OnlyFans Is Reportedly in Talks to Promote Off Its Porn Empire

OnlyFans, the web’s kingdom of smut, could also be altering fingers quickly. Reuters reports that the porn platform’s mum or dad firm, Fenix Worldwide, Ltd., is in talks to promote the enterprise for some $8 billion to a U.S. investor group.

The New York Submit previously reported that Leonid Radvinsky, the billionaire proprietor of the positioning, was trying to “money out,” however had not but discovered a purchaser. Reuters now identifies at the very least one potential purchaser because the Forest Street Firm, an funding agency primarily based in Los Angeles that’s reportedly main an investor group that wishes to purchase the porn platform. On its web site, Forest Street describes itself as “not your common funding agency” and says it embraces “complexity and creativity to extract worth the place others see limitations.” The positioning additionally expresses an curiosity in “media & leisure” and “digital property.”

Not a lot else is thought in regards to the talks. Citing sources conversant in the potential deal, Reuters writes that Fenix can be speaking to different events. Gizmodo reached out to OnlyFans for extra info.

OnlyFans was based in 2016 and rose to prominence in the course of the pandemic by serving to sexy internet customers fulfill their libidos while in any other case avoiding human contact. Since then, the enterprise has solely continued to develop. Aside from a weird brief moment in 2021 (when the corporate bizarrely claimed it might ban “sexually specific content material”), it has served as a premier vacation spot for soiled content material, and has helped re-shaped the porn business by its gig-worker mannequin. Final yr, the corporate reported that funds made by the platform had surged by 19 p.c since 2023, topping some $6.6 billion.

Radvinsky bought the corporate in 2019 and it has made an absolute killing since then. Bloomberg reported final yr that the mogul had made $1 billion in three years by company dividends from the enterprise.

The corporate has additionally been the topic of appreciable criticism, in addition to quite a few authorized complaints. Critics accuse the platform of being frequented by sex traffickers, and declare that the positioning has additionally grow to be a portal for child sexual abuse material. The corporate was additionally not too long ago sued by two prospects who had been outraged to discover that they could haven’t been messaging with actual fashions (creators usually outsource their buyer communications to third-party corporations).