How OnlyFans is Creating a Safe Space for Adult Content Creators

OnlyFans continues to be a popular and lucrative platform for content creators to develop, share, and monetize their material.

Whether it be through monthly subscription fees, pay-per-view content, pay-for-direct messages, or tips, creators have multiple revenue-generating options to choose from as they build a fan base.

And the numbers bear this out. According to the Financial Times, in 2022 the platform had over 3 million creators, over 238 million fans, and made $5.6 billion in payments.

As creators make decisions about which adult content platforms to prioritize, OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair in an interview with the Financial Times said, “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.”

She’s referring to the platform’s effort to treat adult content creators with respect and not perpetuate negative stereotypes about sex work. So much so, that Blair says she doesn’t use the word “porn” to describe adult content on OnlyFans.

For Blair, that word carries too many negative connotations and is too difficult to try to unpack with the public.

In further explaining her point in the interview, she said, “’Porn’ can be treated as quite a pejorative term. There’s a lot of people who would hear that and think one thing or another thing.”

“The word “porn” has been wrapped up in some of the negative things that were the case for the adult-content industry,” Blair said.”

Her sentiment can be seen in some of the findings of a 2021 survey of over 900 Americans conducted by Bespoke. That research found that 69% of those surveyed have feelings of guilt or shame after watching porn, and 73% feel that mainstream porn sites are exploitative of performers.

But that same survey showed that 87% agree that “creator-controlled platforms, like OnlyFans, have contributed to pornography becoming more normalized in the mainstream.”

It’s true that OnlyFans is more than just an adult content site; it’s a place with a variety of content that’s of interest to a variety of people.

Besides the not safe for work (NSFW) content, examples of safe for work (SFW) content on the platform include fitness and health, cooking, art and music, gardening, fashion, and life coaching.

There’s something for everybody and Blair wants to ensure that all creators are treated equally, regardless of content. OnlyFans is focused on providing consumers with the content they’re searching for while providing a safe place for creators to share that content.

“What matters most is engagement and the payment side of things: people being able to monetize their content,” Blair says in her Financial Times interview. “It doesn’t matter to us what the content is that they’re monetizing, as long as it’s within our terms of service,” she added.

Those terms are expansive, governing everything in the way that users and creators engage on the platform. With a number of policies in place, creators can feel protected.

OnlyFans works to prevent unauthorized access to creators’ personal information, and the platform allows creators to lock their accounts with additional security measures, such as two-factor authentication. Creators can also add watermarks to their content to help prevent copyright infringement.

Blair continues to shape OnlyFans’ strategic outlook while being intentional about not categorizing or stereotyping content creators, making the platform attractive to more and more creators.

She was promoted to the role of CEO of OnlyFans in 2023, after serving as the platform’s chief strategy and operations officer. She joined the company in 2022, and prior to that, was head of cyber, privacy and data innovation at the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in London.