Lingerie Fighting Championships (LFC) built its audience first, deliberately, and is building the revenue on top of it now. The sports-entertainment league has 5.3 million followers across social platforms, and because it trades publicly, how far that second half has got is a matter of record. CEO Shaun Donnelly joined MemberFix Radio to walk through it.
That record takes the form of a 10-K, a company's annual financial report to the SEC. LFC's 2025 filing puts revenue at $208,485. Donnelly doesn't hide from the gap. His framing is sequencing: build the audience as the asset, then build the revenue on it. The filing backs part of that account, recording the 2025 UK spend as an intentional loss aimed at audience growth. What follows is what audience monetization looks like in practice at that stage: where the money comes from now, why LFC stopped renting distribution, what the follower growth cost, and how the membership actually behaves.
Where the money comes from now
LFC is a scripted sports-entertainment league: all-female MMA and pro-wrestling events, reality series, podcasts, and video on demand. The library holds 120-plus reality episodes and 46 live events. The VIP membership, at $9.99 a month or $69 a year, bundles all live pay-per-views, the full archive, behind-the-scenes content, and two tickets to a live event with autograph access.
Revenue arrives from four directions: live events and pay-per-view, broadcast licensing, sponsorship and advertising, and site subscriptions. Three customers account for most of it. Meta alone was 39% of 2025 revenue, licensing partner Maybacks Global Entertainment was 24%, and YouTube was 18%. The membership is a real product but not yet the engine – it is something the company is still growing and developing, with pricing experiments planned around its own Roku channel.
Audience monetization breaks when someone else owns the platform
Donnelly says LFC became Tubi's most-watched show within a week of arriving on the platform, “which I think actually hurt us.” His account: someone senior at Fox had the show removed for not being family-friendly enough. A similar story played out at Fubo, where, he says, the executives who brought LFC in were overruled higher up. Both times, the content performed and the relationship ended anyway.
His response was to control distribution rather than rent it. The uncensored versions of LFC events run exclusively on the company's own site, with an owned Roku channel and a bars pay-per-view deal covering more than a thousand venues both on the way, per Donnelly. Video on the site still streams through Vimeo. What changed is who decides whether the content stays up.
The UK bet: what the follower growth cost
In July 2025, LFC produced two UK events and a reality series: cost of services nearly tripled year over year, and the year closed with a gross loss. The company describes the spend as intentional, aimed at audience growth.
Donnelly calls the decision a little of both, calculated and risky. Bigger events had spiked their numbers before, so he expected growth. A doubling would not have surprised him. What actually happened did: the social following went from under 1.5 million to 5.3 million, and Donnelly says sponsor inquiries went from about one per year to one per week.
What the growth has not yet done is close the gap. Revenue rose 56.8% for the year, costs rose faster, and 2025 ended with a net loss of $567,160. The audience arrived. Monetizing it, in Donnelly's words, is the work happening now.
What each VIP signup costs LFC, and when members cancel
Two details in the VIP product deserve a membership operator's attention. First, the bundle carries a physical cost: two event tickets and autograph time per member, so every signup creates a real-world obligation. Donnelly's reasoning is that proximity is the product. LFC events keep fans close rather than behind barriers, and he says the company has run entire events where the audience was only shareholders and site members.
Second, churn follows the event calendar rather than dissatisfaction: “there'll be a big spike in the memberships. And then after the event happens, a certain percentage of those will then cancel it and then sign up again when the next event.” Alongside that cycle sits a base of members subscribed since the site opened, held by a cadence of six to twelve new videos a month.
Revenue share instead of payroll, and lean production
LFC puts two revenue-critical functions on revenue share instead of salary. The webmaster who runs the site works on a percentage, and so does the social media team. Donnelly's rule: “I'm never gonna begrudge someone making a lot of money if they're making me money.”
He says Facebook alone has produced months above $25,000, which makes a percentage deal lucrative for the people running it and ties their income to the company's results.
The same discipline shows up in production. Donnelly learned television with a two-person crew, hiding the boom mic because there was no audio operator. He says he shot a full season for Playboy TV himself for $13,000, and that the network was later paying $90,000 an episode. LFC events run on three cameras, and when the company doubled per-show budgets to roughly $50,000, Donnelly points to what it bought: better fighters and better-looking shows.
What membership and eLearning operators can take from this
Four of LFC's decisions have nothing to do with fighting and everything to do with selling access to content.
Free distribution sold the paid product. Donnelly expected Tubi to cannibalize memberships and got the reverse. What he gave away was different value, not a trimmed one: censored broadcast cuts, while the uncensored events, the archive and the behind-the-scenes stayed on the site. Free content pulls when the paid tier holds something the free tier structurally cannot.
If it takes ten minutes to explain, it will not travel. Donnelly's filter for a project is whether he can pitch it in a breath. Say the name and the listener already knows if they want in.
One membership can hold two renewal reasons. LFC has members who subscribe for an event and cancel after it, and members who have been there since the site opened, held by six to twelve new videos a month. Two behaviors sharing one price, and what retains each group is different. Worth knowing which of yours is which before you build a retention offer for the average of them.
Own at least one channel outright. LFC performed well on Tubi and Fubo and lost both placements to decisions made above the people who brought them in. Donnelly says platforms now approach about five times a week, and that the fit is better when LFC controls it. An owned site, an email list, a first-party channel – each is the same move at a different scale, and each survives someone else's policy meeting.
The through-line of Donnelly's account is sequencing. LFC treated the audience as the asset to build first, accepted a deliberate loss to multiply it, and is now constructing the revenue engine in public, one owned channel and one experiment at a time. The order matters more than the industry.
Shaun Donnelly is CEO of Lingerie Fighting Championships. Find LFC at lfcfights.com, on YouTube, and on Instagram.
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