Quitting OnlyFans

0:00You've probably never heard of Leonid Radvinsky, but you've probably heard of his website. It's called OnlyFans. In case you've been living under an ascetic rock for the last six or seven years, OnlyFans is the biggest hub of amateur pornography on the internet, and Leonid Radvinsky was maybe the most successful pornographer in the history of the human race until he died of cancer maybe a week ago at the age of 43. we don't exactly know when or where he died because Leonid was a super private person. Kinda ironic because he made billions of dollars off a website that encouraged people to bear it all for the entire world to see.

0:37Leonid took a 20 % cut and the creators got 80. Some say OnlyFans revolutionized sex work, made the world's oldest profession safer, easier. Others called Radvinsky the world's most successful pimp. But now that he's dead, his game-changing website is at a bit of an existential crossroads, and we're going to take you there on Today Explained.

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2:18My name's Amelia Gentleman. I'm a reporter with The Guardian newspaper. And this gentleman has been writing a lot about porn lately. So we asked her to tell us about this secretive figure, the late Leonid Radvinsky. So what we do know about him is he was born in Ukraine. He was born in Soviet Ukraine in Odessa. He moved with his family to the U.S. when he was about six. He was a very good student, was very good at playing chess. went to Northwestern University and studied economics and graduated in the top of his class. But even as a teenager, even before he graduated, he had somehow understood that there was money to be made in pornography or in adult content websites.

3:12And as a teenager, he set up his first website called Cybertania, which was quite grim in that it sold passwords to Internet users that purported to allow them access to very, very explicit content, often promising to give access to bestiality and child sex abuse material. Yikes. It's uncertain whether or not that content, whether or not the passwords actually allowed users access. But anyway, that was what the business model was. And you're saying he was able to do this as a miner? How? He asked his mother to be director of the company. So he was very precocious in the pornography sphere. It's a tiny point, but I suppose he would have said it was a significant point.

4:07There is a question mark about whether or not he did actually grant people access to that illegal content. The website promised to, but it may not actually have worked. So to some extent or another, it was a scam in the adult industry adjacent web area. So how does he go from a minor scammer to a major player in internet pornography? So after university, he continued to be in the adult industry. I believe he set up a webcamming company allowing users to see women via live streams. He also set up an investment fund. He was based in Florida. And the little that we do know about him comes from a web page that he had where he talks only about his investment fund and not about pornography.

5:07But the critical moment in his life came, I think, in 2018, where he became aware of a British company called OnlyFans set up by a family of British people in a town in Essex. And this family, the Stokely family, had set up in 2016 the company OnlyFans. Leonid Radvinsky had heard about this website and he decided to buy it. He paid an undisclosed sum for it in 2018. And I imagine that the Stokely family felt that they'd done quite well from it. However, they will no doubt be kicking themselves now eight years on because the size of the company has absolutely rocketed. During the 2020 coronavirus lockdown, streaming services like Netflix and Hulu saw a huge surge in popularity.

6:08However, there is one media company that went under everyone's radar but has taken over the world of entertainment. Adult entertainment, that is. OnlyFans may not be safe for work, but its business model is the envy of the world. By 2023, Leonid Radvinsky was taking huge dividends out of the company and paid himself$472 million. By 2024, that had increased to$701 million. By the time that Leonid Radvinsky died 10 days ago, his net worth was estimated at$4 billion or somewhere between$4 billion and$5 billion. And the company itself was valued at somewhere between$5.5 billion and$8 billion. OnlyFans is crazy successful, but at some point Leonid realizes he's going to die and he tries to sell the company off, supposedly to ensure his family is taken care of once he's gone.

7:15There was an attempt, I think, to sell it last summer that didn't come off. And then from the beginning of the year, the company went into exclusive negotiations with a San Francisco based investment fund called Architect Capital. We know that the sale didn't go through before Radvinsky's death. But the owner of Architect Capital, James Sagan, remains in exclusive negotiations to buy the firm with those interested in looking after the family trust. Buying OnlyFans isn't like buying Instagram. So we asked Amelia what challenges come with an acquisition of this sort. We've seen revenues grow very reliably over the last five years, but there are risks to being in this sector.

8:14periodically credit card companies like visa and mastercard will threaten to turn off their payment processing business if there is robust evidence that any of the content that's being sold on on the site is illegal and there have been historically there have been some breaches But nevertheless, it's a business that operates in an area that can become risky. And there is always the risk of banks and credit card operators deciding that they no longer want to operate with the business. And that would be catastrophic. OnlyFans is banning porn. Why? Well, the company says the decision was made to comply with requests from its banking and payment providers.

9:05Only fans doing a total 180 scrapping plans to ban sexually explicit material. It received plenty of pushback from content creators and advocates who argued that the ban would only drive such work underground, thus making it more dangerous. And also, there's no doubt that AI is going to be a huge disruptive force in pornography globally. I went to a conference in the autumn where I saw the beginnings of incredibly sophisticated AI girlfriends and AI models who perform the commands of Internet users at the click of a button. I think probably we're still a few years off that being an existential threat for OnlyFans, but it's certainly something that the people in the industry are very much aware of and anxious about.

10:09There is a desire to say this is a social media company, that it's a business that rests on the empowerment of women, allowing women to make money from taking their clothes off in a way that is sex positive and liberating and isn't something that we should feel concerned about in a progressive society. with open-minded views about sex. That's one side of the argument, I suppose. But there is a conservative and also a feminist pushback to that that says, actually, even if you're paying the content creators on this site, even if you're allowing them to take 80 % of the revenues generated, and even if a small number of women are becoming extremely rich on the back of that work, that there is still an argument that this perhaps isn't the greatest business to be involved with, that it is exploitative towards women, that it's grooming an entire generation of women to believe that self-objectification is an easy way to make a lot of money.

11:33and I think there's a lot of queasiness about the business model. So although we see a lot of kind of very successful women talking about how much money they've made on the site, there's another story that talks to a long tale of people who have gone on the site and performed explicit acts and perhaps haven't made very much money. so not everybody thinks that this is an incredible tech business that they will want to invest in.

12:17And we didn't even get to the biggest threat to OnlyFans of all, a trend among young men to quit porn altogether. We're going to get to that when we're back on Today Explained.

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14:54Recommendations can be amazing. I mean, maybe someone recommended that TV show you've been obsessed with lately. But when it comes to home projects, it's different. If you don't like a show, you might lose a few minutes. If you hire a friend of a friend of a friend to fix a leaky ceiling, you could end up with a flooded kitchen. Maybe I know a guy just isn't enough for your home. That's why Thumbtack works so well. They'll match you with a top-rated local pro, and you can see photos of past work, credentials, and reviews all right in the app. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. Hire the right pro today.

15:37Today Explained, Sean Ramos. We're here with Rebecca Jennings, who's a features writer at New York Magazine. Rebecca, we just heard about some potential threats to OnlyFans. their future, but you recently wrote maybe about the biggest threat of all. People quitting porn? Yeah, people quitting porn. This is a whole thing. This is a whole thing. It's especially a whole thing on like the Manosphere internet. I think we've all seen the Louis Theroux documentary if you've been on even a little bit online. I teach guys to be proper guys, not these little soya boys, gimps that walk around in the modern day.

16:13I was entering the manosphere, a wild frontier of streamers whose behavior is reshaping the culture. You've seen people talking about what's going on with young guys these days. And what's going on is that they're really, really, really into self-improvement. When you do hard things, you then are fortified and reinforced for the inevitable hardship that life is. Because all of life is hardship with brief moments of bliss, my friend. Sometimes I have a tough time feeling proud of myself. Do you know what that, you know, and I think I've had other people call in our show that have talked about that.

16:47And so part of that is by cutting out things that they believe are bad for them. Porn being one of them. And so you see a lot of these guys in this manosphere from, you know, the really like toxic red pill guys from like Andrew Tate. And pornography as a whole is simply just, I think, a tool which is used to ensure that the male populace stays as docile as possible. To the more centrist, science-based thought leaders like Andrew Huberman and Scott Galloway, who are telling men that you are wasting your life by, you know, pooning to porn. If your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily going to carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're one-on-one with somebody else.

17:32I remember somebody referencing many years ago when I was first getting in the field that porn addiction at the time, it was having the same impact on the brain in young men as crack cocaine. And it's harming your brain and preventing you from going out, finding a girlfriend or a wife, and just being the best you you can be. This is how I went from broke to rich in three months. The first step is quitting porn. Put Goon here because that's what people like to say now. And the framing of your piece about this is not really necessarily Andrew Tate or Manosphere. It's actually the fact that now there's an app for that.

18:12Right. There's a few apps for that. But the one I focused on is called Quitter. Quitter without the E. Quitter without the E. Of course. It's sort of vintage, like, app speak, like Grindr or Tumblr. This is Quitter. And it's founded by two guys. one a 20-year-old British kid named Alex Slater and the other a 22-year-old American named Conor McLaren. Both of them grew up very steeped in sort of manosphere or internet ideology. Why'd you start Quittal? Just out of curiosity, I know. What is it about, actually? Tell everyone what's it about. So it helps, pretty much just helps guys stop gooning. Like, I feel like Andrew Tate pushed this, and Hamza even, pushed this self-improvement movement where people wanted to be the best version of themselves.

18:54You know, they were both looking for something that they could get rich on And they've found out that like a lot of men their age are really struggling with what they believe to be porn addiction. Although maybe older people would like say, oh, you're masturbating and watching porn once a day. That's nothing to be like, you know, really ashamed about. But to these men that grew up watching these influencers, they are really, really, they really struggle with that. And in terms of like what it says about themselves or their self-esteem. And so they're like, oh, we can capitalize on this. And so within like two weeks, they built this app called Quitter.

19:27And for$30 a year, it will, you know, help you supposedly quit porn for good. Did you download the app and figure out how it worked? Oh, of course I downloaded the app.

19:41I used the app not really in the way it was intended, but I used it just to see what was going on there. And the real, the thing that gets written about mostly about this app is that there's a panic button, which, you know, if you start to feel like you want to watch porn, you click a panic button and your phone starts vibrating and it immediately turns on the front facing camera. And so you just see a picture or video of yourself and like the text will come up on the screen being like, you're better than this. Wow. Remember why you quit.

20:12And it's so funny that it helps you, I don't know, suppress the urge to go look at porn by showing you the least sexiest thing on earth, a picture of your own face. Right. And it's sort of using shame as a way to sort of help people that are struggling with this. And the other the thing that really struck me, though, is so much of it is about like writing down your feelings and interacting with community members. There's all these different group chats you can be in, and they're startlingly earnest and a bit sad. I'm 25. I have a crippling porn addiction. I've spent probably$20 ,000 on pornography.

20:50I have no sex lives because I have erectile dysfunction whenever I try to get with a girl. These young men that really have no self-esteem and feel like they don't have control over their lives. You know what it's like to finish jerking off and have that shame all over your body, even if you go wipe it off, if you put it in a sock, if you wash your hands afterwards or in the towel. When you go back and have dinner with your family, when your mom says that the food's ready, you feel the guilt and the shame on you. And I was just really startled by that and a little bit moved by that. And then, you know, you hear all you watch some of these Manosphere guys who are just like ripping into them all the time.

21:30And it's like, God damn, no wonder you're feeling like such crap about yourselves. This app, is it popular? You mentioned there are others. Yeah, there is. So when they started, they said there was only like, you know, one or two on the market. But after the success of Quitter, it's really exploded. Like when you search on the app store for a porn quitting app, there's like a dozen that come up now. And like addiction quitting apps in general are now really popular thanks to like vibe coding and stuff. You know, like on passive income subreddits, people are sharing ways that like they made all this free money basically by making an app with Claude Code or something and then putting it on the app store and then just like watching the money roll in.

22:09So this is now like a pretty popular way of these type of guys to make money. OK, but this makes me want to ask, are these guys you mentioned, these young guys, one Brit, one American who started this app. Are they doing it to make money or are they doing it to help out their fellow young men who are, you know, falling down these rabbit holes of sex work, pornography, whatever it might be? I think the answer is very clearly to make money. But they also know that there is money to be made in helping people. So I think, you know, these these guys are flashy, you know, like they want to drive fancy cars.

22:44This is a pretty surreal environment that I've found myself in. $10 million Miami house living with all my boys. We have Lambos, Ferraris, GD3Rs. They want to have DJ careers and be YouTube influencers. They're very interested in living the sort of influencer entrepreneur lifestyle that has been popularized by the manosphere and by people like Logan Paul even. One of them told me, they're like, I want to be the next Logan Paul. They're like, we want to be Andrew Tate, but less toxic. It's like they're very clearly modeling their careers off of these guys. And so, yeah, it's like, I think it's to make money, but also they know that there's a lot of money to be made in the self-improvement space.

23:24So I think, like, the way they say it, it's like they want to create, like, even more apps or more, like, e-books and more courses to help men, you know, improve. And we talked recently about this character, James Fishback, who's probably a long-shot gubernatorial candidate in Florida, but he takes aim specifically at OnlyFans and that culture. If you are a so-called OnlyFans creator in Florida, you are going to pay 50 percent to the state on whatever you so-called earn via that online degeneracy platform. Are these guys, too, presenting quitter as sort of an alternative to being like a power user on OnlyFans?

24:06Or is it just porn more broadly or sex work more broadly? It's Pornhub and OnlyFans together. I think like those are really the two like big bads that they're that they believe that they're up against Which is ironic because they're both like living in Miami where all the influence all the OnlyFans girls live

24:29So it's like there's sort of like two sides of a very similar coin in this in this Miami kind of scape But but yes, they like on there on quitter is official Twitter They have tweets where they're like, they call OnlyFans prostitution with Wi-Fi and the clearance aisle of femininity. They say porn stars shouldn't be allowed to have kids. Also, these tweets are very clearly AI-generated. Porn stars shouldn't be able to have kids? Guys. I mean, yeah, it's like rage bait. And a lot of that, I would argue, comes from a lot of young men who've seen many of their female peers on the internet have huge successes and get rich off OnlyFans.

25:06And they really resent that. And I think that's where a lot of the contempt for OnlyFans comes from is this idea of like, these women are outpacing you. It's the same argument that we're having about like women's test scores going up or women in more like scientific fields. It's like, these women are getting rich on the internet because of guys like you. Therefore, like, in order to sort of beat them, you have to sort of overcome that urge to want to pay them money. pay them money. It really seems to be a lot of this is based off of a resentment that young women are able to use their sexual power to get rich.

25:50And do you think the fact that so much of this backlash in the manosphere, which of course is drawing the attention of men who don't consider themselves part of the manosphere, but it's certainly attracting impressionable young men. Do you think it means that OnlyFans itself has kind of maybe peaked and is now having some of like a, more of a waning influence on, say, impressionable young men? I mean, OnlyFans is in a completely different place than it was in the pandemic. It's been around for 10 years, but the reason OnlyFans has succeeded is because people trusted enough to put their credit cards in it.

26:27And because the banks, for now, are allowing their, like, the payment providers to be used on OnlyFans. And if that goes away, which it has threatened to do in the past, the whole thing crumbles. And so it basically depends on where we're at as a culture in terms of how people feel about porn and sex work and sex online. And if that is changing as a result of these Manosphere influencers, then that could really change what OnlyFans is or how we talk about this stuff. And where we are at as a culture on all this stuff continues to feel sort of divided? Yeah, like everything, there really is no monoculture anymore.

27:08And so instead you have all of these very fractured communities that all want different things that have almost no bearing to each other because they exist in completely different planes on the internet. And these guys are one of them.

27:31Read Rebecca Jennings at nymag.com. Thank you so much to Kat Tenbarge for helping us with the show today. It was produced by Dustin DeSoto, edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Andrea Lopez Cruzado, and mixed by Patrick Boyd and David Tattashore. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can find more shows at podcast.voxmedia.com, and you can listen to this one ad-free at vox.com slash members. The rest of us on the team are Noel King, Miranda Kennedy, Jolie Myers, Danielle Hewitt, Kelly Wessinger, Ariana Spuru, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, Peter Balanon, Rosen, and Abishai Artsy.

28:06We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder, and we want to welcome Gabriel Donatov to the show. Great to have you at Today Explained.