Meet Tim Stokely, The founder of Onlyfans

Tim Stokely is a British businessman, and the founder of the internet content subscription service, Onlyfans. He was recently in the news after he stepped down as CEO of the company to pursue new endeavours.

He founded the Onlyfans in 2016, a platform that allows content creators to receive funding directly from their fans on a monthly basis as well as one-time tips and the pay-per-view (PPV) feature.

The platform however became prominent as the majority of its content creators are sex workers and other adult content creators who charge fans for sexual content.

Childhood, Education and Early career

Tim Stokely was born in Essex, the United Kingdom in July 1983, his father Guy Stokely, was a retired ex-Barclays investment banker. He obtained a degree in Property and Surveying from Anglia Ruskin University.

He began his career as a businessman when he founded  GlamGirls an unsuccessful adult performing website that connects sex workers with their fans and customers.

Not giving up Tim Stokely established Customs4u  in 2013,  a custom online video portal that features models from various countries who create customized, personalized video clips for customers and fans.

The Website also allows performers and models to own their own video content and control their own profits, rather than only working with studios.

Founding Only Fans

Despite the failure of Tim’s former enterprises, he took a loan of £10,000  from his father to set up Onlyfans in 2016. He founded Onlyfans alongside his older brother, Thomas Stokely who was the company’s chief operating officer and made his father the head of finance.

He however avoided the mistakes of his earlier sites by building in a referral system that gave third parties an incentive to recruit new content creators to the site.

Although the platform is commonly associated with sexual and explicit content, it also hosts the work of other content creators, such as personal trainers,  chefs, gamers, musicians and fashion influencers.

In 2018, Tim Stokely sold a 75% stake in OnlyFans’ parent company Fenix International to Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American businessman and the owner of porn site MyFreeCams.

Onlyfans Growth

Onlyfans has grown to be one of the biggest internet content subscription services has it houses over two million content creators and 130 million users including the popular US Rapper Cardi B

According to Wikipedia, Amateur and professional sex workers were the key drivers of OnlyFan’s initial growth, but the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns had significant positive impacts on the company.

Influential acts like Cardi B, Bella Thorne and Beyonce also contributed to the increase in the number of users on the platform.  Beyonce on her own part mentioned the platform in the remix of the Megan Thee Stallion song, “Savage”, which generated about 200,000 new users, 8000 new creators every 24 hours.

Bella Thorne also earned over $1 million within 24 hours of joining the platform in August 2020 after promising her fans and customers nude photos for just  $200 but instead only provided lingerie-clad photographs which eventually led to public backlash for the actress.

Bhad Bhabie, a controversial internet personality broke Bella Thorne’s record on OnlyFans by earning over $1 million in the first 6 hours.

In 2021 the Onlyfans revealed that the content creators on the platform collectively earned $3 billion in revenue and they pay out more than $200 million to its content creators every month. In the same year, Onlyfans reached a  valuation of $1 billion.