The Market’s Judgment on OnlyFans Has Nothing to Do With Money

(Photo illustration by Barron’s; Dreamstime (1), courtesy OnlyFans)

About the author: Hannah Wohl is a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project and an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In any other industry, OnlyFans’ blistering rise would spark a bidding war.

The subscription-based social-media platform, used predominantly for porn, recently reported blockbuster numbers. OnlyFans made $7.22 billion in gross revenue (an increase of 9% from the previous year) and $1.41 billion in net revenue. Creator accounts rose 13% to 4.6 million. Fan accounts climbed 24% to 377.5 million. With just 42 full-time employees, OnlyFans is, by many metrics, one of the most operationally efficient platforms on earth—far outpacing YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok in revenue per employee.

And yet OnlyFans is valued at just $8 billion —worth only about one year of its total revenue and about 10 years of profit.

Majority owner Leonid Radvinsky has struggled to find a buyer. His talks earlier this year to sell the company to an undisclosed investor group for seem to have stalled.

That is because markets don’t just measure profits—they also reflect values. And for buyers and mainstream investors, porn carries a stigma that overshadows efficiency and revenue.

On paper, OnlyFans looks like a savvy bet. In a digital world awash in free porn, the platform managed to convince users to pay for porn by offering what studios hadn’t: intimacy. Creators produce minimally edited videos often straight from their own bedrooms. Fans can chat, tip, and order custom clips. This ecosystem is sticky. Creators depend on fan subscriptions; fans feel tethered to their favorites. Younger users often see the platform as a more ethical alternative to pirated content, and competitors have barely dented its dominance.

The problem isn’t economic—it is social.

Sociologist Erving Goffman described stigma as a “spoiled identity,” an attribute that discredits its bearer in the eyes of others. Stigma isn’t inherent in the trait itself but arises from the social judgments attached to it. It also spreads by association—what Goffman called “courtesy stigma.” In the case of OnlyFans, courtesy stigma is a sexually transmitted disease.

The company seems to know this. In 2021, OnlyFans briefly banned explicit content, then reversed course after creator backlash. It courted influencers who offer more vanilla content, such as fitness coaches and chefs. Fashion brands and restaurant chains auditioned their content on the platform.

That has done little to change public perception. If anything, OnlyFan’s attempts to distance itself from its original creators have only underscored the bind it is in.

The more visible and lucrative OnlyFans becomes, the more scrutiny—and stigma—it attracts. Visibility amplifies both opportunity and moral judgment.

To be sure, OnlyFans faces other hurdles. The platform has been beset by regulatory issues with payment processing, app store bans, and banking skittishness. But these flow from stigma rather than fundamentals, and none have slowed the platform’s rise.

OnlyFans could remain privately owned indefinitely. That path has trade-offs: While private ownership preserves control and shields companies from shareholder scrutiny, it also limits access to capital and broader market legitimacy. Other platforms in stigmatized or highly regulated industries, such as pornography sites or cannabis firms, have likewise tended to remain private far longer than their peers. Curaleaf, one of the largest U.S. cannabis firms, went public in 2018 through a reverse takeover of a Canadian-listed shell company, since mainstream U.S. exchanges wouldn’t list cannabis companies operating domestically.

Since buying OnlyFans in 2018, Radvinsky has received more than a billion dollars in dividends. Maintaining the platform’s steady cash flow may be more appealing to him than a sale under duress. Or he could finally find a buyer willing to lean into courtesy stigma, one that would perhaps fold the platform into a contrarian portfolio of sin stocks.

OnlyFans stalled sale underscores that markets are never morally neutral. Profitability is always filtered through cultural judgments about what we consider acceptable. When investors recoil at porn platforms but embrace fossil fuel and private prison companies, they expose the moral map of the market—what we collectively prize, what we excuse, and what we deem untouchable, regardless of balance sheet bottom lines.

Guest commentaries like this one are written by authors outside the Barron’s newsroom. They reflect the perspective and opinions of the authors. Submit feedback and commentary pitches to ideas@barrons.com.