The late owner of streaming platform OnlyFans was paid more than $700m (£513m) in dividends before his death from cancer earlier this year.

Fenix International Ltd, the British company that owns OnlyFans, made $714m in profit before tax last year, it said in its annual report. This is an increase of 5% from 2024.

The site hosts a range of subscription-based content from cooking to fitness videos, but it is best known for pornography and is credited with transforming online adult content by encouraging personal connection between sex workers and subscribers.

Its owner Leonid Radvinsky, who died earlier this year aged 43, bought the site from its British founders in 2018.

OnlyFans employs just 47 people. Companies with such high profits rarely have such small staff – for example, British retail giant Marks and Spencer, which employs over 65,000 people, made £671m in profit last year.

Fenix International’s company results show that it paid dividends of $535m for the year ending 30 November 2025, with further dividends payments totalling $174m between then and 26 March 2026.

Radvinsky, who was born in Ukraine and raised in the US, died on 23 March. The company is now owned by his widow, Yekaterina ‘Katie’ Chudnovsky.

OnlyFans surged in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic, landing Radvinsky on Forbes’ annual list of billionaires just three years later.

The site is known for the way it encourages creators and fans to connect through livestreams, personalised messages, and direct requests for custom-made photos and videos.

In return for hosting the material, OnlyFans takes a 20% share of all payments.

The site had 132 million paying subscribers and 2.5 million active creators in 2025.

The boom in size and popularity under Radvinsky’s ownership also brought scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators over its adult content — a recent BBC Three documentary uncovered allegations of exploitation, coercion and violence committed against OnlyFans creators.

In 2024, British regulators launched an investigation into whether children were accessing porn, an issue that the company at the time blamed on a technical issue.

Ofcom ultimately dropped that probe, but it fined the firm about £1m for failing to respond accurately to its requests for information about the measures it had in place to check the age of its users, who in theory must be 18 or over.

Creators have also debunked the narrative that making explicit videos on the site is a get-rich-quick scheme.

Keily Blair, the chief executive of OnlyFans, said on Tuesday that the company had paid over $30bn to creators since launching a decade ago.

“OnlyFans provides real opportunities to real people by creating a safe, regulated space where people can monetise their content with a global fan base,” she said.

“As a UK-based business we have also made a significant contribution to the UK economy, paying over £600 million in corporate taxes from 2016 to date.”