off cash, sold for $400 million in 2023. Patreon, the polite version of this exact model, sold for $4 billion despite never turning a profit.

Same mechanics. Different brand. Ten-figure difference.

That’s the thing I want people to sit with. We talk about brand equity like it’s a warm feeling, a logo preference, a tracker score. Here it is expressed in the bluntest possible unit: billions of dollars of enterprise value, evaporated, purely because of what the business means rather than what it earns.

There’s a coda to this story, and it complicates the neat business lesson.

The obvious read on Radvinsky’s sale was that he saw the headwinds, the banking fragility, the lawsuits, the AI-generated creators already earning €10,000 a month on rival platforms and threatening to hollow out the marketplace entirely. Smart money exits before the cliff, not after. It’s the Blockbuster playbook: the billionaires who sold it did so precisely because they could see the future and didn’t fancy it.

Then, weeks after the sale reports, the news broke that Radvinsky had died of cancer at 43. He wasn’t just reading market signals. He was dying, and almost nobody knew.

I don’t have a tidy framework for that. But it’s a useful humility check for anyone who analyses businesses from the outside, which is most of us, most of the time: there is always information you don’t have. The strategy deck never contains the whole story. Sometimes the “brilliant timing” is a man putting his affairs in order.

Strip out the salacious bits and OnlyFans is a controlled experiment that brand strategists could never ethically run: take a business with flawless unit economics and attach maximum negative brand association to it. What happens?

The answer is now on the record. You lose the buyers. You lose the banks. You lose the multiple. You operate permanently at the mercy of other companies’ risk appetites. And no amount of cash generation, not $700 million a year, not tax bills bigger than Microsoft’s, buys you back in.

Brand isn’t the paint on the machine. It’s a load-bearing wall. OnlyFans just showed us, to the nearest billion, exactly how much weight it holds.

Would love to your thoughts in the comments, let me know beow…

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

Learn more about us HERE