How, and why, I invented OnlyFans. In 2004.

One of the things I liked most about moving to Latvia was access to faster, cheaper internet than I could get in my previous home in Los Angeles. It allowed me, on January 10, 2007, to view the high-resolution 480p stream of Steve Jobs' keynote from the Moscone Center.

I had avoided roundups of the event like a sports fan, staying away from Daring Fireball until I could watch things “live”. I wanted to be wowed.

Jobs’ presentation started with an on-mic, throat clearing cough, something a perfectionist wouldn’t stumble into, making me think it was his way of calling the room, and world, to attention. We knew what was coming, rumours about an Apple phone had simmered for years, and it only took two minutes and twenty-eight seconds for Steve to make the now famous reveal.

“So… three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.

An iPod. A phone. And an internet communicator.

An iPod. A phone…

Are you getting it?”

We got it. The best phones of that era, like the Sony Ericsson then in my pocket, already had cameras, and a few high end models could record video. iPhone, with its enormous screen and magical interface, made even the latest new mobiles look archaic. Surely it was going to do everything any of them could and more.

My startup, SugarBank, could pivot. Throw everything into building for iPhone and abandon the nightmare of wrangling Macromedia Flash, the only universal way to get complicated functionality into web browsers back then.

I watched on, waiting for him to introduce the media capabilities we needed. Video recording via that gorgeous screen, GPS for image tagging, and a media editing suite like iLife people could use to edit recordings, but that part of the presentation never came^[1].

I didn’t know then that the device on stage was barely functional. That the announcement itself was only taking place to pre-empt the FCC, about to make iPhone public via mandatory regulatory filings. That limited as it was, the announced feature set encompassed everything Apple Computer could possibly do at the time. That they would, given a few more months to sprint, just about be able to make the features Steve had announced on stage a reality.

By the end of the announcement the writing was on the wall. We were out of money and out of time. SugarBank, the first monetised adult creator platform, wasn’t going to make it. Our last hope was gone, we were just too early.

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In 2003 creator platforms as we know them today, most notably in the form of YouTube, Patreon and OnlyFans, didn’t exist. Nor did social media, cloud services or apps. Putting content online meant building a website. For anyone born this century, the difference in difficulty between then and today, when it comes to making content and distributing it, is so vast it's worth enumerating.

Free blogging platforms existed, but Blogger, LiveJournal and others didn’t allow you to sell anything. To do that you could either hire a “webmaster” to build a site, at the cost of an employee; or buy a domain, pay for a server, write your pages, build a checkout, and contract with an online pay portal. With that done, at a cost in the low four figures over a couple of months, you could turn to promotion.

For people in the adult space things were harder still. The few companies that would do business with legal adult content, charged a premium for the privilege. If credit card fees were 5% in the mainstream, they were 20% for “porn”.

The average computer back then was a desktop, with a 1024 ⨉ 768 pixel resolution CRT monitor. This forced every design and typography choice, to work in a space equivalent to about one fifth of a modern phone’s screen. 60% of Americans were still getting online using phone lines at 56k, and the average “broadband” service via DSL, at 200k, was barely faster. The lucky few, about 1% of the population, could connect at 1-3Mbps using a cable modem or dedicated line. For perspective, on a 56k dialup connection, a single app icon on your phone could take 20 seconds to download. Most of using the web back then was waiting.

Making content required semi-professional equipment. The go-to camcorder of the day, a Canon XL-1s, cost $4,700, the equivalent of over $8,000 in 2025. You could spend less but “cheaping out” wasn’t actually cheap. Half decent cameras still cost $1,000 or more, and the difference in image quality between the 3-CCD capture of a prosumer unit, versus built-to-cost single-chip consumer options, was dramatic. Even kids shooting skate videos bought good cameras. People understood the choice to be between hiring someone with proper gear, buying it yourself, or accepting barely watchable results. Consumer camcorders with their grainy recording, lack of inputs, crappy sound, tiny batteries and plastic lenses just weren’t viable.

Prosumer camcorders also made editing easier. The XL-1s had a DV port based on the Firewire specification, it allowed digital camera–to–computer transfers without the generation loss, and expense, inherent in using analog capture cards. Those cards being another expense you couldn’t avoid if you used consumer grade equipment. Unfortunately as footage was recorded to tape the camera had to play it back in real time to export it. Hence an hour of video took an hour to move, and if you were employing an editor you paid their hourly rate for them to drink coffee and watch TV while “logging footage”, driving your costs even higher.

Once your standard definition 480p masterpiece was on your hard drive, each hour existed as a 13GB lump your PC could barely handle. Computers wheezed and steamed, fans screaming, as they did anything with such huge amounts of data. You’d sit, head in hands, as the sound of spinning rust hard drives clicking themselves to death, announced that you’d accidentally nudged a clip in your editing timeline. Minimising that pain meant spending $2,000 on a Power Mac G5 with 512MB of RAM and visiting a barber surgeon to fund the upgrade to 8GB. If that was too much, a top-of-the-range iMac with 1GB was "only" $2,500, but made for slower editing. As every computer was inadequate, professionals updated their PCs as fast as they could afford to, and it would be well over a decade until “watching the computer grind” wouldn’t be the majority of a video editor's day.

In the world of stills about 50% of cameras sold used film, whose superiority over early digital was inarguable. However everyone saw how fast digital cameras were improving, and professionals who could afford the cost of entry made use of them.

The adult space moved to digital even faster, because the difficulties of processing rude images through a film lab disappeared, and the relatively low quality of the output was tolerated. If you were delivering to the web, given the low resolution of monitors at the time, even a one megapixel image would fill a screen. Not needing to buy film and pay for processing, or scanning, made shooting digital dramatically cheaper. Decent film scanners, which don’t really exist in the modern world, cost as much as fast computers. More importantly unskilled photographers, of which the adult space had many, could “spray and pray” without having to pay to capture, process and scan their mistakes.

If you were lucky enough to own the best DSLR Canon then made, the EOS-1Ds, you could shoot 11 megapixel images, delivering a little more detail than a paused frame on a 4k streaming show. Poor noise performance meant shooting indoors required proper lighting, tripods and skill in addition to the $9,000 the body itself cost.

If you didn’t need such high resolution, and could make do with 6 megapixels, a Nikon D100 only cost $2,000. Late in 2003, Canon’s Digital Rebel broke the $1,000 barrier making it the cheapest digital camera with interchangeable lenses. A veritable bargain which briefly dominated amateur content production.

Before smartphones made everyone Henri Cartier-Bresson, even if you could afford to buy cameras, people making content usually hired professionals to take their photos. The amateur aesthetic we now accept, and shooters have been emulating since vile nepo-baby Terry Richardson made it mainstream, was niche. “Glamour” photography was self-evidently glamorous, and the idea that someone could take poorly lit photos and sell them was novel.

The amateur adult space did exist and have fans, but with the exception of the network centred on Carol Cox, famous people, or those with particularly unique skills or attributes, it wasn’t nearly as profitable or prestigious as the more glossy content. Outside the swingers community it was also much harder to attract an audience if you weren’t a viral novelty, or previously known from magazines or video. Danni Ashe, my old boss, had made a lot as a semi-amateur, but she built a name as a stripper and in softcore video, which made anything she did valuable to her fans.

If you’ve been keeping a tally, which is the point of this digression, you’ll note that gearing-up to make content required a four to five figure investment at the turn of the century, or at minimum enough money to hire professionals on an ongoing basis. Each cost contributing a constellation of barriers to entry that meant normal people never considered they could independently produce and publish content as a business. Even established models hesitated from launching their own websites because getting content for was a significant investment.

Then things began to change.

Apple, with its cutting edge design language, had made laptops desirable. Each week Carrie, Sarah Jessica Parker's lead character in Sex and the City spent the end of every episode using her PowerBook, and people thought Carrie was cool.

Owning a desktop meant giving over a corner of your living space to a beige box and monitor. Noisy, ugly, permanently on display, and spewing light into the darkness as you tried to sleep. Ownership was a compromise many people weren’t prepared to make.

Conversely you could use a laptop on Wi-Fi anywhere there was signal, and put it away once you were done, getting your table back. That wireless convenience made it easy to justify spending more to ditch dialup at home, upgrade to broadband, and invest in a wireless router. Carrie showed people what made laptops great.

People who’d previously bought the cheapest PC they could find in a big box store were now buying the coolest laptop they could afford, often based on its looks alone. Young people, who didn’t consider themselves “into technology” and who had balked at spending thousands on a computer, started doing so in significant numbers. As they did the average speed of the average computer, and the quality of its internet connection, jumped. The new market opening up was also different demographically; less dorky, more female, cooler.

In 2000 only 25% of computers sold were portable, by 2003 they represented more than half of all sales.

For many years USB webcams had been widely available and cheap, but in 2003 Apple shook things up when it released iSight. Through great industrial design they managed to turn something mundane into an $149 object of desire. People bought them even if there wasn’t much to use them for. Skype had launched earlier that year but wasn’t yet video capable. Apple was pushing video conferencing, but the main domestic use was mucking about making “video diaries” like every teenage character in every movie and TV show of the time.

All the pieces were in place and I saw an opportunity.

Working for Danni Ashe I’d met models who had bought their first bulky PC in order to view a website they’d paid to build. Now computers were becoming legitimately cool, and when coupled with a webcam contained all the tools necessary to get images and video online. The cost of content creation suddenly dropped from north of $10,000, to the thousand bucks that you were going to spend to check your HotMail anyway.

If I could make it easy for people to get images and video online, without the need to learn HTML or hire a webmaster, and provide the public with a way to pay for that content, then every interested exhibitionist could be a little Danni. I just needed to provide the tools. The image quality would be terrible, but I knew people had a high propensity to persevere if sexy pictures were on offer.

Having thought this way for over a year previously I eventually wrote a pitch and shared it with a very successful entrepreneur I’d been connected to via a friend. I sent my deck, the guy read it, said he wanted to talk, and emailed me tickets to Latvia. I flew out, we met, became partners on a handshake, and I moved to Riga. My third day in the city being the one on which I moved into my apartment.

I made all the classic errors typical of first-time founders and more. Particularly difficult for me was almost-on-the-spectrum perfectionism. I didn’t tend naturally toward “good enough”, or “minimum viable”, and would spend weeks trying to make things sparkle and work elegantly in ways that few people outside Apple and the BBC appreciated. I was producing work as if Jony Ive would be reviewing it, in a startup losing a race against a dwindling stack of cash. Half the time, the things I refined were invisible to anyone but me.

Working in isolation, within a bubble at my business partner’s HQ, I also fell into an old bad habit of trying to do everything myself before presenting a finished result. That tunnel-vision meant that I missed out on the insight of less obsessed people who’d be easily able to see things I was missing.

I also lacked the skill I needed to do the core engineering myself and didn’t realise I needed to learn it. Building a tech product where you are reliant on someone else to write the code who isn’t your partner is a losing proposition. You cannot be scrappy and agile when your most important employees are working for less than they’re worth, and are aware everything is riding on them. Key people need to have drunk the Kool-Aid and possess a motivating amount of stock.

My partner had seen the opportunity to buy into my idea cheaply by allowing me to use his staff and backend to launch SugarBank. Unfortunately those people weren’t aware they were supposed to be working for me and didn’t. It was real rookie shit.

I’d been coding since learning BBC BASIC and assembler aged 11, acquired the classic coding languages at university, and had taught myself enough HTML and CSS to build websites commercially, but I left the Flash, key to our model, to my “team”. In essence I was building from the outside in, and by the time I realised there was no engine in our plane we were about to be catapulted off an aircraft carrier. Lacking experience as a CEO, I behaved as an employee, and by the time I understood the problems we were underwater.

On top of that, a couple of weeks after reaching Europe my ailing sister Sarah, who I’d moved to be closer to, died. Alone in Latvia, with only work to focus on, I started to exhibit a lot of behaviours I now know to be consistent with clinical depression. I lived off cereal, apple pie and Cognac, working till four or five am each day and rising at noon. I ate exactly one hot meal a week, a burger from the local TGI Fridays, each Saturday. None of this seemed weird to me then.

The stuff I built during this time worked almost too well. I launched a blog to get an independent foothold in the adult space, under a gauzy pseudonym to distance myself from Danni.com. It drew an audience of potential customers and creators which grew so large, and got so much attention, that I was asked to, and did briefly, edit a blog for Nick Denton’s Gawker Media network. The SugarBank blog could have become a separate business in itself, were it not for my other plans.

I also started podcasting in 2005, publishing my debut episode a few weeks after Apple first made the format available in iTunes 4.9. That show, being about the adult industry but not adult in itself, proved a hit and garnered thousands of downloads. Another potential stand alone business if I’d kept it going till the great Covid podcast boom, when millions flowed to anyone with a pulse and listeners.

Both the blog and podcast were written and performed in character. A reflection of the attitudes of a time when “cool girls” pretended sexism and misogyny were funny, and “cool guys” were sexist and misogynistic. The TV show Entourage was popular and I liked it in particular because it was almost exactly how I, and my friends, were living before I left LA. Same places and same people at the real versions of the parties they recreated on screen. Hollywood is very accommodating of guys who know a lot of nude models and pornstars.

It’s all deeply embarrassing in retrospect but reflective of a world which had embraced Maxim magazine’s view of gender, coincidentally launched by Dennis Publishing my first employer, when I worked for them immediately after leaving University.

The success of these marketing vehicles distracted me from the fact that our key technology–a browser based streaming app in Flash–wasn’t keeping pace.

Flash, for those under 40, was how we used to make websites do anything much beyond displaying static images and video (a slight exaggeration but essentially true). You couldn’t access a webcam, record sound, or upload media without it. Entire corners of the web, and every site for every movie, was a huge lump of Flash which your computer would download and then run as an app in your browser. Flash was so widely installed that in 2007, when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, a lot of people said he’d doomed it as a platform because Flash was blocked. Everyone knew two things about Flash, it sucked, and you had to have it.

Smart people (and pornographers) in the 90s had managed to make streaming video at low quality work without Flash, using what they called “JPEG push”. It was exactly what it sounded like. Video delivered as a flip book of stills, switched out as fast as possible to create the illusion of movement. In ideal conditions with a bit of luck you could get 10-15 low res frames per second. It was barely watchable and only good enough to hold the attention of someone happy to tolerate poorly sync’d or totally absent audio, i.e. those watching important breaking news or adult content.

It worked well enough to make an enormous amount of money with pay-per-minute live video sites like MyFreeCams, but was a system people built for themselves every time they needed it, not a format.

“JPEG push” required custom software on the sender’s end to work and serious hardware. I knew how difficult it was to get someone to download code and install it. Even worse every content creator’s computer was different, and the odds on it working at all, let alone smoothly, were long. Danni.com used “JPEG push” and had a team of excellent engineers who spent a huge amount of time supporting it, even though we did everything from a studio we controlled, with hardware we could specify, fettle and update. Expecting content creators to install and successfully manage similar software was fantastic.

The cam sites made it work because they weren’t hosting independent creators at all. Performers then almost all worked for “studios” who would employ large numbers of women in less wealthy countries to work as employees. They ran out of big spaces filled with fake “bedrooms” wired for picture. Other people, often men, would write back to viewers in the text chat pretending to be the performer, who could see a small selection of messages translated for them locally or hear them, read aloud over a speaker. There was usually no sound. The studio would take most of the money and manage the technical aspects which could be significant. It was often as exploitative as you’d imagine.

Extant commercial video formats–like RealMedia and Quicktime–came with rules, hardware requirements, massive licensing fees and, as ever, an application you needed to install at the sender’s end. The upside was that the quality was higher and the well maintained software usually worked on a range of systems. The companies behind the formats weren’t (officially) open to working with adult content, and encoding files for delivery was so expensive computationally entire companies existed to do it for you. Those operations generally wanted nothing to do with adult material, and for those reasons and more, the easy solutions were impossible for us.

Hence Flash. We knew that if someone could view Homestar Runner or Peanut Butter Jelly Time our stuff would work. We wouldn’t need to direct people to download anything new, or require creators to buy expensive new computers. Visitors could just show up and see whatever people chose to post. It was the most seamless experience we could design in a world before YouTube, which also launched using Flash in 2005, and its clones made video seem simple.

The other major challenge we faced had nothing to do with technology at all, it was psychological. In 2003, as I worked on a content sharing platform with a store attached to it, Mark Zuckerberg was still stealing images of women from the Harvard servers to use in Facemash, his collegiate Hot or Not ripoff. Online dating was still considered “sad”, something you only attempted if you were incapable of meeting people in the real world. Many of the biggest online dating sites were still text only, for fear users would die of shame if identified.

Social networking didn’t really exist. Friendster, launched less than a year previously in 2002, was a sensation and in 2003 everyone was launching clones of it as fast as they could. LinkedIn, MySpace, Ryze, Tribe, Meetup and Hi5–all fast-followers, appeared within 12 months.

Classmates had been online since 1995 and had made two mistakes which limited its growth. A focus on people you went to school with, and charging for access. Friends Reunited, a UK based clone of Classmates, launched in 2000 and faced the triple headwinds of a British culture in which school students don’t graduate, an educational system where people of the same age don’t all leave school during the same year, and people for whom class reunions don’t exist and were thus indifferent about re-connecting with people they’d never see.

Friendster ultimately lost its lead because it couldn’t keep its servers online. Though Facebook captured the hype, had Friendster worked properly there would have been no room for MySpace and the world today might look different.

Their mistake was a business school case study in unintended consequences. They launched with a clever, but poorly realised, feature which showed you your network of connections updating as you met people. This calculation was done on their end, and they unwittingly built a rolling computational combinatorial explosion for their servers to swallow.

Combinatorial explosions happen when calculations quickly multiply to galactic sizes. The old story about the man who asks the King for a grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, double that on next, and so on with each subsequent square is an example. By the time you reach the end of the board you have more rice than the total global harvest for 900 years combined. Put another way that’s enough rice, laid end-to-end, to reach 14 light-years.

As people joined Friendster their servers were forced to make more and more calculations. Without cloud providers to rent hardware from they essentially launched DDOS attacks on themselves and began to crash, only coming back online when their new hardware arrived or people stopped visiting. It got so bad people made jokes about it and then, once the joking stopped, left for uglier and less fun Facebook as soon as they opened to people outside the Ivy League. By the time Friendster overcame their mistake they’d lost the spotlight. FaceBook and MySpace became the high and low end options. FaceBook being slick, limited and elite, MySpace being younger, more fun and creative.

What all these early social networks had in common was being limited to connections between people who knew each other. You needed a common intermediary in order to see someone’s page. The idea of sharing your life with strangers was novel and scary. All of the things people overlook today regarding privacy were front-of-mind then. It felt odd to allow anyone who chose to look you up, to see what you’d posted. Blogging was for the public, social media was personal.

Changing those norms took years. First with Twitter, who made text messaging public, and later with Facebook’s promotion of the social graph which included both people you knew and friends of friends. Before Facebook copied the “newsfeed” idea from Twitter the default setting on social sites, for everyone, everywhere, was privacy. Your wall on Facebook, where friends could post things for you and others to see, was private. People expected to be able to decide who saw their content.

My idea was therefore radical. I knew the real core of it was convincing all those Sex and the City fans with their new PowerBooks to start uploading. That required convincing them it was safe and sane to post their images in public.

Models and pornstars were the low hanging fruit. Already public figures via magazines, websites, music videos and Howard Stern, they were keen to automate their websites, but as the content that had made them famous was paid for, and owned by, other people, they needed a way to generate more independently. SugarBank would solve that for them, and they would draw clicks, but their numbers were too limited to sustain a big business and I’d need to offer them free access to get them to join.

To make money I needed new faces, and amateur content creators needed convincing. The problem was anonymity. Though many were open to being rich, adored, and nude in public, few wanted to be famous, naked and poor. Women in touch with their sexual power weren’t viewed positively in the US. Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan were called bimbos and sluts. Hilton’s TV show fame was built on her pretending she was in-fact dumber than you’d guessed. “Sex Tapes” were presented as stolen material, even when the people in them were being paid a cut having sold rights to a distributor.

The chicken and egg problem was normalising fiscal exhibitionism. Making being topless for money online seem reasonable to Americans at a time when celebrities in nude dresses, “freeing the nipple”, was unimaginable.

Pornography is forever mired in hypocrisy. It’s something almost everyone consumes and yet is universally looked down on as the preserve of freaks and deviants. I never fail to be amused seeing people explaining something sex-related to their audience, as if that self, same, group of people doesn’t masturbate, isn’t online, and has no kinks. Women knew that if they posted their images online they would be seen and shared by people who claimed they weren’t looking for them, and could be publicly vilified by hypocrites buying their content.

The cam sites had dealt with this already. Operating before smartphones made video-capture as simple as filming your monitor, they placated performers fears by not archiving content where it could be seen for free, and using geo-fencing to allow models to block any countries and regions they chose. Hence customers would normally see people living at some remove, and not come across anyone local they might recognise.

As well as borrowing the geo-fencing approach, my path through that minefield would be cash. As long as I could convince a pioneering core of amateurs to start using the site, their small number would work in my favour. With a limited number of creators online incomes would be disproportionately large, and everyone would experience success. I knew that as soon as I could tell the press someone had become a millionaire via their webcam, the media would do most of my advertising for me and things would pick up speed. I could recruit those first few amateurs in person, over coffee, holding their hand all the way.

I also wanted to take a chunk of the companies revenue and split it as a prize amongst the creators. This would mean that even as the site grew, there would be a chance each month for anyone to experience a lottery-like payday. We would charge sellers like any other professional service provider, not gouge them because their limited options gave us leverage.

SugarBank died before I could put those plans into action and over a decade later, OnlyFans didn’t face the shame hurdle at all. By the time they took a swing at my idea Instagram, and others, had reset notions of normal public exposure.

Self-publishing porn marketed as a “Sex Tape” was common and a constant drumbeat of news stories, regarding the stratospheric wealth of influencers had negated the need to prove you could get rich posting content. Broadcasting your life, euphemistically called “sharing”, was the new social default.

While there were still many people who wouldn’t dream of sex-work as an option, thousands of people had independently taken it up under a myriad of “acceptable” labels including fitness influencer, E-girl, cosplay artist, bikini streamer and ASMR channel. They pushed the limits of sex-negative platforms that only allowed them to monetise their erotic labour obliquely. Meanwhile the sexually oriented cam platforms routinely took 50% of creators earnings, making those users a ripe target for a better deal in an era where performers could run their business, without help, from a phone.

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According to OnlyFans Exposed, the 7-part in depth investigation published by Reuters in December 2024, in 2011 four years after SugarBank shuttered, fellow Brit and entrepreneur Tim Stokely, launched a website called Glam Worship.

The site catered to people interested in financial domination, those who show their dedication to dominatrixes by sending them money. That site died and he tried again with Customs4U which allowed creators to send bespoke videos to paying members. It also failed to take off. Five years later Stokely stumbled into the same idea I’d had in 2003. A content platform with a pay button. His timing was perfect.

In 2016 the then current iPhone 6S, released the year previously, shot 4K video and could be bought for $650. You could edit and upload from the same device while sitting in a coffee-shop. In 2003, when I started working on SugarBank, renting the only 4K cinema camera available (a Dalsa Origin) cost $3,000 a day and a standard definition Panasonic AG-DVX100 cost $3,750 to buy.

The difference between his idea and mine was that he thought it would work without adult material. I knew that a pay-content platform would work in the mainstream, but was also aware the pain-points for creators were greatest in the adult space, and that’s where things should start. Pop stars could thrive on Instagram and YouTube, porn stars could not.

Stokely’s approach nearly doomed OnlyFans as he found it incredibly difficult to get traction with musicians and influencers. Smart enough to pivot while looking down the barrel of his third failure, he rolled back OnlyFan's ban on adult content in 2017, and it took off.

The other key smart move made by Stokely is normally left out of the official recounting, or glossed over by people unaware of its impact. I’ll detail it here because I believe his hidden unofficial female co-founder was largely responsible for OnlyFans early success.

Anyone looking at OnlyFans up until the time of writing will notice an obvious flaw in the site's design. There’s no easy way to browse. Unlike other sites which invest a huge amount in seamless discovery, at OnlyFans if you don’t know the name of the channel you are looking for you are stuck. Each creator is in a paywalled box.

That friction limits growth. One creator becoming a ‘hit’ doesn’t do much to help others on the platform. At launch this is devastating. A single popular piece of content, or media story which drives people to a page, doesn’t ripple out through the network and create a positive feedback loop. The site works like a sponge, absorbing visitors but never pooling them to be shared across the community. It’s like pushing a car with the handbrake on. However hard you work it doesn’t get easier.

Overcoming this requires a lot of traffic which has to come from other sites. That in turn means spending money on advertising, and funding that can bankrupt you unless you have a hack. Stokely’s hack was Petra Ouwehand Milam, an American working for Fenix BV in the Netherlands, the company that owns Freeones.

Launched in 1998 Freeones was for many years, what’s known as a TGP, or “Thumbnail Gallery Post”. Back when people paid for porn, TGPs were how people got a peek behind paywalls. Website owners would post galleries of images for free, and then post those links to TGP sites (often for a fee). Those sites became huge traffic hubs crammed with people who wanted to view adult content. Placing ads, in the form of galleries or banners, was one of the core ways adult subscription sites promoted themselves, and the amount of money being made was significant. I remember paying $80,000 a month for a single banner on a big TGP (Persian Kitty’s Adult Links) in the early 2000s.

With Petra to drive traffic from Freeones, OnlyFans could grow without worrying about how to raise their profile. She could direct hundreds of thousands of people their way each day, targeting different content creators algorithmically to guarantee their success. Their partnership meant OnlyFans didn’t have to pay “the going rate” (either getting discounts, deferring payback, or offering ownership in return) and could launch without having to worry about the scale of their ad spend.

It worked so well that in 2018 Stokely sold OnlyFans to Ukrainian-American, Leonid Radvinsky, the owner of Freeones and MyFreeCams. An easy deal given that OnlyFans was dependent on his holdings. Functionally you could go so far to say OnlyFans was spun off Freeones, in the same way every “new” dating site since Tinder ends up being a branch of Match.com.

A year later the worst crisis in global health for a century became a stroke of dumb luck for OnlyFans, as COVID-19 temporarily stopped the planet. With people forced to remain at home, millions of new creators and customers had hours to spend making and viewing content. Site membership quickly sextupled from 20 to 120 million users. They had achieved what I failed to.

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So could SugarBank have been OnlyFans 13 years before OnlyFans? Maybe, but I was determined to play on hard-mode in a way OnlyFans did not.

I had seen the seamier side of the adult space by working with so many people who were at the centre of it. Though Danni.com only hosted topless photos and nudes, many of the people we worked with were involved in more explicit pornography. I heard the stories from, and had spent time around, what we referred to as “sticky floor operations”.

To protect performers and prevent exploitation I knew that every piece of content would have to be pre-screened, and the depth of records we needed to keep. I understood that models needed to comprehend everything they signed and that some agents and boyfriends shouldn’t be trusted. I was ready to spend time and money helping people fix mistakes, go back on decisions, and protect themselves from the public.

Defending against the clichéd, frequently deserved, negative image of the adult space entails spending significant amounts of money which could otherwise be booked as profit. I was eager to. I didn’t want to be ashamed of what I, or my company, did.

OnlyFans came from a different place and, as it grew, it ran into a lot of problems around content, specifically insufficient screening of what was being shared. Non-consensual images, content depicting criminal activity and abuse, and material stolen from other creators were all uploaded and monetised. They didn’t care enough, or know enough, to stop it, and seemed reluctant to choose to lose money when in doubt.

All of this caution could have been a death sentence for SugarBank, and even if not, would guarantee much slower growth; but for me there was no choice to make. I wanted my ethics to be clear and I know it might have doomed me.

I’ve thought about trying again. Twenty years on the investment would be significant and the approach would need to be different. The real window of opportunity today is on phones via an app, and that seems impossible given platform content guidelines (though it’s not, just look at the world’s biggest adult sites, Reddit and X)

OnlyFans is also for sale. With a net worth in the billions Leonid Radvinsky feels rich enough already, and being associated with a platform which is constantly on the brink of implicating him in federal crimes must be wearing. He wants out but, given the site’s content and problems, buyers are hard to find. Turns out that caring less about ethics is expensive.

If the platform is sold the market may shift again. With Donald Trump in power a move against adult content seems due, and unlike prior Republican administrations, this one feels only loosely bound by notions of free expression or precedent. I don’t see the current Supreme Court leaping to protect porn under the First Amendment. If SugarBank had worked, I might be selling too.

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I’d argue the most iconic sentence from Steve Jobs introduction of iPhone is:

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”

Invention can be hard to attribute. Is the inventor the first person to make a lot of money from soemthing? Or the person who develops the idea? If monetized content platforms were ever invented, I'll throw my hat into the ring as a candidate, SugarBank being my Difference Engine.

Content platforms have changed everything. Taking the adult space from one where a handful of (mostly) men decided what was wanted, to one where anyone can be their own boss, create what they want, and find an audience. After a quarter of a century women are now, finally, almost as independent as Danni made herself in the late-90s.

The problem is that the means of production still aren’t in the hands of the creators. OnlyFans locks people’s content within its platform, their competitors do the same, and the only real alternative is a personal website with all the same barriers which have existed for decades.

The lessons Danni learned pioneering the space are relevant again, and helping creators navigate those issues is one purpose of this project. I hope by giving some insight into my history in the space I can provide a case for why this newsletter is worth subscribing to. I will share some of the things we did to help an ex-stripper without investors, or a degree, build and sustain a market-leading company with 50 employees and a multi-million dollar turnover. I'll look at where things are today, and include insight from decades of personal experience in the mainstream and as an entrereneur. It's for anyone whose job is "everything". I hope you join the list and come along for the ride.

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1. The App Store arrived in 2008 with the second iPhone, the 3G; and video a year later, in 2009, with the third iPhone, the 3GS. ↩︎