OnlyFans CEO Kelly Blair tried to clear the air about what’s offered on the popular subscription-based platform — insisting that it’s not a “porn” website.
Blair, the UK-based site’s former chief strategy and operations officer who took the reins in January 2022, dismissed the notion that the platform is exclusively for sexual content in an interview with the Financial Times this week.
“No: we’re a site that hosts adult content, but we also host a variety of other content. And a lot of the people who create adult content also choose to create other content, so maybe yoga and naked yoga,” she told the outlet.
She said that adult-content sites like OnlyFans should cater to other adult interests — not just sex — including “comedy and sports and music.”
“We don’t want to categorize people, so we don’t. That’s why we don’t categorize our content either. Creators are able to create whatever content they choose to, as long as it’s within our terms of service,” Blair added.
OnlyFans launched in 2016 as a subscription-based social media platform that allowed sex workers and other creators to post content behind a paywall. Since its founding, OnlyFans has dished out more than $8 billion to its creators.
After exploding in popularity during the COVID pandemic, OnlyFans has sought to move away from explicit content to expand its appeal to more conservative audiences and avoid crackdowns from social media giants like Facebook and Instagram.
Blair told the Financial Times that she takes issue with the site being labeled as “porn,” which she believes is “quite a pejorative term.”
“There’s a lot of people who would hear that and think one thing or another thing . . . Also, a lot of the content on our site is messaging or chats or talking about breakfast or talking about a variety of different things,” she said. “When we talk about this subject, it’s really important to be as unemotive as possible.
“The word ‘porn’ has been wrapped up in some of the negative things that were the case for the adult-content industry, and we’ve done an awful lot to try and help adult-content creators to have a safe space on the internet and be treated with respect. That’s the reason why I don’t tend to use the P word,” Blair added.
The CEO said that the company is thriving financially, having grown 17% last year with revenue topping $1 billion as it expands into other global markets.
OnlyFans has registered more than 3.1 million creators and 238.8 million fans, the Financial Times reported.
The website takes 20% of the proceeds from its creators, according to the website.
Blair has defended Onlyfans in the past, telling Bloomberg in 2022 that “Our content creators provide content on anything from gardening to lady gardens, and for some reason, OnlyFans is ‘an adult-content site’.”
The site faced immense backlash from creators in 2021 after it announced it would ban sexually explicit content. OnlyFans walked back on the plans after creators claimed it would threaten their income.
In early 2022, mainstream lenders such as Wells Fargo terminated the bank accounts of several high-profile individuals in the sex industry without so much as offering an explanation.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
