For months after the Riverfront Times sold in May and was effectively shut down, it seemed like the mystery buyer might never be identified.
But a path to discovering who purchased the St. Louis alt weekly opened on Aug. 1. A new executive editor took to the Riverfront Times' X account to introduce himself, JD Davis, and his "plan to save RFT" by publishing articles about OnlyFans — an online platform that connects content creators, most of whom make pornography, directly with subscribers.
“Building an editorial library that genuinely serves the people who are seeking out new Content Creators is an incredible business opportunity and we’re going to work hard to make ours the best,” he wrote. “When my team writes helpful articles about topics like OnlyFans Creators and Weed, advertisers LOVE IT because it’s a great place for them to spend their budgets and get solid returns.”
By putting his name out there, Davis revealed more than his business plan for the paper. St. Louis Public Radio has dug into incorporation documents, lawsuit filings and information from people close to the matter — all of which points to RSC Ventures, an operation that is leveraging the RFT’s online reputation to fund a link-farming business run by out-of-state owners.
The story begins in Texas with a group of search engine optimization salesmen who make their money hawking OnlyFans creators and camgirls.
A case based on timing
The first inkling that then-Executive Editor Sarah Fenske had that former owner Big Lou Media Group had sold the 47-year-old newspaper came on May 21. She told St. Louis Public Radio that owner and CEO Chris Keating had reached out to her (and, full disclosure, to this reporter, who was then serving as the RFT’s managing editor) for early meetings the next day.
At that May 22 meeting, Keating told Fenske of the sale and that the new owners would not be retaining the staff. He also said that he’d signed an agreement not to reveal the purchaser. Keating declined to comment for this article.
Two days earlier, Davis registered a limited liability company, RSC Ventures, with the Texas secretary of state’s office. STLPR previously reported that Davis and the RFT share a phone number with OnlyFans creator promotional company FanFox, which has a San Antonio suburb listed as its location on the company's LinkedIn page.
The timing of Davis’ move was the first piece of evidence that RSC Ventures is the owner of the RFT. But what is RSC Ventures?
According to the filing, RSC Venture's management is another LLC, Ready Set Cam, which shares an address with RSC Ventures in Gonzales, Texas, about an hour's drive from San Antonio.
Davis registered Ready Set Cam LLC with the Texas secretary of state's office on Aug. 9. It’s the surviving entity from a merger with an LLC of the same name that was created in 2020 in Washington.
According to the Texas filing, the company’s management is a married couple: Stephanie Adames and Max J. Anderson of Phoenix, Arizona. In the original Washington filing, Anderson is listed as CEO.
Neither Davis nor Anderson responded to requests for comment.
While Davis and Adames have modest online presences, Anderson has put himself out there. He’s blogged, published a handful of tracks on SoundCloud, been a guest on podcasts and keeps robust social media accounts. He frequently talks about his “bootstrapped internet companies” that boost online adult services creators. And a big part of his businesses hinges on websites publishing the type of OnlyFans-focused listicle now found all over the RFT.
Alt weeklies and the backpage tradition
Since the start, journalism in the RFT has been paid for in part by sex work advertisements — nothing unusual in the alternative weekly world. These ads, often placed in the classifieds section toward the back of publications, became known as backpage ads.
In 1998, New Times Inc. purchased the RFT from founders Ray Hartmann and Mark Vittert. New Times — which at its height owned papers across the U.S., including LA Weekly and the Village Voice in New York — eventually split into two companies: Voice Media Group and Backpage.com, a classified site that New Times co-founders and journalists Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey created to compete with Craigslist.
Backpage became popular with sex workers looking to safely advertise their services and unpopular with a host of critics. In 2018, after much legal back and forth, several federal agencies shut down and seized the operation’s servers, and a federal grand jury indicted Lacy and Larkin (who had since sold the site) and five others, on charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering, NPR reported at the time. Last year, Larkin died by suicide, the Phoenix New Times reported, and in August, Lacey was sentenced to five years in prison, according to NPR.
That’s to say, when the RFT started running sex-focused sponsored content, the topic wasn’t new, but the format was.
Former RFT Editor-at-Large Daniel Hill wrote about the proliferation of sponsored content, known in the industry as sponcon, on Facebook in August. He explained that companies that want to show up higher in internet search results pay prominent online publishers, like the RFT, to run sponsored articles that link back to the companies’ websites.
“[T]he tech side of things figured out how to completely bury all the sponcon to where it simply didn't appear on the RFT's site in any conventional way -- there was no way to click through to it at all,” Hill wrote, “this didn't bother the people that were paying for the sponcon because they don't actually need RFT readers to read their stories; they just need the keywords that they are trying to promote to rise up the ranks on a google search.”
New sponcon poured into the RFT’s site in its final months, Hill recalled. A lot of it was “best of” listicles for OnlyFans content that Hill said was “identical” to what the new owners are putting on the RFT’s site now.
Hill speculated that the buyer was likely the entity selling sponcon onto the RFT’s site: “this would streamline operations -- they would now OWN a publication with a high google ranking and could fill it with as much [OnlyFans] content as they want, and they wouldn't have to pay per post as they did before.”
In June, the new owners created an “After Dark” category on the visible side of the RFT and began populating it with the same type of OnlyFans listicles that had previously been hidden and labeled sponsored content — only now it links from the site’s main menu.
The digital nomad behind the new RFT
Ready Set Cam co-owner Anderson describes himself on X as “running a portfolio of bootstrapped internet businesses.” A lot of the businesses monetize OnlyFans creators by promoting their accounts through sponcon or getting referral fees from cam sites.
“Loneliness is already fixed,” he wrote on X in 2023. “It’s called OnlyFans.”
Two years ago, Anderson appeared as a guest on The Damn Good Day podcast. In the two-hour conversation, he portrays himself as a free soul whose existence is made possible through savvy minimalism, tech biz knowhow and a vegan diet. Accordingly, his Instagram portrays a footloose, glamorous life with a Burning Man aesthetic that bears the marks of photo manipulation.
“Anyone who's never taken mushrooms or LSD with their dog is, like, missed on a whole part of life,” he said at one point on the podcast.
Host Ian Lenhart dubs it a “digital nomad lifestyle,” and Anderson unrolls his life story.
A Washington state native, he dropped out of college to become a marketing intern at a tech startup, Porch, begun by a few Google graduates. Anderson says he worked his way up through the ranks and then bounced around in the online tech space. Eventually, he got into entrepreneurship.
He did that by entering the search engine optimization business in cannabis, moving on to vape pens and then adult content with Ready Set Cam, a website that ranks camgirls and provides best practices for up-and-coming models.
“I had always heard from software engineers I worked with was that porn is the leading edge of the internet,” Anderson said. “Every technology that's ever been invented for video streaming, that kind of thing, that was invented for porn first, and then got adapted to YouTube and that kind of thing. And, like, 15 of the top 50 websites on the internet by traffic are porn sites. Yeah, it's freaking massive. No one wants to talk about it, but it's huge.”
On the podcast, Anderson explained that his businesses focus on getting websites with high Google search authority to link to, for example, cam sites, which then helps the cam sites show up higher in search results. In exchange, the cam sites would pay him a percentage of the model’s first-year profit, or in some cases lifetime profit. One new model, he said, might bring in about $10,000 for him.
Eventually, he was able to trade on the SEO authority of his websites to expand the business model. Anderson created a listicle of top 50 OnlyFans creators on Ready Set Cam based on account popularity. Then people started reaching out and asking to pay to get on the list. Soon, he said, that became the biggest part of his business.
Eventually, he acquired OnlyFinder, a search engine for OnlyFans creators, as a way to expand his business.
But just a few years later, that acquisition would dump Anderson straight into legal hot water and into conflict with OnlyFans itself.
Cracks in the empire
According to Michael Patzer, the creator of OnlyFinder, Anderson’s acquisition is a matter of debate. In March 2023, he sued Anderson in a circuit court in Miami-Dade County, Florida, in an attempt to nullify the sales contract for OnlyFinder’s domain.
In the suit, Patzer argued that the contract was meant to be a limited licensing agreement giving Anderson enough control in order to operate the site’s services but not to transfer ownership or to allow Anderson to sell the domain. Patzer alleges Anderson was trying to do just that.
Anderson fired back with allegations of wild behavior on Patzer’s part. Supposedly full of seller's remorse, Anderson said Patzer “became increasingly hostile, illicitly demanded $5,000,000,” delivered a bogus server to Anderson, stopped doing the work needed to keep OnlyFinder humming and actively tried to sabotage the operation.
Attempts by STLPR to reach Patzer through his lawyer were unsuccessful.
Though the lawsuit itself isn’t material to the question of the RFT’s ownership, it does reveal a few things. The first is an example of what Anderson’s purchase agreements look like — which suggests what the sale contract of the RFT also might have looked like.
According to the suit, Patzer agreed to a “purchase price” of $590,000 paid in installments of $15,000 over 36 months plus an up-front payment of $50,000. During those months, Anderson would pay Patzer 10 cents for every ad click on the site after 150,000 in a year.
The suit adds another point of connection between OnlyFinder and the alt-weekly world.
Among the list of witnesses and exhibits is a listing for Google Analytics and Search Console data of “OnlyFinder.com and integrated sites, including, but not limited to, VillageVoice.com, LAWeekly.com, ReadySetCam.com, Lustfel.com, and TheLittleSlush.com.”
Village Voice and LA Weekly are both once-lauded alt-weeklies that are now shells of their former selves filled to the brim with X-rated sponcon. Street Media owns both sites, which are run by CEO and Publisher Brian Calle. (In July, Wired reported on how much of the OnlyFans sponcon on both sites bears the earmarks of AI-generated writing and reached out to Calle, who denied using AI.)
OnlyFinder sold sponsored content onto the RFT, an individual close to the matter confirmed, and the Detroit Metro Times, an alt-weekly owned by Big Lou Holdings, has “Only Finder” listed as an author on its site. When asked if OnlyFinder sold sponcon on the Detroit Metro Times website, a Metro Times sales staffer did not respond.
Finally, the lawsuit may provide some schadenfreude for St. Louisans ticked off at what the new owners have done to the alt weekly they once loved.
Anderson has twice sought to obtain a trademark for OnlyFinder only to have Fenix International Limited, the parent company of OnlyFans, block it.
Then in August, the Florida court ordered that the legal tussle between Patzer and Anderson be temporarily halted because Fenix is attempting to wrest the OnlyFinder domain from both.
Will the behemoth squash Anderson and OnlyFinder — leaving them in a state of rubble much like the RFT? There’s a hearing in that Miami court early Tuesday that may deliver that answer.
Until then, Anderson might take his own advice:
“Just keep trying to grind at it and stay alive.”
Editor’s note: Jessica Rogen is a former employee of Big Lou Holdings and was the managing editor at the Riverfront Times at the time of its sale in May.
