The late owner of streaming platform OnlyFans was paid more than $700m (£513m) in dividends before his death from cancer earlier this year. Fenix International Ltd, the British company that owns OnlyFans, made $714m in profit before tax last year, it said in its annual report. This is an increase of 5% from 2024. The site hosts a range of subscription-based content from cooking to fitness videos, but it is best known for pornography and is credited with transforming online adult content by encouraging personal connection between sex workers and subscribers. Its owner Leonid Radvinsky, who died earlier this year aged 43, bought the site from its British founders in 2018.

Say More Look Up Safety Net Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series But OnlyFans may implement AI tools in the future. Anna Iovine is the associate editor of features at Mashable. Previously, as the sex and relationships reporter, she covered topics ranging from dating apps to pelvic pain. Before Mashable, Anna was a social editor at VICE and freelanced for publications such as Slate and the Columbia Journalism Review. Follow her on Bluesky .

OnlyFans' First-Gen Creators Are Retiring--and Some Are Begging You to Forget They Exist As more sex workers quit the industry, some are having to navigate tough questions around consent and the "afterlife" of work they no longer want to be associated with. On April 28, just before noon, Win White logged onto X and posted a series of messages to his 65,000 followers who, until that moment, were mostly unaware of his past as an OnlyFans creator. If you see it, save it cool," he wrote . "I know where I've been and I think I'm entitled to a life after that at least." That morning White, 29, had received several DMs about an old clip of him making rounds. Though he has done his best to separate his old life from his new one--last year he deleted his OnlyFans account and the separate X account where he posted content--it often has a habit of catching up with him. "All that work that I did for OnlyFans, I did out in California.

In its first foray into business content, the platform has asked lingerie entrepreneur and ex-SuicideGirl Rachael McCrary to teach creators how to monetize their ideas. OnlyFans has tapped the founder of a lingerie company and former nude model to launch business classes on the platform. Rachael McCrary, a longtime lingerie designer and founder of the company Spice Rack, is launching four videos on OnlyFans Wednesday. The videos are quite different from the usual OnlyFans fare. They'll focus on pitching investors, building a brand, and navigating being an entrepreneur as a woman, McCrary tells WIRED.

Or, really, what I mean to say is: access, filtered through social media, is an illusion. In 2016, no one understood that better than Timothy Stokely, who launched an adult subscription site called OnlyFans that summer. He knew that access--the selling of it, and what buyers believed it opened up--could be quite lucrative. WIRED went looking for love and found that modern romance is a web of scams, AI boyfriends, and Tinder burnout. But a smarter, more human, and more pleasure-filled future is possible.

One of the more persistent concerns in the age of AI is that the robots will take our jobs. The extent to which this fear is founded remains to be seen, but we're already witnessing some level of replacement in certain fields. Even niche occupations are in jeopardy. For example, the world of OnlyFans chatters is already getting disrupted. What are OnlyFans chatters, you say?

At first glance, "Jenny" looks like a young, attractive Asian-American woman with a penchant for posting flirty photos and captions on her X account. Even if some of her features look a little enhanced – her skin is unnaturally smooth and her bust unusually large for her petite frame – it is easy to look past the slight uncanniness of her appearance in an era of widespread cosmetic procedures and photo editing tools. In fact, Jenny is not a real person, but an artificial intelligence-generated model, available for hire as an online influencer or virtual companion. Jenny is the brainchild of LushAI, a startup that bills itself as the world's first AI-powered modelling agency aiming to rival OnlyFans, the subscription-based website best known for hosting adult content creators. Jenny offers essentially the same services as the human content creators that make up OnlyFans, except she is powered by an algorithm – which means she can work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

In August, Savannah's entire monthly income was at stake. OnlyFans, the social media platform where she built her career, making an average of $2,000 a month from subscribers, had just announced it would be removing content like hers from the site. But there was little she could do about it. She remembers thinking: "OK, well, this is another Thursday, I might as well finish my Chick-Fil-A, and I'm just gonna chill here and wait for us to get some sort of response." Savannah, 24, is part of a vibrant, supportive community of online sex workers that underwrite OnlyFans's considerable financial success; it's now valued at over $1 billion. But in a move that may foreshadow changes to come, that community was shaken when OnlyFans announced it would be banning explicit content on the site. "The sky falls on OnlyFans, like, every three or four months," Savannah says, wryly.