Since the pandemic started, we have seen many digital businesses have an explosive growth. For example, Zoom. One year ago, nobody used it, and now every person with internet connection probably has made a call with their service.
OnlyFans is a social media platform where users can subscribe to Content Creators for a fee. It was born from the idea of Influencers being able to monetize their audience. To follow your favorite artists and receive exclusive content, you must pay a monthly subscription but the levels of interaction are much higher than in other social media.
They started in 2016 and now the transactions in the platform are more than $200 million monthly. It’s a really huge growth for just a 4-year-old company.
Even when the users and Content Creators love the platform, and it is really fair because they only get a 20% commission on the earnings of each Creator, OnlyFans lacks of a good infrastructure.
Such explosive growth has created so many problems. For example, the website is down several times every month. And as they need to focus on the thousands of new daily accounts, they are not developing new functionalities that would improve user experience.
So they have to decide: focus on growing or focus in users and solve functionality problems?
The functionality that is missing and that most users request is the possibility to search OnlyFans accounts.

And as we often see, if there is a need, someone will solve it sooner or later.
That is what happened recently, as new Startups developed an OnlyFans search engine. The founders of one of these platforms saw the business opportunity: “We loved OnlyFans, but it was so hard to find new accounts to follow! You had to search in Twitter, Instagram, Telegram groups… that was crazy. So we decided to create our own OnlyFans search engine”.
The responsible of PR of https://onlysearcher.com explained in local newspapers that they did not expect the idea to survive. They thought that as soon as OnlyFans saw their search engine, they would include that option soon. But that has not happened and they think it is because: “OnlyFans right now can’t focus on their competence or businesses which offer services around their community. If they stop focusing on growth, they will collapse. So all their effort goes to infrastructure and customer support.”
And many other OnlyFans search engines are appearing in the scene, which means that it is a functionality that users demand.
The other functionality missing is a mobile App. Right now, it is a website based service, even when almost 90% of their traffic is mobile. But developing an app is not on their backlog and it is not expected to be published soon.
Now OnlyFans wants to continue growing and move further away from the image for adult content channels. Its goal: to become a service known worldwide like YouTube or Twitch. For the CEO of OnlyFans, Tim Stokely, the next step is the creation of OFTV (Only Fans TV), which will offer exclusive content from popular creators of OnlyFans.