Name: OnlyFans CEO on Avoiding the App Store and Personalized Algorithms | WSJ
Uploaded: 2025-05-20T02:51:00.000Z
Duration: 12 min 56 s
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OnlyFans has changed the business model of being naked online.

Now, the company wants to build a different kind of social media platform, one that's not reliant on advertising and personalized algorithms.

To-infinitive

Keely Blair, CEO of OnlyFans, sat down with The Wall Street Journal to discuss her plan to build the world's safest digital platform and why she thinks some banks still use an outdated risk model.

What did you do for work before you joined OnlyFans and how did you land here?

My OnlyFans origin story is quite different from that of most UK and US tech CEOs.

So before I joined OnlyFans, I was a partner at a law firm and I led their cybersecurity, online safety and privacy practice.

So not the typical background for a tech company CEO.

But what I found was that actually my background in law really put me in a unique position to lead the business, because in terms of the biggest risks that face tech and social media companies presently, it's regulation.

I want to talk a little bit about the platform design and what makes it different from some of the other social platforms out there.

To start, I think the search function is not the most user friendly.

So OnlyFans is very different by design from other platforms.

And a lot of that is because we follow safety by design principles when we think about platform architecture and structure.

Search function is a great example of one of those things.

So we don't have highly personalised content algorithms on OnlyFans.

You're not going to get a bunch of suggested creators that is specially curated for you to try and encourage you to spend more time on the platform, because we believe that users as well as creators should also have control.

So users should be able to choose who they subscribe to.

You can't search by genre, you can't search by like first name or last name.

The only thing you can search for is their username.

And the reason for that is actually because we found historically across the internet, that when broad search terms are applied, people can seek to abuse those to promote content that is illegal or harmful or things along those lines.

Whereas if you're trying to promote content that is not, you know,   if somebody genuinely wants to subscribe to a creator, they will know their username already, and they'll be able to find them.

I've seen you talk a lot about how you want to create a different type of social media.

And you can see that in how OnlyFans is designed today.

Or have those sort of design features come in over time?

Some of the design features were there from the beginning.

The 80-20 monetisation split was there from the beginning.

The same with creators owning their own content and being able to remove their content when they see fit rather than the content belonging to us.

We've certainly evolved and a more sophisticated position on advertising and on privacy over time.

Because we're open about the fact that we host adult content.

And we recognise that we have a duty to control for the risks associated with that.

So a lot of our platform features are designed with that in mind.

Now, a lot of other social media platforms will say adult content is against their terms of service.

But their platforms are full of adult content.

And so by definition, they're therefore not designing for that risk.

Another thing I find really interesting about the business is that it's managed to be incredibly successful without being an actual app.

Would you ever consider putting OnlyFans on the App Store?

Or is that something you're comfortable operating without?

I think the 30% payments piece is a barrier to us joining the App Store.

It doesn't make sense from a corporate and commercial perspective to give up that amount of revenue.

Not being on the App Store has not had a negative impact on growth.

If you think we now have 4 million creators, 300 million fans worldwide, I struggle to see the upside, I guess, at this stage.

Perhaps in the beginning, it may have been different.

But again, it was a financial decision at that time.

And now it's very much a, where's the need?

The US and Canada and the UK are very big markets for OnlyFans.

Are there any locations that you want to expand into?

When we look at new geographies to bring on board, the key thing is, are we going to be able to verify their identity with a high degree of success?

So that is tricky in some more emerging markets, candidly.

And so that makes those markets harder to operate.

And with fans, it's simply a question of can they make payments safely on the platform when we look at new geographies?

It's very much, you know, where creators are, can we open that market?

Are we getting more requests to open a market in a particular way?

Or make a change in a market, for example.

So in Brazil, last year, we introduced an alternative payment method called PIX, which is a local payment method only for Brazil, to better enable creator and fan payments on the platform.

Within the financial industry, it is difficult for a lot of adult entertainment companies to work with these institutions.

So I'm curious how you take on that risk and how you mitigate that.

There is a perception, certainly within payments and financial services, that certain industries are higher risk just by virtue of what they do.

So adult content industries, crypto, cannabis, things along those lines are traditionally classed as high risk merchants.

That is a very unsophisticated view of risk.

And so actually, at OnlyFans, we've invested heavily in putting into place market leading safety controls around our platform, around the payments infrastructure on our platform, around the content that's on our platform.

And for that reason, we've been able to communicate and to be transparent with financial services providers and payment providers about, you know, what is the unmitigated risk that's left there.

So we have ended up working with people who traditionally have not worked with those industries, as a result of the fact that they are now confident in our safety controls.

We invest heavily in our payments process.

So we spend a lot of time and effort building a global payments network to enable our creators to withdraw their funds in the jurisdiction that they live in.

Is there a risk that, say, maybe in the future, the leadership of one of the banks that you're working with changes, somebody comes in and says, I don't want this bank working with OnlyFans?

I think there's always a risk if you if you work in a business which is polarizing.

You could say the same thing with oil and gas.

And you can say the same thing with green energy or D&I policies.

Attitudes and risks and risk tolerance shift over time.

We're definitely seeing that in terms of the adult content space, seeing that in terms of crypto, you know, if you think about five years ago, nobody would invest in crypto.

Now you've got major traditional financial services institutions heavily invested in crypto, for example.

And so attitudes change and shift over time.

What are the biggest threats to safety on OnlyFans right now?

I think it's not really just an OnlyFans issue.

And I think that in terms of the biggest threats that exist for user-generated content platforms, it would be AI-generated content that is generated either without respect for copyright or without respect for consent.

And that is an issue for user-generated content platforms.

And if you'd ask me for like a magic bullet tool to fix it, I would love if there was a really effective tool that was able to identify whether an image was artificially generated.

There are plenty of tools that exist in the market now which claim they are able to do that.

They're not effective and they're certainly not evolving at the pace that AI-generated image technology and software is developing.

I mean, all of our content is reviewed by our team of human moderators anyway, but that would help people to be able to more quickly triage what they believe to be artificially generated content that may not be of the creator.

I'm actually really curious how you think about AI-generated chat.

How are you thinking about, you know, if someone were to hire an agency or hire a freelancer who then just can AI-generate chat that goes back and forth?

There's no AI chat plugin you can use to be able to chat to your fans on Only Fans.

Each creator runs their business in a way that they see fit, and they're going to use third parties to help them do that, whether it's a photographer, a to help them to run their account.

We don't, as a matter of policy, allow AI chatbots to be utilised to manage the account.

Can people cut and paste AI-generated content from chat GPT into Only Fans?

Of course they can, but in the same way that I could do that with my work now, and we can all do that across the space, we don't have those tools integrated for creators to use natively in the platform.

What are some of the challenges that you face when it comes to thinking about bringing in outside investment?

We don't want to bring in outside investment.

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OnlyFans CEO on Avoiding the App Store and Personalized Algorithms | WSJ

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