FOLLOW US

I.

The Architecture of Legitimacy

OnlyFans launched in 2016 as a subscription-based content platform — the "content" being, in the overwhelming majority of revenue-generating cases, explicit material. Its early years were unremarkable in their ambition and modest in their reach. Then the pandemic arrived, and with it a combination of economic desperation, digital captivity, and social media's relentless amplification of its most lucrative use cases, and the platform grew with a velocity that outpaced any conceivable system of oversight. In 2020 alone, the platform's user base expanded from 7.5 million to 85 million. The number of content creators increased by approximately forty percent. Revenues exceeded two billion dollars. OnlyFans collected its cut and called it a revolution.

The company was careful, throughout this period, to establish the scaffolding of legitimacy. Age verification was introduced — a system that required creators to submit a government-issued ID and, eventually, a facial biometric scan processed by third-party providers. The company pointed to this system as evidence of its seriousness about child safety. Regulators, at first, were inclined to take the company at its word. The U.K.'s media regulator, Ofcom, opened an inquiry in the early 2020s and found that OnlyFans had described its age-verification technology to investigators in terms that were materially inaccurate: the company told regulators that its facial estimation system used a threshold age of twenty-three when, in reality, it was set at twenty. This was not, Ofcom concluded, an honest error. In 2025, the watchdog issued a fine of $1.4 million — a figure that amounted, given OnlyFans's annual revenues, to roughly the platform's earnings in a single hour.

$1.3B OnlyFans annual revenue — Fenix International most recent filing

300M+ registered users as of 2025

20% cut taken by OnlyFans from every creator transaction

$1.4M Ofcom fine for age-verification misrepresentation, 2025 — roughly one hour of company revenue

The fine was paid. The verification system was adjusted. The problem did not go away, because the problem was never primarily technical. It was structural. A platform that takes a twenty percent commission on all content has a financial incentive to maximize the volume and value of that content. Any intervention that reduces participation — more rigorous verification, more aggressive moderation, more responsive reporting to law enforcement — also, necessarily, reduces revenue. This is not a conspiracy. It is arithmetic. The question that has never been satisfactorily answered by OnlyFans or by the regulatory bodies that oversee it is: at what point does the financial incentive to look the other way become indistinguishable from a decision to do so?