OFTV: numbers to celebrate its birthday
You have probably heard about creators setting up their own streaming websites, a way to monetise their work. This took many forms: Nebula, Dropout, Watcher, …
But have you heard about the VOD website that did the opposite? Where creators who are usually behind a paywall started to do content openly. That would be one way to describe OFTV (Wikipedia). The video portal launched by OnlyFans for Safe-For-Work content.
It seems to be one of those websites that just is not on anyone’s radar. I do not know if my reaction had differed between someone telling me it launching, it existing, or it shutting down.
It has its birthday today! 🎂 I am here to tell you OFTV launched 6 years ago today.
There are 3455 creator pages on the site. Only 13 of these have not published any videos yet. This has been consistently growing at just over 20 creators publishing their first video every week.
Squinting at the graph seems to suggest this growth rate has been steady for almost 2 years. No big boom or hockey stick. As a start-up it would probably have been labelled as a failed attempt.
The percentage of active creators has also been going down as the total number grows. This is of course understandable for any online platform. The last half year only ~50% of creators have published a video.
There are 80 612 videos on site. As I said, they are having a birthday: the first video was published 2020-05-24. A promo for DJ Kaila Troy. It then took almost 3 months for the second video to arrive.
The videos on the platform have a median runtime of 4m 29s. But that does not mean it is all just short promos. At least one creator decided to put their gaming content on OFTV, which gave us the longest runtime of 2h 42m 46s. A full play session of the game Dread Flats.
There are 242 videos over an hour long. Most of these are podcasts. Or whatever you want to call talking content with a video that has also been the rage over on YouTube.
But you can also relax and watch Mike and Erin behind Handy Capped Golf play a round for 1½ hours. Almost as if you ended up on YouTube. Part of me is a little sad they have a YouTube channel, makes it harder to point at them as true OFTV creators.
Speaking of different types of videos: videos are classified as belonging to different genres. Visiting the OFTV home page might suggest there are 20 genres, but those just happen to be the ones with dedicated landing pages.
Videos are divided amongst 111 different genres. Some of these are very new. This month saw the first ever use of the Book Reviews genre. This is also the least used genre with only 2 videos so far.
Other genres that saw their first uses in 2026 include Gardening, Photography, and a bunch of sports (Biking, Volleyball, Basketball). The most recently introduced genre is DJ. Which is very funny to me, considering the very first video was for a DJ!
The most used genres are as you would expect. The top 5 are Vlogs, Food, Infotainment, Fitness, and Travel.
It is a little hard to figure out who are creating episodic content. Creators do not seem to have the ability to create playlists (although they exist in the API) and not one of the videos is tagged with a season or episode (in the API).
Just looking at titles we can find a lot with some sort of episode marker: #1, Ep. 1, etc. Many of these are some form of podcast or vlog.
I have not really gone through them all, but a cursory glance suggests that the most consistently run indie creator series is by Sophie Sweden. She is on a 74 episode run, having started in 2023.
There is also more produced content. Seemingly by OnlyFans themselves. The longest running one is This is Fire (IMDB), a cooking competition. It had its 1st season May–June 2022, and just ended its 9th season this April. (My congratulations to the winner!)
This is not the only OnlyFans production. Creators that are not individuals can be spotted in the API output because they will not point to an OnlyFans account.
Bangers like The OnlyFans Golf Show (amateur tournament with 50k USD prize) and There’s a Catch (letting influencers work on fishing boats) launched with singular seasons.
The only two apart from This is Fire that I found to have had multiple seasons are:
- Miss/Match, a blind date show that has been running for 7 seasons.
- House of Sims, a classic reality TV show following the Sims Family for 2 seasons.
That was focused on classical episodic content. There are other OFTV-run channels such as LMAOF that are longer running in episode count. With 144 videos to date, posting on average 3 videos a month for close to 4 years. These feature some comedians you might know from your TikTok and Instagram feeds, like Matt Rife.
I have no idea where this platform is going. Or what its goal is. But I do think it is very interesting that they are around, even when I have never heard anyone speak of them.
But it was really interesting to dig through the data a little. How did I do that, and what API was I speaking of? The whole website is a pretty straight forward Vue application rendering results from a REST API. I manually wrote an OpenAPI specification of the endpoints I noticed, and then used Restish to query for data.
I might share the OpenAPI spec at a later date. Just trust me when I say there is nothing hidden in there.
Congratulations to OFTV once more, and maybe I’ll be back in another 5 years! 🎉