OnlyFans is the name of an online platform and application created in 2016 and mainly known for content for an older audience. It’s a platform where people can offer clips and photos to their subscribers for a monthly subscription fee. And the main difference between OnlyFans and many other social networks is that this content can be very explicit.
Sounds funny, Onlifans was created as a family business. Tim Stockley founded the company with his older brother Thomas by taking out a £10,000 loan from his father, Guy Stockley. And that was the last time a father agreed to finance his sons.
Tom Shockley was not a newbie in the industry. In 2011, he founded GlamWorship.com, a site devoted to BDSM, and later tried to launch Customs4U.com, a platform where visitors could pay registered stars to post personalized content. In fact, this was the idea behind OnlyFans.
The official idea of OnlyFans is to help authors monetize their content. In reality, the business model is to sell photo and video content banned on other platforms. Much of the demand for OnlyFans is created by the fact that Instagram doesn’t allow 18+ content to be posted.
Two years after the launch of the platform, in 2018, 75% of the project was acquired by Leonid Radvinsky, an American businessman with Ukrainian background. Radvinsky is the owner of MyFreeCams, one of the most popular webcam model platforms. And this is when the “delicate specialization” on OnlyFans started prevailing. In the beginning, the platform was thought to be another normal social media with content-exchange functions.
The site continued to grow when performer Cardi B. and actress/singer Bella Thorne joined the platform. After Beyoncé mentioned OnlyFans in her remix of the Savage in April 2020, visitor numbers skyrocketed. Bella Thorne set an OnlyFans record by earning over one million USD within 24 hours of joining the platform in August 2020 and over two million in less than 1 week.
Yes, there are plenty of musicians, fitness trainers, and even chefs on OnlyFans, but still, the main thing about OnlyFans is the lack of censorship and the ban on nudity. And more than that, the platform owes its incredible popularity to the Covid-19 pandemic because even though erotic materials is already popular on the Internet, a 500% increase in users in one year would hardly be expected under other conditions.
OnlyFans’ revenues exceed those of MindGeek, the behind sites like Pornhub and YouPorn. The platform became kind of a trendsetter for the new format of social media. Although in 2022 OnlyFans shocked the world by banning all explicit content, as the banks, financing it was worried about its reputation. However, the ban didn’t last long, as the owners saw Strong public opposition and traffic outflow.
Even after the pandemic, OnlyFans keeps attracting millions of visitors and lets content creators earn hundreds of thousands of USD for their photos and videos, which sometimes can look innocent.
What is OnlyFans?
OnlyFans is a UK-based paid content subscription platform, the main idea of which is that content creators can earn money from users who subscribe to their content (fans). The service has three broad categories of content creators: entertainment industry for those over 18, fitness experts and musicians. Monetization allows content creators to receive funding directly from their fans every month, as well as from tips and the pay-per-view function.
The very first logo of OnlyFans was created in 2016, and featured a simple yet bright blue and black color palette, with a plain background, usually white. It was an inscription in two styles: the “Only” in a full-shaped sans-serif font, with thin lines, and black color, and the bold smooth “Fans” in a custom cursive font, in light blue. The tail of the “F” overlapped the top of the bar of the “Y”. Another element of the logo was a small blue image of a lock, placed inside the circle of the letter “O”. It was a graphical representation of privacy and maybe even a mystery, which you can open by getting a subscription.
The redesign of 2021 kept blue as the main color of the OnlyFans logo palette but added to the light shade from the previous version a smoother and deeper one. Black was completely gone from the color scheme now. The emblem, set on the left from the logotype is now formed by two stylized letters, “O” and “F”, glued one to another, and forming some kind of a winged wheel. As for the inscription, it was rewritten in a simple yet bold and clean sans-serif typeface, with the “Only” part in a lighter shade of blue, and the “Fans” — in a darker one.
The OnlyFans symbol, introduced with the redesign of 2021, drew much criticism and even ridicule. The “winged donut” in two shades of blue looks like a Pegasus wheel and, according to the designers’ idea, is a stylized “OF” monogram. The round part of the symbol is executed in a lighter hue, with the winged “F,” overlapping it on the right, set in a darker hue. The “feathers” on the wing are bold and smooth, evoking a sense of delicacy and tenderness, while the color palette of the graphical elements adds a feeling of reliability and protection.
Despite the redesign of 2021, the old icon of OnlyFans can still be seen on some websites. It is a bold lock in a circular outline, placed on a solid square with softened angles. The most common colors for this option are white on blue and blue on black.
As for the new icon, it only uses a blue and white color scheme, with the sky-blue and white “winged donut” drawn over a solid blue square. The icon looks bright and intense, making the arguable shape of the graphical element look more professional and stable.
The bold and bright badge of the OnlyFans platform has a logotype as the main element. The inscription in the title case has two capital letters, with the two words placed close to each other, with no extra space. The OnlyFans lettering is executed in a smooth and traditional sans-serif typeface, which is pretty close to such fonts as Gardenia Extra Bold and FF Meta Correspondence Std Bold.
As for the color palette of the OnlyFans visual identity, it is set in two shades of blue, which look fresh and cool. The blue color here represents privacy and security, also pointing to the reliability of the website and the professionalism of the team, standing behind it.