Blac Chyna has had a truly impressive and weird career. A little over a decade ago she was a stripper in Miami at a club called King of Diamonds. She quickly became very popular. Popular enough to earn a name-check in Drake's song "Miss Me" ["Someone tell Maliah I'm on fire, she should work tonight… Call up King of Diamonds and tell Chyna it'd be worth the flight"]. In 2010 she was hired to be Nicki Minaj's stunt double in the Nicki/Kanye West music video for their song "Monster." A year later she starred in a music video for the rapper Tyga. A year later she had Tyga's baby. In 2016 Blac Chyna began dating Rob Kardashian. Later that year she had Rob's baby.
In the years since, the model/singer/actress, whose birth name is Angela Renée White, has starred in several reality shows, released a dozen singles, launched a number of beauty businesses, and even forged an unsuccessful $100 million lawsuit against Kardashians.
But today, the only thing anyone ever talks about when it comes to Ms. Chyna is her OnlyFans earnings. Take it from me. Not a week goes by without someone emailing CelebrityNetWorth to ask how Blac Chyna's net worth can "only" be $5 million considering how much she makes from OnlyFans.
I know why people are confused. It all stems from the idea that Blac Chyna supposedly makes $20 million PER MONTH performing on OnlyFans. And if she makes $20 million per month, that would work out to $240 million PER YEAR. Roughly $120 million after taxes. Far far far more than $5 million, obviously.
A few days ago Ms. Chyna announced she was done with OnlyFans. That announcement caused dozens of (surprisingly reputable) outlets to publish articles under headlines that are all some variation of:
"Blac Chyna Quits OnlyFans After Making $240 Million Per Year"
Variations of that headline were just recently published by:
- CinemaBlend
- BuzzFeed News
- BET
- Perez Hilton
- The NY Post
- Yahoo News
- Complex
If these headlines were true, it would mean Blac Chyna was BY FAR the highest paid celebrity on the planet. It would imply that in 2022 she out-earned Lionel Messi by $110 million. LeBron James by $120 million. Taylor Swift by $130 million…
Unfortunately, the cold hard truth is that it is not true. The $20 million per month "fact" is a galaxy away from her actual monthly earnings. And we know this thanks to Blac Chyna herself…
(Photo by Prince Williams/WireImage)
Where $20 Million Came From
In September 2021, a website called InfluencerMarketingHub.com published an infographic which claimed to rank the 10 highest-earning people on OnlyFans. This infographic claimed Blac Chyna was the highest paid person on the platform with $20 million in monthly earnings. It was a perfect headline. A headline that was repeated thousands of times across the web, all pointing back to this infographic.
The site's methodology was not clear. For their data sources the infographic credited "celebmix.com, brobible.com and respectmyregion.com." It also said "All numbers are estimated as of 2021 and collated through various media outlets and research reports." In other words, this was just a fun guesstimated infographic pulled together from a lot of random web sources, whose own credibility and sources were questionable.
If you pull a thread on all the stories that subsequently claimed Blac Chyna makes $20 million per month from OnlyFans, they can all be traced back to this infographic.
Blac Chyna's Actual Earnings
Remember that $100 million Kardasian lawsuit I alluded to in the second paragraph of this article? Long story short, Blac Chyna initially sued the family for defamation in 2017. The lawsuit didn't actually go trial until the April of 2022. She ultimately lost the case, but not before taking the stand over several days to give testimony. In her testimony, Blac Chyna revealed a number of very interesting financial details about herself.
For example:
- She did not file for a personal income tax return in 2019, 2020 or 2021.
- She claimed to not have a personal bank account.
- She claimed to have made $2 million per year from all sources in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Most importantly, when asked directly about her OnlyFans earnings, Blac Chyna revealed the exact total amount she had earned from that platform up to that point. The total amount?
$1 million
Not $1 million per month. $1 million TOTAL since she began posting on OnlyFans TWO YEARS prior in April 2020. In other words, her actual average monthly earnings were…
$41,666
That's still an impressive number… but hopefully you now understand that $20 million per month is complete fiction… unless you are the OWNER OF ONLY FANS!
OnlyFans Owner Earnings
OnlyFans was founded in London in 2016 by tech investor/entrepreneur Timothy Stokely. Two years later Stokley sold the company to reclusive adult website kingpin named Leonid Radvinsky for an undisclosed amount. At the time the platform had 1 million monthly users. By August 2022, 200 million people per month were visiting OnlyFans.
OnlyFans was founded in the UK and is still registered as a British corporation. So it is required to make periodic public financial filings even though it is a private company.
According to an August 2022 company filing, OnlyFans generated a whopping $4.8 billion in gross revenue in the previous 12 months. That same filing showed that Leonid Radvinsky paid himself $284 million in 2021 and $233 million through August 2022. For a 20 month total of…
$517 million
That works out to $25 million per month.
What Is OnlyFans?
I guess I shouldn't assume everyone knows what OnlyFans is. Creators like Blac Chyna or even regular non famous people make content available behind a paywall with access available for a monthly fee or a one-time tip to access certain content.
The beauty of OnlyFans is that it doesn't have a lot of restrictions in place about what content its creators can post. This lack of rules allows creators to post whatever appeals to their particular audience. If you can dream up a fetish or kink, you can find an Only Fans channel devoted to it.
Obviously OnlyFans makes its most money from models and sex workers sharing NSFW content with their subscribers. However, if you want to create an OnlyFans channel about your ability to yodel (or anything else) – you can do that as well, though I wouldn't expect a ton of paying subscribers.
OnlyFans pays out 80% of the fees an account earns and keeps the remaining 20%. Content creators must be at least 18 and need a driver's license or other government-issued ID to create an account. What makes OnlyFans different is the fact that visitors cannot screenshot content. If you try, the screenshot will be blacked out. If a user is caught recording content on OnlyFans, they will be banned. The site goes above and beyond to protect its creators.
Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Content creators can set their monthly subscription rate anywhere from $4.99 a month to $49.99 a month. They can also enable tips or paid private messages for $5 or more. The more followers you have (and the more you interact with them) the more you earn on OnlyFans. Some of the top content creators stress that it isn't a part-time job. It takes work to build and maintain an audience.
Traffic to OnlyFans exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March and April 2020, roughly 200,000 new people subscribed to the site EVERY DAY.
In August 2020, OnlyFans announced it paid out more than $1 billion to its content creators up to that point. By November 2020, that figure had doubled to more than $2 billion.
When actress Bella Thorne joined OnlyFans, she reportedly made $2 million in her first week. She is the exception, however, as most OnlyFans accounts make less than $150 a month, largely because these accounts join the site without an existing fanbase. It's almost impossible that any performer is making $20 million per month.
