How OnlyFans changed porn

This is an audio transcript of Hot Money podcast Episode 7: How OnlyFans changed porn

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Patricia Nilsson
Before we start, a warning. Our investigation looks into power and the porn industry.

Alex Barker
This episode contains adult themes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Patricia Nilsson
In previous episodes, we’ve told you about men at the top of porn their ambition, their power battles, their relentless efforts to remain unknown to the world. We looked at how they cornered the most lucrative parts of the adult business, either by owning tech platforms or production studios or both. Porn profits flowed to owners and middlemen, but not so much to performers.

Alex Barker
Now we’re going to tell you about the company that reset the balance. The company that, whether it intended to or not, managed to shift money and power back to performers in a huge way. You may have heard its name. It became so popular during the pandemic. Even my mother had heard its name. We’re talking about OnlyFans.

OnlyFans Ad
OnlyFans as a social media platform, just like those you use already, but which allows you to set a monthly subscription price, ensuring that any media you upload is fully hidden until your fans pay your subscription.

Peppermint
We are not the average demographic we are on the more mature sides of your typical webcam broadcaster.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Patricia Nilsson
This is Peppermint, is the stage name she uses for the adult enterprise she runs with her husband Dusty, also a stage name.

Peppermint
Our shows can run anywhere between four to eight hours.

Patricia Nilsson
Eight hours, that’s a long time.

Peppermint
No, not all of that is sexual engagement. We have amazing conversations with our viewers. We like to dive deep into the meaning of life and relationships and sexuality.

Alex Barker
We met at a porn event in LA where Dusty and Peppermint were promoting their business and meeting fans. They’re mainly known for their live video work on campsites. Those eight-hour shows that can include sex, fire spinning, acrobatic yoga and cooking.

Peppermint
Trying to promote real sex between real people rather than a fantasy scenario created by a studio.

Patricia Nilsson
Over time, they branched out. Selling clips on video platforms and reaching their most loyal supporters through an OnlyFans account.

Peppermint
So with the explosion of people turning to OnlyFans, turning to content creation, turning to online work, I think there is a lot more acceptance of it in the mainstream audience.

Alex Barker
OnlyFans is a platform that launched in 2016. It’s basically a special kind of social media site. It lets you message followers or upload videos or posts just like Instagram or Facebook. The twist with OnlyFans is that your content lives behind a paywall — visitors pay you to view it. They can even pay you to produce media just for them. The seemingly small difference, the paywall changed how a whole generation of online stars earn their living. Influencers, musicians, fitness instructors, but especially porn stars. OnlyFans made the industry’s most famous performers seriously rich. Some have earned millions, and it allowed them to make videos at home on their own terms.

Patricia Nilsson
Most OnlyFans creators aren’t big stars but more like Peppermint and Dusty. The platform has allowed them to generate a modest, steady income. It made it easier than ever to make money from porn. Until the moment OnlyFans announced that porn wouldn’t be welcome anymore. Can you tell us about the day that OnlyFans banned porn?

Peppermint
We had actually been on a trip up to the mountains and we had gone just to a different location so we could shoot some new content specifically for OnlyFans. I opened up the app on my phone and I see Twitter and I see all these posts about OnlyFans banning porn. So I remember driving down the mountains, seeing our follower count just drop literally in half, which means we also lost half of our income. I think that these rules and these changes almost affect the smaller creators, more so.

Alex Barker
The platform that totally transformed the porn industry. Decided to ban porn to become a safe-for-work service. Then just one week later, OnlyFans changed its mind — porn was okay again. They canceled the cancellation. It was so farcical. Only fans made headlines around the world.

Patricia Nilsson
And what about then when they reversed the ban? How did you feel then?

Dusty
You always kind of sit there and wonder when it’s gonna happen again and you know, what’s gonna be the next trigger. Why are they gonna do it this time?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Patricia Nilsson
What happened? We decided to seek out OnlyFans and where it came from. A close-knit family from Essex, the New Jersey of England. They’re the most miscast porn barons you can imagine. And yet they somehow confirmed — power in porn is all about payments.

Alex Barker
I’m Alex Barker.

Patricia Nilsson
I’m Patricia Nilsson.

Alex Barker
From Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, this is Hot Money.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Act one: Financial domination.

Alex Barker
We set out to follow OnlyFans to its source, and it brought us to a big-gated house on the south coast of England — the home of Dannii Harwood. Dannii was the very first creator to join OnlyFans when it launched.

Dannii Harwood
Hi everyone, my name’s Dannii. Welcome to my OnlyFans page. Come and join me. Have a little chat. Come and see all my sexy selfies. And let’s have some fun, boys. (kiss sound)

Alex Barker
But before we get to that part of the story, we have to tell you how she first met Tim Stokely. The mind behind OnlyFans.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Alex Barker
It all started about 12 years ago. Dannii was in her late twenties, making a living as a glamour model. And one day, a man called Tim walked into her life with a madcap plan to transform her into Goddess Danielle.

Patricia Nilsson
So can you tell us when and where you first met him?

Dannii Harwood
(laughs) He contacted me for a photo shoot, having seen me on TV, and he turned up in a Savile Row suit with a briefcase and a copy of the Financial Times under his arm. Just a bit. “Who is this guy?”

Patricia Nilsson
Tim was carrying a Financial Times because his father was a banker, his brother was a banker, and Tim may have become a banker too, if he didn’t have other interests he wanted to pursue. He was starting a new business, a fetish site called Glam Worship.

Dannii Harwood
He sort of looked like he was just about to go for a board meeting — not a photo shoot. He was young, a fairly good-looking guy and just very smart and very well-spoken. And he’s like, “Okay, Dannii, if you just like uhm to sit over there and uhm, he’s like, just look at the camera.” He was so underprepared. He was so nervous.

Alex Barker
This was Tim’s first shoot for Glam Worship. Dannii was the first model. He used his briefcase as a camera stand. And here’s the extraordinary part, the origins of OnlyFans can be traced straight back to the kink the website served — the fetish for financial domination. Out of the photo shoot would emerge Goddess Danielle. Her page told visitors it was the luckiest day of their pathetic existence.

Dannii Harwood
Girls would talk about financially dominating men. That’s what the fetish was. So the woman is in charge, and therefore they should give their money to the woman. And because they’re not worthy of that money.

Patricia Nilsson
Financial domination. The art of the findom is not something we have made up for a Financial Times podcast about money and porn, we promise.

Dannii Harwood
Hello slaves. Well, you’ve probably been watching me for quite a while now, haven’t you? Seeing me grow from strength to strength. Hmmm by now. I have lots of loyal, loyal followers. Lots of loyal, submissives.

Patricia Nilsson
Some people will literally pay for the thrill of becoming a financial slave. Tim would script scenarios for Dannii to perform to her fans or paypets.

Alex Barker
Dannii’s financial slaves never actually handed over all their money, even if they wanted to, they probably couldn’t. The tech was still clunky, almost hacked together. Dannii’s paypets could buy her stuff from an Amazon wish list or send checks to a numbered postbox. But the paypets could never get Goddess Danielle’s personal attention. They couldn’t ask for her custom videos or directly fill her bank account with money.

Patricia Nilsson
The flaws were obvious. Tim launched other ventures, hoping to solve them — many other ventures. And after some painful trial and error in 2016, something new came together a site that actually worked — OnlyFans. A platform that combined interaction, tailor-made content, and the direct connection between the fan and the performer, including, yes, payment with OnlyFans taking a 20 per cent cut. Danny was one of the first to hear Tim’s idea.

Dannii Harwood
It’s like so people can tip you on that. I was like, what? They can tip you. I was like, yeah. I was like, okay, that’s a game changer.

Alex Barker
This was the start of a new era. If video streaming made porn free, OnlyFans was one of the sites that began to turn the tide. People were paying for porn again, actually getting their credit cards out and not just to pay pornographers, a studio or a website owner. They were paying the performers direct.

Patricia Nilsson
It was a slow start. But as new features were introduced partly on Dannii’s advice, the money started rolling in. Through OnlyFans, Dannii found a way to tap her Instagram and Twitter following.

Dannii Harwood
I went from earning one month between three and $6,000. My next earnings was 22,000.

Alex Barker
Tim asked Dannii to spread the word, so she spoke with friends at the Glamour TV channel where she performed.

Dannii Harwood
Girl, there’s this website, you have to join it, you know. Look at my bank statement. Look at the statement. This is what I’m being paid. This is what you could earn. They were like, “wow.” So quickly signed them up.

Patricia Nilsson
Dannii told us that performers started leaving because they were earning so much money from their OnlyFans accounts and keeping most of it.

Dannii Harwood
Going into the changing room one day and my boss had put these posters up and the change and removed saying that you’re not allowed to film any content for OnlyFans otherwise you’re gonna get the sack. They hated it.

Patricia Nilsson
Dannii says she eventually became the first to have a million-dollar page. To her, and for many established performers, the control OnlyFans provided was a sort of liberation. It gave them freedom.

Alex Barker
And the power that comes with money. They were being paid well enough to have leverage in the industry, something that in an age of free porn was sorely lacking.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Patricia Nilsson
Today, Dannii is still on the platform, not as Goddess Danielle, but under another name. She crowned herself “the queen of OnlyFans.” After all these years, she is still friends with the Stokely family. And that’s who we spoke with next. That’s after the break.

Act two: The Stokelys

[car engine sound]

Alex Barker
We hopped in a car with our producer, Pete Sale, and headed to Bishop’s Stortford, a rural commuter town to the northeast of London. It’s near the home of the Stokelys but not a typical spot for a company headquarters.

Peter Sale
Patricia, where are we going and why?

Patricia Nilsson
I don’t even know how to pronounce it. Bishop’s Stort . . . 

Peter Sale
No, no. (laughter) Great start. Podcast’s gone already.

Patricia Nilsson
We’re in the car. We’re on our way to meet up with Tim and Guy Stokely. We are walking past the OnlyFans headquarters which are in a converted barn called the Fish Barn. It looks like the south of Sweden, (laughter) but we’re just next to us are a couple of grain silos. It feels pretty rural.

Alex Barker
There’s a thatched roof over there. (laughter)

Peter Sale
It’s not what you expect.

Patricia Nilsson
This does not make me think out of content.

Alex Barker
We were greeted by the founder, Tim Stokely, and taken to a conference room overlooking a pond.

Tim Stokely
My first podcast.

Alex Barker
Is it?

Tim Stokely
Yeah, yeah.

Patricia Nilsson
Tim doesn’t often do recorded interviews. He has a bit of a playboy image in the press. His Instagram is full of glam shots of Ibiza and sharp-cut suits. But when we met him, that’s not how he came across at all. He was almost shy, hardly the guy that was once called “the king of homemade porn.”

Alex Barker
He first ended up in the adult industry, in part because the financial crash hit the job market in the city of London. Since he couldn’t follow his father and brother into banking, he tried something else. Starting Internet businesses from scratch, lots of his ideas failed miserably. But the ones in the adult business pointed him in the right direction.

Tim Stokely
A lot of the models we were working with were getting inundated with private requests asking to produce these tailored custom videos.

Patricia Nilsson
The seed of OnlyFans was planted. When OnlyFans launched, it was intended to be for everyone. There was no home page with porn stars, no search function to find them — there still isn’t. It was really designed to be an add-on service for the social media profiles that people already had. It allowed them to monetise their online following. But the creators, musicians or influencers or fitness instructors had to bring their own fanbase with them, and the first ones to do it were the porn stars.

Tim Stokely
I think the adult industry is typically ahead of the curve when it comes to new tech and I think content behind a paywall model really, really suited.

Alex Barker
How did you raise the money for it?

Tim Stokely
That was my father, Guy.

Alex Barker
Guy Stokely is a former merchant banker. If Tim is an unlikely pornographer, Guy is a complete fish out of water. Before OnlyFans, Guy was retired. He’s mild-mannered and ever so polite.

Guy Stokely
Tim phoned me and said, “I’ve got this really good idea, dad.”

Tim Stokely
 . . . and I kind of explained the premise of paid social media.

Guy Stokely
And he told me about it and I said, “yeah, that’s interesting.”

Patricia Nilsson
Picture that thought bubble coming from Guy’s head. “Oh, God, not again.”

Tim Stokely
There was a healthy amount of skepticism. Got invested in some of the previous platforms. Some had gone really well, some really badly. After many attempts to convince him, I remember Guy saying, okay. . . 

Guy Stokely
Okay, but this is the last one.

Patricia Nilsson
The early days for Tim were a hard slog. He sent hundreds of emails to performers and influencers trying to explain how much money they could make on OnlyFans.

Tim Stokely
I remember receiving one email from one influencer saying, “this is hands-down the most stupid business idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Alex Barker
OnlyFans launched in 2016. One thing that really put the wind in its sails was a clever referral program giving creators a cut of other people’s earnings if they brought them to the platform. Guy thought Tim’s goal of half a million pounds revenue in 2017 was totally ridiculous. They ended up with £2.4 million. A lot of the creators were adult performers and sitting with the Stokelys, that’s something you can easily forget. They don’t seem like porn people. Mentioned nudity and Guy almost starts to blush.

Guy Stokely
I didn’t think of it as being adult. I wasn’t interested in adult, but it was about supporting Tim.

Patricia Nilsson
This was genuinely a family business. Tim was CEO and Guy, the chief financial officer and supportive father. Tim’s sister and his two brothers were involved too. But then in 2018, at a point when OnlyFans was growing fast and showing it had real potential, the Stokelys did something surprising. They decided it was time to bring in an outside investor. They sold OnlyFans but stayed on as the executive team. Within a year of selling, their platform just exploded in popularity.

Clips about OnlyFans
OnlyFans is massively a part of the pop culture Zeitgeist right now.

Cardi B is on the platform. You have Chris Brown.

Now why are you tipping the switch, man? I think almost out of OnlyFans, Please do it, Loni Love. Michael B Jordan’s mustache.

Patricia Nilsson
Beyoncé, even name-dropped OnlyFans in a song.

Song playing
Hips Tik-Tok when I dance. On that demon time, she might start an OnlyFans.

Alex Barker
During the pandemic, it reached two million creators and 180 million users. A significant proportion of them were buying or selling porn. OnlyFans gave the tired old porn industry a new lease of life and everything on the site was behind a paywall, so much harder for children to access. But with the success came a lot of bad press for Tim. There were, of course, stereotypes about the bling Essex man making millions from porn. But also unease over OnlyFans normalising pornography, making it seem just like any other career.

Patricia Nilsson
A lot of men and women saw the huge payouts to top porn stars and thought, “I can give this a try.” But most couldn’t build a big enough following, and some probably realised porn wasn’t something you can just dabble in and regretted trying. Anyway, it’s fair to say OnlyFans really caught a cultural moment and courted plenty of controversy. We, of course, focused on the business side and the money. What you need to understand is what makes OnlyFans different. It succeeded not just because it could take money, but because it could pay it out.

Alex Barker
It built a financial bridge from fans’ credit cards straight to the bank accounts of creators. The bigger OnlyFans became, the more its reputation was associated with a porn revival and the more nervous banks got moving its money around the world. So nervous, one bank even stopped providing a personal bank account to Tim’s brother, a former banker, just because he was involved in running OnlyFans.

Tim Stokely
It’s a very strange way to act, but it was, you know, that’s what happened.

Patricia Nilsson
Then in the summer of 2021, the dam burst.

Alex Barker
OnlyFans, the platform that changed the adult industry, announced it was going to ban porn. Performers, we’re totally stunned.

News clip
Only fans will prohibit the posting of any content containing sexually explicit conduct.

News clip
That leaves a lot of people worried about what’s going to happen to the at least tens of thousands of creators on the platform who particularly during the pandemic, have made a lot of money from the safety of their homes.

Alex Barker
Think back to the decision to ban explicit content. And yeah, what were you trying to achieve when you first made that announcement?

Tim Stokely
Well, it certainly wasn’t a strategic move.

Alex Barker
Really?

Tim Stokely
Yeah, absolutely. We here, we have to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to creators globally each month. You know, when you have to move that amount of money, you depend upon large investment banks. And we’ve seen an increasing amount of wires has been flagged with some investment banks citing things like reputational risk.

Patricia Nilsson
The precise trigger of their decision remains unclear. Here, Tim is describing the choice as a practical matter. His company’s transfers were being flagged, marked down for extra checks by banks moving their money around the world. A lot of banks don’t want to be associated with porn. The abrupt announcement completely threw the industry. The uproar from performers was deafening. Big stars or less well-known performers like Peppermint and Dusty, they relied on only fans for their livelihoods, and they were furious.

Alex Barker
And after a week of mayhem, OnlyFans reversed its decision. Porn went from banned to okay again, all inside seven days.

News clip
People who earn money on the website only fans may have a bad case of whiplash tonight.

News clip
What a walk back. I guess the question is, has the damage already been done? Some users really saw this as a move of OnlyFans selling out. OnlyFans said its original decision to ban porn was due to pressure from banking and payment services, but now it has secured assurances necessary to keep things as is.

Alex Barker
To everyone watching the handling look totally botched. It was mocked on social media and compared to Domino’s trying to ban pizza. The lack of any convincing explanation at the time also fed all sorts of conspiracy theories.

Patricia Nilsson
Tim actually insists the reversal was enabled by an interview he did with me over the phone last year. It was for a piece in the Financial Times that ran straight after the ban, where he names some of the banks, causing OnlyFans problems. After that article was published, he said the mood changed. The banks gave him the assurances he needed.

Alex Barker
Do you have regrets on how you handled it, looking back?

Tim Stokely
Not on how it was handled. I don’t think we had much of a choice, but I deeply regret the amount of concern and anxiety it caused.

Alex Barker
I mean, for a lot of people it was like being cut down at the knees. And why should they trust OnlyFans not to do this again?

Tim Stokely
Well, I, you know I think what this put a spotlight on was the discriminatory policies within the banking system. And that’s where the focus is, I think.

Alex Barker
Tim here is talking about banks making life difficult for companies just because they’re associated with adult content. The problem isn’t necessarily allowing porn on a platform. Twitter, for instance, permits adult content on parts of its platform and hosts lots of porn without much trouble. The issues start when a company has so much porn or makes so much money from porn, it starts to look like a porn company. After that, basic finance dries up. Banking becomes harder and a lot more expensive. There are lots of people in the porn industry who find it hard to believe that OnlyFans got cold feet for a mundane reason like financing. They are still convinced the whole porn ban fiasco was actually a publicity stunt. Some cunning plan.

Tim Stokely
That’s entirely false. I think we’ve perhaps been victim to some, you know, unfair reporting, which, you know, has led to some criticism that is based on moral outrage rather than evidence or facts or statistics.

Patricia Nilsson
Couldn’t you have had that conversation with your financial partners before? You know, if they were all happy. Couldn’t you have gone to your financial partners and said we might have it changed?

Guy Stokely
Could we have handled it in a different way? Yes, of course we could. But we’re happy with where we ended up.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Patricia Nilsson
At the end of our interviews, the Stokelys took us to their office and there was another brother wearing a woolly jumper that looked like an early Christmas present. There were ducks wandering around the patio, cricket trinkets on the desks. It seemed just a setting for a charming family business, but for OnlyFans . . . 

Alex Barker
 . . . something didn’t quite seem right, and it wasn’t. We’ll be right back.

Act three: Reading the fine print

Alex Barker
Within three weeks of us visiting, the Stokelys had left OnlyFans. Tim stepped down as chief executive and Guy and the rest of the family followed.

Patricia Nilsson
Just like that, the Stokelys had gone. We’ll admit it, we were confused. We called them to ask what happened, we didn’t get much of an answer. Now the story of the Stokelys and OnlyFans that you heard earlier, those are all true. The family business, the way OnlyFans democratised porn. But we later learned that was only one side of the story. Like looking at a movie set from a single camera. It didn’t explain why the Stokelys left OnlyFans or that crazy hokey cokey over banning porn or why they sold their company when it was doing so well in 2018? To figure out what was going on, we need to rewind and look out of shot.

Alex Barker
And that starts with the current owner, the guy who bought OnlyFans from the Stokelys in 2018. Now, plenty of investors have been tempted to buy OnlyFans over the years — mainstream investors. But when the Stokelys sold, it was to a man called Leo Radvinsky, a 40-year-old Ukrainian-American who made his fortune in the porn industry. We’d love to have spoken to him, but he declined. He’s not one for publicity. Here’s what Tim told us about Leo when we visited.

Tim Stokely
You know, he’s been absolutely a joy to work with and such a smart guy and is a huge reason we are where we are.

Patricia Nilsson
Remember in 2018, OnlyFans was a fast-growing business, but it hadn’t really caught fire. The good times were ahead. So why did the Stokelys give it all up to Leo Radvinsky. Tim was cagey with his reasons for selling OnlyFans, but he did give us a few clues.

Tim Stokely
I mean, what I can tell you is it’s one of the best decisions we made. He’s very kind of hands-on and adds so much value to the technical part of the business. And then he also works, you know, to an extent on the payments side.

Patricia Nilsson
We didn’t think much of it at the time. Leo knows tech. He made his career running a live video porn site called My Three Cams. But when we listened back, we realised the intriguing part was the second half of that sentence. Tim said Leo also worked on the payments side.

Alex Barker
Which raises one blindingly obvious question, why was Leo, the seasoned pornographer, helping a family of bankers with payments? So, you know, I’ve been looking for an explanation of why the Stokelys sold OnlyFans. I think I found something, but I have a little confession to make.

Patricia Nilsson
Yeah, what’s that.

Alex Barker
One of my new habits is reading the terms and conditions on porn sites. The legal fine print.

Patricia Nilsson
Well, you’ve sent me one. Should I read it out loud?

Alex Barker
Go ahead.

Patricia Nilsson
So says you may not create upload, post, display or distribute user content that is sexually explicit.

Alex Barker
It doesn’t sound like a porn site, right?

Patricia Nilsson
No.

Alex Barker
Well, those are the original terms and conditions for OnlyFans from 2016.

Patricia Nilsson
So no porn. OnlyFans didn’t allow explicit content from the start.

Alex Barker
Nothing. Exactly. And it more or less stayed that way for a year and a half after OnlyFans launched, even though there was lots of porn on the site. I mean, this really transformed how I understood the whole OnlyFans venture. It may well have been crucial to the entire business model. It was claiming to be porn-free, and if you don’t have porn, you don’t have payment trouble. The Stokelys could benefit from easier, cheaper payment processing. They’d get like any mainstream platform.

Patricia Nilsson
Well, that’s a big advantage in the porn business. I mean, OnlyFans stood out when it launched because it only took a 20 per cent cut of a performer’s earnings when most campsites take an average of 50 per cent or more. So one of the reasons they could offer that was cheaper payment processing. And so the Stokelys just sidestepped higher costs by denying there was any porn on the site?

Alex Barker
Exactly.

Patricia Nilsson
It’s amazing. So when did they admit that there was porn on the site?

Alex Barker
In the spring of 2018. And that’s when the Stokelys introduced a new adult payment processor. A different financial service came in to handle all the explicit accounts. Presumably a much more expensive payment processor. And people in the industry told me that OnlyFans, around this time, began to struggle with payments in particular. And within six months, hey presto, the Stokelys sold OnlyFans. And remember, Leo is known in the porn business as a master of payments. You had to be, to run a porn campsite. I mean, there’s lots of micropayments. It’s just in the nature of the business. And suddenly, you think of all that? Everything that Tim said about selling to Leo just made a lot more sense. When the payments side got more difficult, they had to turn to an expert.

Tim Stokely
What I can tell you is it’s one of the best decisions we made. It’s not much value in speculating where we’d be if we hadn’t done it.

Patricia Nilsson
We’d love to ask Leo how he does it, how he keeps his banks and payment processors onside. But like most of porn’s biggest money-makers, he’s not the type to give interviews. Neither would his new management team, who are usually very media friendly. The reason is partly Leo’s vision for the company. He came from the porn world, but he always saw the mainstream potential of OnlyFans. For him, that’s OnlyFans’ future — fitness instructors and musicians.

Alex Barker
And that explains a lot. When we talk to the Stokelys about the decision to ban porn last August. It never seemed like they really believed in it. In reality, it was Leo’s call. To him, the mainstream promise of OnlyFans was not worth risking for porn, however much money it made. He has visions of bringing in mainstream investors or even floating OnlyFans on the stock market. OnlyFans has promised not to ditch porn performers again. People like Peppermint and her husband Dusty, who we heard from earlier in this episode.

Peppermint
I mean, they say one thing and then a week later they say another thing. And it makes one very, very hard to trust what’s happening with the site itself. When is this going to happen again? So it makes it, you know, very precarious.

Patricia Nilsson
Peppermint and dusty stuck with only fans because it’s an important stream of income and it didn’t seem right to be cutting off loyal subscribers.

Peppermint
It’s felt in some ways like going back to an abusive partner. You know, you don’t wanna really stay there, but you’re kind of stuck, you don’t have a lot of choice. I’m hoping that it means only good things, you know, maybe Tim Stokely was tired of having to deal with the credit card companies and all the legislation and the rules, so handing the reins over to somebody else could possibly be a good thing. That’s my hope, indeed.

Alex Barker
There is a weird parallel between all the people we’ve spoken to and told you about in this episode. Peppermint and Dusty, the Stokely family, and Leo Radvinsky, the pornographer, trying to go mainstream. You could even make a link to Dannii, the goddess of financial domination, who had no way to be tipped by her paypets. What all their stories taught us was this: if you’re not the master of your businesses’ payment system, very simply means somebody else is in charge.

Patricia Nilsson
OnlyFans empowered performers by giving them a way to receive direct payments from fans. But because OnlyFans doesn’t control its own payment system, it is caught in a bind. It is reliant on porn-shy payment companies on one side to take in money and on porn-shy banks on the other to pay it out. That’s where the real power lies — a finance world that seems to have a muddled and bizarre relationship with the porn industry and the money it brings.

Alex Barker
What does this all mean for porn today? That’s on next episode, the season finale.

Stoya
Instead of the government defining what is and is not considered sexually acceptable, it’s a corporation.

Patricia Nilsson
Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Patricia Nilsson.

Alex Barker
And me, Alex Barker. Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer. Edith Roussillon is our associate producer. Our editor is Karen Shawkurji. Amanda Kay Wong is our engineer. Music composition by Pascal Wise. Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez Casado. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein.

Patricia Nilsson
Special thanks to Renée Kaplan and Roula Khalaf at the Financial Times. And Mia LaBelle, Layton Moreland, Justine Lange, Julia Barton, and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Thank you to Similarweb for providing our web traffic data.

Alex Barker
If you want more from the FT, try our new app featuring eight essential stories every weekday. Search FT Edit in the iPhone App Store. Your first month is free and it’s $0.99 a month the six months after that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]