LONDON — The Financial Times has published an interview with OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair, in which she discusses the popular creator platform and her current vision for the company, and explicitly states that the company is “very proud” of its adult content creators.
In the interview, Blair told the Financial Times’ Cristina Criddle that OnlyFans is “an incredible UK tech success story.”
As XBIZ reported, Blair served as OnlyFans’ chief strategy and operations officer from early 2022 until last July, when she was appointed CEO following the departure of previous chief exec Ami Gan.
Blair says in the piece that her mission following Gan’s brief tenure was consolidating what the company had built and thinking about future opportunities.
“For us, obviously we’re very proud of our adult-content creators, but it’s making sure that we also open up to other creators, so we’re doing new verticals,” she states.
Blair was previously a cyber, privacy and data specialist at the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, and had OnlyFans as a client before joining the company.
“We’re so unusual because we’re a UK tech success story,” Blair tells the Financial Times. “Whenever I talk about the business, everyone automatically assumes that we’re based in the US. We’re happy to say, actually, we founded it in the UK, we’re still solidly in the UK, that’s where the majority of our exec team lives. We’ve paid out over $15bn to creators since we started, and that’s increasing year on year. We continue to grow. We’ve done the Financial Times’ Fastest-Growing Companies in Europe ranking two years in a row.”
Blair adds that although some had worried OnlyFans’ rise was only a pandemic bubble, the company’s ongoing success has proven that is not the case.
“The company is also capable of doing so much for creators,” she says. “That’s what excites me about the job. Also, with my background in cyber and privacy and online safety, there’s a nerdy part of me that really enjoys the challenging landscape that tech companies face at the moment. I think I can help to reduce some of the risk that’s inherent in running a tech business, especially one that is open and honest about allowing adult content.”
During the interview, Blair discusses how OnlyFans is tackling compliance with the U.K.’s new Online Safety Act, citing the “constantly moving landscape” of online safety.
“We’re already being regulated by Ofcom under the video-sharing platform (VSP) regulation. That means we’ve got a jump-start on, frankly, a lot of other people, because we’ve already got a 100 per cent verified creator and user base and we’re already an over-18s platform — we already check ID, we already do all those things.”
Tackling the ‘P-Word’
In the course of the interview, the Financial Times interviewer presses Blair on terminology.
“Would you call yourself a porn site?” Criddle asks.
Blair replies, “No: we’re a site that hosts adult content, but we also host a variety of other content … Creators are able to create whatever content they choose to, as long as it’s within our terms of service.”
“I just wonder why you use the term ‘adult’ rather than ‘porn,’” Criddle persists.
Blair then explains that “porn” can be a pejorative term.
“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 says. “That’s the reason why I don’t tend to use the P-word.”