More Than Just Porn: ‘Secretive' OnlyFans Tries to Open Up in Move to Mainstream

OnlyFans Ltd. executives have mapped out a plan to become more transparent and highlight less-explicit content at a time when the company’s home country is finalizing strict new online safety laws.

“Amazon sell books on sex and gardening. Nobody calls Amazon an adult bookstore, right?” said Keily Blair, the London-based company’s strategy chief. “Our content creators provide content on anything from gardening to lady gardens, and for some reason, OnlyFans is ‘an adult-content site.’”

The online platform is trying to move away from its “secretive” past, Blair said in an interview, and is working to be more communicative with journalists, banking partners, regulators and “anybody who wants to come and have a conversation with us,” particularly those who are critical.

Among those who have focused on OnlyFans have been UK lawmakers, who have voiced concerns the platform could escape oversight if parts of the new Online Safety Bill -- expected to come into effect next year -- only apply to services where there are a so-called significant number of child users.

OnlyFans has had meetings with UK MPs about the bill, and backs the incoming legislation, Blair said.

“We are vocal supporters of the Online Safety Bill and any suggestions that we have or would attempt to dodge its requirements are not supported by factual analysis, evidence or statements by OnlyFans,” a spokesperson said.

According to OnlyFans’s own transparency reports, published on its website, the company removed more than a million posts for violating their acceptable use policy since July 2021, and takes down hundreds of accounts per month.

It’s contributed 230 new instances of child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children database in the same period. In comparison, much larger platform Meta Platforms Inc. said it acted on more than 20 million cases of such material in the second quarter of this year.

More than 1,000 workers are dedicated to safety, and OnlyFans is hiring between 40 to 50 people per month. Many of those are responsible for moderating the 20 million monthly posts coming from its more than 2 million creators. Every post is reviewed within 24 hours of posting, after being triaged by image and word-recognition systems, which prioritize higher-risk material, OnlyFans said.

Read More: OnlyFans Drops Plan to Ban Porn Content Amid Creator Uproar

On a Tuesday visit, the offices were all but empty. But the company said its teams work remotely, and the moderators are contractors. OnlyFans doesn’t have a careers page on its website, and on LinkedIn there are just two vacancies advertised.

Founded in 2016, OnlyFans is based in a small office in London’s Soho neighborhood – once the home of city’s red-light district but now home to media and fashion companies. The platform became wildly profitable during the Covid-19 pandemic, posting pretax profits of $433 million in the year ended Nov. 30, seven times more than it earned in the previous year.

US-based investor Leonid Radvinsky, who acquired a majority stake in the business in 2018, has made more than $500 million in dividends from the platform since the end of 2020, the company said in its financial statements last month.

OnlyFans subscribers pay content creators monthly fees and tips for access to exclusive photos, videos and conversations, and the company takes a 20% fee. It has attempted to broaden its offering beyond the adult content that it’s well known for, highlighting pages by chefs, musicians, celebrities and fitness trainers, and launching a mainstream streaming site similar to YouTube.

Read More: OnlyFans Owner Gets Over $500 Million in Dividends in Two Years

“If you had an OnlyFans account, and you wanted to share cooking content on Monday, and spicier content on Tuesday, how would we categorize you? Are you a chef?” Blair said in a conference room that also acted as the main office, brimming with merchandise emblazoned with the blue and white OnlyFans logo, including t-shirts, hats and electric desk fans.

Blair declined to comment on how much of the content hosted by the company is explicit.

A search for “gardening” on OnlyFans’s free and safe-for-work streaming service OFTV brings up a video of a woman offering tips on planting pumpkins. The avatar for its creator’s OnlyFans account is more suggestive, wearing a small, purple bikini. A search for creators making “cooking” content on the site brings up similar, scantily clad results.

In August last year, OnlyFans said it would ban sexually explicit material, causing an uproar from creators and sex workers who had come to rely on the platform as a source of income. It soon reversed its plans, and blamed requests from “banking partners and payout providers” in its initial announcement.

“Dear Sex Workers,” OnlyFans said in a tweet at the time, “The OnlyFans community would not be what it is today without you.”

The public reaction convinced financial institutions to continue working with the company, Chief Financial Officer Lee Taylor said in the interview. He said OnlyFans now has a “vast” financial network across a range of payment processors, though he declined to name the payments firms that partner with the company.

“The key focus for us is trying to challenge the mis-perceptions on us as a reputational risk,” Taylor said. The company is also due to add more open banking partnerships, which Blair said will bolster its identity verification and anti-money laundering controls.