Martin Mikyska, known to fans as Mikýř, earns roughly CZK 6.5 million gross a month on the Czech platform Herohero, according to a focus-age overview. This is a subscription that fans pay directly, with no advertising and no platform payout key in the middle. Herohero, which Vojtěch Otevřel and Vojtěch Knyttl founded in 2020 as a Czech equivalent of Patreon, takes 15%. The rest goes to the creator.
This model, in which a fan pays for access and interaction directly to the author, has its hardest proof in a platform that business debate tends to avoid. Investor and Goldfinch co-founder Phil McKenzie called it the elephant in the room on LinkedIn. The most profitable platform in the world per employee is OnlyFans.
How much platforms keep
How profitable OnlyFans is becomes clear from the accounts of its parent company, Fenix International, for fiscal year 2024, which netinfluencer analyses. The platform had 46 direct employees and a pre-tax profit of $684 million. That is roughly $15 million of profit per employee. Three different pots of money need to be distinguished here. Fans paid a gross $7.22 billion, of which the platform paid creators $5.8 billion and kept the rest. The split between creator and platform is 80 to 20 in the creator's favour.
These figures only make sense in comparison with how others charge. YouTube takes 45% of ad revenue on long videos and leaves creators 55%, and the algorithm, rather than the author, decides which ad is shown. Spotify pays roughly two-thirds of its music revenue to rights holders, meaning publishers and labels, and the artist sees only a fraction of it. OnlyFans takes 20%, the creator sets the price, and the creator also owns the relationship with the paying fan.
The result is that money concentrates with the authors instead of the intermediary. 5,076 creators have cumulatively passed the million-dollar mark. Shannon Elizabeth illustrates how fast such a direct relationship can earn. In her first week on the platform this spring she earned over $1.2 million, more than her role in American Pie ever brought her.
The platform is becoming a financial layer
More interesting than the payouts is what is starting to be built around them. In May 2026 Architect Capital bought 16% of Fenix International for $535 million, valuing the platform at $3.15 billion. The stated purpose was building financial products for creators with limited access to traditional banks. OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair said the investment would “build additional services and features to support our creator community”.
Why such a payment history is financeable is simple. Millions of named fans pay named people every month, with no advertising market in between. It is a predictable flow of money, of a kind that is hard to find elsewhere in media.
US-based GigaStar is pushing the same logic a step further. It has launched an SEC-registered trading system for secondary trading in securities tied to creator income, and on 31 August 2026 its team rang the Nasdaq bell. It describes itself as the only alternative trading system built directly for the creator economy. The platform has over 30,000 investor accounts, and according to the company more than $1.5 million a month is distributed to investors from YouTube revenue. A creator's income thus becomes an asset that is traded.
The same pattern across media
The model of direct, participatory relationships is spilling over into areas where people used to pay for content itself. In the second quarter of 2026 Spotify reached 300 million paying subscribers and 777 million active users, with total revenue up 14% year on year. Growth at its core comes from subscriptions, that is, the listener's direct commitment.
The shift from passive consumption to participation is also visible in how music is made. The producer Fred again.. was finishing a joint mixtape with the band LATIN MAFIA live on a three-day YouTube livestream that began on 28 July 2026. According to YouTube, viewers' comments served to let artists “crowdsource ideas, test out new sounds”. The viewer became part of the production.
For a European brand that follows the creator economy as a buyer, what matters is the conclusion, not the sensational source. Herohero, Patreon and OnlyFans rest on the same mechanics that music, IP and the capital market are now copying. The direct relationship between creator and fan is proving more profitable than structures built on advertising and algorithms. “The participation economy isn't coming. It's here,” wrote McKenzie. The difference is that banking and stock market infrastructure is now being built around it.
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