There’s No Slowing OnlyFans Growth – For Now, At Least

The Financial Times, one of the most respected financial newspapers in the world, has announced its ranking of the fastest-growing companies in Europe – and OnlyFans has made the list.

The list looks at the top 1000 companies for growth – based on their revenue in 2022 against their revenue in 2019 – and OnlyFans placed 73^rd in the continent, with an absolute growth rate of 2,143.3%.

The statistics are pretty crazy. The company made 43 million Euros in 2019 in revenue, but has managed to increase that to become a billion-Euro company, with revenue in 2022 of 1,015,474,926 Euros.

In fact, if you want the top 1,000 fastest-growing companies by 2022 revenue, OnlyFans is third. To be clear, that doesn’t mean it’s the company with the third-highest revenue in Europe, but of the fastest-growing companies in Europe, it is the third-biggest.

The number of employees is fascinating too – in 2019 the company only had 11 employees, but that’s now grown to 1,337. Understandable when you consider the scale of the platform and just how many creators need to be supported.

The numbers don’t lie – OnlyFans is on an upward curve and continues to grow at a huge rate.

But what does the future hold for the platform – is it likely to maintain that level of growth, will it plateau, or is it shaping up for a big crash in the future.

And as a content creator, how does the OnlyFans success impact you?

Let’s dive in for a look.

Is OnlyFans’ Growth A Good Thing For Content Creators?

Anytime a company gets bigger, it should have positive repercussions for the employees. But then OnlyFans creators aren’t employees – they are essentially customers of the platform. Think of OnlyFans as a service that allows you to share your content with fans, and make money.

Still, the same logic should apply, right? A more successful company would be a good thing for customers since it shows that the company is on a sound footing?

Well, yes and no.

It’s good to know that OnlyFans is not going to fold anytime soon, and that it’s making huge sums of money. But you should want to see that money then invested into improving the service.

And we’re not sure OnlyFans is going to do that. In fact, we’re not entirely sure if it’s possible. Because what isn’t reported in the statistics is the number of creators on OnlyFans, but that’s also growing exponentially, especially now that AI is being used to make it possible to manage accounts with even less work.

More creators = a huge amount more data storage needed, and so for that reason alone OnlyFans might not be able to actually improve anything – that revenue might be swallowed up by the running costs just to keep things ticking over as thousands upon thousands of hours of video content is uploaded, along with millions of photos.

Plus, the company will actually want to make a profit, and as much as possible. So as long as OnlyFans is ‘working’, they’ll keep costs to a minimum where they can.

How’s The Future Looking?

It’s really hard to say how the future is looking for OnlyFans, because we know the history of the company. Financially, things are sound right now – well, better than sound. Things are definitely rosy in the bank account for OnlyFans in the short- to mid-term.

But does that mean OnlyFans will continue to grow? It’s not easy to predict that.

AI will play a huge part in the future of content creation and it’s already starting to gain traction. Not so much with fake creators but with the way creators are able to maximize their content output through the use of AI chatbots to answer messages for them, or write posts. AI could be a huge time saver, which will in turn mean creators can make more money through producing more new content, which will help fund the growth of OnlyFans.

Remember that OnlyFans makes its money from creators – it needs them to be successful.

However, we also know from its past that OnlyFans would like to go mainstream, even if that means banning adult content. They’ve tried once before, to a huge backlash. That would only be worse if they tried again because they now have even more creators relying on the platform for their careers.

And yet, OnlyFans’ owners know that some banking systems and institutions won’t touch them while they’re still affiliated with adult content. They likely want to go public and float on the stock markets but they can’t right now, and it’s a balance trying to keep their creator base happy whilst also getting the big financial institutions to buy in.

If OnlyFans does continue to allow adult content, it won’t be able to grow at the same rate forever. There’s a chance that it will grow still for a few more years, as adult content creation becomes more socially acceptable for both creators and fans – there are still some taboos which will cause people to be wary of subscribing to creators, but those are waning.

It will eventually plateau, and at that point, we may see things shake up a little, but for now, OnlyFans seems like a safe place for content creators to work and earn their money.

But we’d certainly have a contingency plan in place…

A Rising Tide?

The phrase “a rising tide floats all boats” could be relevant here, because the continued success of OnlyFans could be beneficial to its competitors. We’ve seen OnlyFans rivals such as Fanvue continue to grow at pace, along with new fan platforms entering the market.

Just because OnlyFans is seeing huge revenue, that doesn’t mean it’s taking that money away from other companies, and there are potentially some fantastic opportunities for competitor platforms to share the limelight a little and grow their own user bases.

And then, they can become disruptors by continuing to offer a genuine alternative to OnlyFans – not just a different brand name, but actually offering something different.

That could just be as simple as the reassurance that adult content will never be banned. Or it might be something like Fanvue’s commitment to AI and other innovative technologies, giving creators that investment into new features to make their work even easier.

If you’re a creator, it’s probably worth exploring the different options out there in case you do ever need to move platform. Having a plan in place could make the transition seamless – and maybe you’ll even want to jump before OnlyFans were to push you.

Final Word

We absolutely don’t want to be negative about OnlyFans – the fact that the company has made the FT’s list of fastest-growing companies is a huge achievement and a sign of the success that the platform is having.

But we would always advise some level of caution for creators – don’t think that this means OnlyFans will be around forever. It’s a business that exists to make money, and it will take whatever decisions necessary to keep doing that, even if it means attempting to get rid of adult content again.

In case that does happen, make sure you’ve at least got an idea of what your next steps would be, and how you would promote any move to a new platform with your fans.