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FHM Sold 560,167 Copies in 2005. OnlyFans Now Reports $7.2 Billion in User Revenue.

Post date: 14 Oct 2026
Tags: onlyfans , free , glamour models

The two stories are separate, and the figures do not prove one caused the other. Read together, they show how far the audience for glamour imagery has moved online.

In 2005, FHM sold 560,167 copies. By the time the British lads' magazine was winding down in 2015, its circulation had fallen to 72,180.

Nuts, Zoo and Loaded followed the same path. Between them, the four titles lost most of their readers within a decade, and all four had closed or were closing by the end of 2015. The decline marks the end of an era in British glamour publishing, and it raises a question the figures themselves cannot answer: where did the audience go?

The numbers

Press Gazette's Dominic Ponsford set out the peak-to-trough figures in November 2015. FHM went from 560,167 in 2005 to 72,180. Nuts fell from 304,751 to about 50,000 a week before it closed in April 2014. Zoo dropped from 260,317 to 27,644 a week and was due to close at the end of 2015. Loaded went from 237,083 to roughly 10,000 a month and closed in April 2015.

One title bucked the pattern. Men's Health slipped only from 228,108 to 193,901 and became the top-selling men's magazine in Britain. Two free titles, Shortlist and Sport, were distributing around 500,000 and 300,000 copies weekly, respectively.

Earlier closures had already signaled the direction. Maxim and Arena shut in 2009, and Front closed in February 2014.

Why they fell

Ponsford identified two causes. The first was free online content. Lads' mags, he wrote, had become victims of the fact that much of the more racy material they supplied was now freely available to young men elsewhere on the internet.

The second was a change in what readers wanted. "Young men are, it seems, nowadays more interested in creating six-pack stomachs than downing six-packs of beer," Ponsford wrote, pointing to the rise of Men's Health.

Both explanations concern readers. Press Gazette's analysis does not discuss advertisers, and it says nothing about the glamour models and photographers who supplied the images. That is a gap worth noting, because the fortunes of a magazine and the fortunes of the people in it are not the same thing.

A newspaper's version of the same shift

Magazines were not the only place glamour imagery lived in British print. In January 2015, The Sun briefly dropped topless photographs from Page 3. ITV News reported that the feature was missing from three consecutive editions and that the paper declined to confirm or deny it had been discontinued.

On January 20, 2015, the former Page 3 model Nicola McLean told ITV's Good Morning Britain: "You don't buy The Sun if you really want to read hard-hitting news." Two days later, ITV reported, The Sun restored the topless photograph, ending the speculation.

The episode did not end the genre in newspapers, and it should not be read as an obituary. It does show how unsettled the position of print glamour had become by 2015, when its most prominent outlet could drop and then reinstate its signature feature within days.

How the genre outlived the format

The sources above describe the decline of print products, and the genre itself outlasted them. The Sun's Page 3, which began in 1969, was the target of a campaign, No More Page 3, founded by Lucy-Anne Holmes in 2012, according to Wikipedia's account of the feature. The same account says the Daily Star became the last mainstream daily tabloid to stop printing topless images, in April 2019.

That timeline matters because it shows two different pressures. Magazines lost their readers to free online content and to a change in taste, as Ponsford argued. Newspapers faced a public campaign and shifting editorial standards. Both ended with the same outcome: a smaller, less visible place for the format in mass print.

The model of income that replaced it

OnlyFans is now a very different kind of business. Reporting on a stake sale in April 2026, the Irish Times put the company's user revenue at $7.2 billion for its latest reported year. The sale valued the company at more than $3 billion. The newspaper also reported that OnlyFans paid $701 million in dividends the year before.

The scale is not comparable with a magazine's. FHM's figure is copies sold, and OnlyFans' is money spent by users, so the two are different units and cannot be set against each other. What the contrast shows is the change in the business model. A magazine sold a bundle of images to a mass readership at a single cover price. A subscription platform sells access to an individual account, month by month, and the arrangement runs through that account rather than through a publisher.

That change in who is paid is the interpretive core of this piece, and it is an interpretation. Neither source examines what glamour models earned from magazines, or what they earn from subscriptions now. The figures here concern audience and revenue, not pay.

Where the audience went

The Press Gazette analysis says the content migrated online. It does not say where online. The more precise answer for the 2015 audience was probably a mix of free websites, social media and, increasingly, paid platforms. That is a reasonable inference from the sources, and an inference is all it is.

What can be said with confidence is the timing. The collapse of print glamour took place between 2005 and 2015, and subscription platforms grew after it. The sequence is consistent with a shift in audience, and it does not by itself show that readers of FHM became subscribers. A different, younger audience may account for much of the platform's growth.

Browsing free-to-follow pages

Readers who want to see how glamour-style presentation looks on a free-to-follow page can browse an index of free glamour models. The index sorts accounts by category, and nothing in the figures above describes the people listed there.

The longer view

Glamour modeling did not disappear when the magazines did. The business around it changed shape: fewer mass-market publishers, more individual accounts, and a revenue model built on a direct relationship with a smaller audience.

The 2015 numbers are a snapshot of the old model at its lowest point. The 2026 numbers are a snapshot of a very different one at a high. The interval between them is where the audience went, and nobody has published a study that follows individual readers across it.