Who Owns Fansly? The Company, the Owner, and Why It Matters
Who owns Fansly is a short answer with a long tail: a privately held operator, Select Media LLC, tied in public records to one person, Michael Etelis. For creators, the real question is what a closely held platform's ownership means for your income.
Who owns Fansly matters more to a creator's income than most fee comparisons do, because a private platform with one controlling owner can change its rules, its processors, or its direction without asking anyone. That isn't a criticism of Fansly. It's how every tenant platform works.
Fansly is owned by Select Media LLC, a Baltimore, Maryland company incorporated in February 2020, and by CY Media LTD, a company in Kamares, Cyprus, registered in May 2021. Incorporation records reported by MEL Magazine in August 2021 list Michael Etelis as the owner of both entities. Fansly is privately held and doesn't publish financial statements.
The stakes are concrete. Fansly takes a 20% platform fee on subscriptions, pay-per-view and tips, the same headline rate as OnlyFans, so a creator billing $10,000 a month hands over $2,000 to a company whose finances and decision-makers are largely invisible from the outside. MEL Magazine reported that Fansly had about 2.1 million users by August 2021 and hit roughly 4,000 sign-ups per hour during the OnlyFans content-policy scare that month.
Who owns Fansly, and who runs it day to day?
Select Media LLC is the American operating company behind Fansly, and CY Media LTD is its Cypriot counterpart. The two-entity structure is common for subscription platforms that bill a global audience: a domestic company handles the US business, while an EU-registered entity sits closer to European payment and regulatory relationships. MEL Magazine reported that Michael Etelis registered eight companies in Maryland and Texas from 2016 onward, most tied to online media.
Beyond those filings, Fansly's leadership keeps a low profile. There's no public cap table, no disclosed outside investors, and no named executive team doing press the way OnlyFans executives have. That's a legitimate choice for a private company, but it means a creator can't read Fansly's balance sheet, its processor concentration, or its owner's long-term plans before committing their business to it.
Fansly's growth story is tied to one event. In August 2021, OnlyFans announced it would restrict sexually explicit content from October, then reversed the decision within days. Creators who'd felt the ground move under them went looking for a second home, and Fansly was the closest substitute: similar layout, similar 80/20 split, and a discovery feed OnlyFans didn't have.
How Fansly's ownership compares to OnlyFans
OnlyFans is a useful contrast because its ownership has been tested in public. Fenix International, the UK company that owns and operates OnlyFans, files accounts at Companies House, which is why its numbers are known. The Irish Times reported in April 2026 that owner Leonid Radvinsky died in late March 2026 at 43, that control passed to a family trust led by his widow, and that a stake of less than 20% was being sold to Architect Capital at a valuation above $3 billion.
The same Irish Times report noted OnlyFans users spent $7.2 billion on the platform the previous year and that Fenix paid a record $701 million in dividends. Those figures exist only because Fenix files public accounts. Fansly, as a US LLC and a Cypriot private company, carries no comparable disclosure obligation.
| Criterion | Fansly | OnlyFans | Your own platform (e.g. built with Highlife) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operating company | Select Media LLC (US) and CY Media LTD (Cyprus) | Fenix International (UK) | Your company |
| Controlling owner | Michael Etelis, per incorporation records | Radvinsky family trust (since 2026), plus a minority investor | You |
| Public financials | No | Yes, UK annual accounts | Yours to keep private |
| Platform fee | 20% | 20% | Revenue share set by contract; Highlife partners earn up to 60% |
| Who owns the subscriber relationship | The platform | The platform | You |
| Exposure to owner-level decisions | High | High | Low |
You don't need to know who owns a platform to use it, but you need to know who owns it before you build your whole income on it.
The common thread is concentration. Both Fansly and OnlyFans are controlled by a single person or family. When a single owner dies, sells, or changes strategy, every creator on the platform inherits that decision. The OnlyFans succession in 2026 went smoothly for creators, but nobody on the platform had a vote in it.
Is Fansly safe to build on if the owner is private?
Private ownership isn't a red flag by itself. Fansly has operated since 2020, pays creators on a regular schedule, and runs on the same 80/20 model the market has accepted. The risk isn't that Fansly is shady. It's that you, as a creator, carry platform risk you can't measure, because the information you'd need to measure it isn't public.
Three ownership-driven events hit tenant creators hardest: a payment processor dropping the platform, a policy change after a sale or investment, and an account suspension with no appeal. None of these need a bad actor. They follow from the fact that the platform owns the billing relationship, the content policy and the subscriber list, and you rent access to all three.
Here's a worked example. A creator with 800 paying fans at $20 a month bills $16,000 monthly. On a 20% platform, that's $3,200 a month, or $38,400 a year, paid to an owner the creator has never met. If an owner-level decision freezes payouts for 30 days, the creator loses access to $12,800 of net income with no contractual recourse and no way to email a single subscriber.
What Fansly's ownership means for a creator-founder
If you're on Fansly now, you don't need to leave. You need to stop treating it as your business and start treating it as a channel. Your business is the subscriber relationship, and on any tenant platform, that relationship belongs to whoever owns the platform.
- Diversify your billing so no single owner's decision can freeze more than half of your monthly revenue.
- Capture direct contact details from your most valuable fans wherever the platform's terms allow, so you can reach them if your account is ever paused.
- Model what you'd net on an owned site with our creator platform calculator before your audience gets large enough that moving is painful.
- Treat any ownership news about Fansly or OnlyFans, such as a sale, a new investor or a processor change, as a prompt to review your contingency plan.
- Once you're past roughly 1,000 paying fans, put a date on launching a platform under your own brand.
Fansly is the right home for creators who want discovery, zero setup and don't yet have an audience that follows them by name. It's the wrong long-term home for a creator whose fans already search for them directly, because at that point the 20% fee buys infrastructure, not reach.
That's the gap Highlife fills. Highlife runs billing, content pipelines, moderation and audience intelligence under your brand, takes a site from concept to live and monetized in 48 hours, and pays partners a revenue share of up to 60%. You keep the subscriber list. You can see what that looks like on our page for creators launching their own site, and agencies managing several Fansly or OnlyFans creators can review the Highlife partner program.
Who owns Fansly: the short version
Who owns Fansly has a simple answer, Select Media LLC and CY Media LTD with Michael Etelis named as owner in public records, and an uncomfortable implication: you can't audit the company that collects 20% of your revenue. The smartest response isn't suspicion. It's ownership. When the platform under your income belongs to you, the question of who owns it stops being a risk and becomes your answer. If you're ready to run that platform under your own brand, talk to Highlife about launching it.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns Fansly?
Fansly is owned by Select Media LLC, a Baltimore, Maryland company incorporated in February 2020, and CY Media LTD, a Cypriot company registered in May 2021. Incorporation records reported by MEL Magazine list Michael Etelis as the owner of both. Fansly is privately held and doesn't publish financial statements or name outside investors.
Is Fansly owned by OnlyFans?
No. Fansly and OnlyFans are separate, competing companies. OnlyFans is owned and operated by Fenix International, a UK company controlled since 2026 by the family trust of the late Leonid Radvinsky. Fansly is operated by Select Media LLC and CY Media LTD, which public records tie to Michael Etelis.
Where is Fansly based?
Fansly's US operating company, Select Media LLC, is based in Baltimore, Maryland. Its second entity, CY Media LTD, is registered in Kamares, Cyprus. The two-entity setup is common for subscription platforms that bill customers in both the US and Europe.
Does Fansly's ownership affect how much creators earn?
Indirectly, yes. Fansly's owner sets the 20% platform fee, the content policy and the payment processor relationships, and creators can't negotiate any of them. Because Fansly is private, creators also can't review its finances, so the safest approach is to diversify billing and build toward a platform under your own brand.
