OnlyFans is an amazing business that seems to scare off investors

• OnlyFans has an amazing business model: It sells subscriptions to user-generated porn.
• That means the company generates enormous profits.
• But those profits aren’t enough to entice mainstream investors, so OnlyFans has struggled to find a buyer.

OnlyFans is an internet business marvel: low costs, huge profits, nonstop growth. But every time it goes looking for mainstream capital, it runs into the same problem: Investors are scared of buying into a porn company.

Our newest reminder of this tension comes from the Financial Times, which reports that OnlyFans’ parent company is close to an investment deal with Architect Capital that would value it north of $3 billion — down meaningfully from previous targets.

It’s one of a series of data points about OnlyFans’ difficulty in attracting investors. In 2022, it took a run at going public via a SPAC deal that never materialized. In 2025, it was trying to sell itself for $8 billion.

Details and deal structures keep changing in all of these would-be transactions — now the company is reportedly talking about selling a minority investment instead of a controlling stake, for instance. The fact that owner Leonid Radvinsky died in March from cancer has also complicated sales talks. I’ve asked OnlyFans and Architect Capital for comment.

But the main throughline is that many mainstream investors have looked at OnlyFans’ numbers, which describe an amazing business, and concluded that they’re better off staying away. The reputational, regulatory, and legal risks of owning a user-generated porn subscription business have convinced them it’s not worth it.

And again, you can’t overstate just how impressive OnlyFans’ numbers are, which you can see for yourself in British filings. In 2024, it posted a staggering pretax profit of $684 million on revenue of $1.4 billion; people familiar with the company’s business tell me those numbers spiked again in 2025.

As I noted a couple of years ago, that performance comes because OnlyFans is built on a simple and effective business model: “It has connected one of the internet’s favorite things (porn), with one of its favorite content strategies (getting users to create all of its content, for free), and one of its favorite monetization strategies (payments and subscriptions).”

And that made OnlyFans incredibly lucrative for Radvinsky, who took out $700 million in dividend payments in a single year.

Let’s compare that to Match Group, another internet business based on subscriptions and user-generated content, minus the porn: In 2025, the company behind dating apps like Tinder and Hinge posted similar pretax profits of $746 million — albeit on revenue of $3.5 billion. But investors value the company north of $8 billion.

That gap in valuation makes for a pretty easy read: If OnlyFans weren’t a platform best-known for adult content, it could be worth much more. Instead, it looks like it will remain a hugely profitable business with meaningful porn penalty.