Paywalled porn or online safe haven? OnlyFans’ CEO weighs into the debate

This story is part of the March 4 Edition of Good Weekend.See all 15 stories.

The CEO of OnlyFans is worried that you will have heard of her company, but won’t understand what it does or how it works. Months after becoming the new boss, last July she told Time magazine: “There’s been a lot of misconceptions publicly about OnlyFans – who we are and who’s running this company. Honestly, most people don’t even know what the business is.” Presumably this is why I am here in the basement of a private members’ club in London’s Soho. “Yes, I’ve been making a massive effort to publicly be out there to talk about the company,” Amrapali Gan tells me brightly, “to clear up the confusion.” She wants to be transparent.

What she wants, however, and what actually happens turn out to be quite different things. When we part an hour later she exclaims, “This has been so lovely!” Which I’m sure we would both have wanted to be true. Unfortunately, it has been nothing of the sort for either of us.

I don’t know which media training company coached her to sign off with a sentiment so laughably implausible, but would guess it’s the same one that told her to begin every answer to a difficult question with “So …” As anyone who has ever heard a politician or spokesperson parroting “So …” knows, this verbal device is seldom deployed in the service of transparency.

OnlyFans is a staggering success story. Founded in 2016 by Tim Stokely, a young businessman from Essex in eastern England, it provides a platform on which content creators can charge fans a subscription fee ranging from $US4.99 to $US49.99 (about $7.30 to $72.30) a month to view their content and contact them.

Many accounts effectively operate as a shop window for more explicit or personalised content; subscribers can request bespoke messages, photos and videos via direct messaging, for which they pay extra. They can send “tips” to thank creators for posts they particularly like; creators can also request “tips” to unlock more explicit content. Everyone involved must be over 18; the creators take 80 per cent of the revenue, OnlyFans keeps 20 per cent.

To find out what a popular OnlyFans account might look like, I typed the words “Best OnlyFans” into a search engine called OnlyFinder (one of many that have popped up online to scour the site). Top of the list was @sofiegonewild, whose bio reads: “Sofie Gostosa 19 Years Old … Hot Latina/Filipina Teen Girl … I share my dirtiest videos & fantasies with you … If you don’t find something, I’m always here to fulfil your Custom Requests …” It goes on, in unrepeatable graphic terms.

Largely unknown until 2020, the business exploded during the pandemic when adult performers and sex workers unable to earn elsewhere flooded the site, joined by celebrity names – Cardi B, Bella Thorne, Amber Rose – who quickly made it famous all over the world. With more than 120 million subscribers to date, the site has paid out more than $17.4 billion to its creators, and made the American porn magnate who bought it in 2018 a billionaire. Depending on your point of view, OnlyFans is either a blueprint for the future of social media – “Instagram with a paywall”, as some suggest – or shorthand for the mass pornification of mainstream culture.

Largely unknown until 2020, the business exploded during the pandemic when adult performers and sex workers unable to earn elsewhere flooded the site.

The platform has solved many of social media’s biggest problems. Influencers and celebrities can finally control and monetise their own image; they choose what to post and are guaranteed to get paid for it.

The subscription model also defeats virtually all trolling; as Gan says, “As soon as they join, a lot of creators are, like, ‘Wow, everyone is so nice and so welcoming.’ And they’re almost surprised by that. I’m – well, someone who’s going to say something mean is not going to go and pay to subscribe to you.”

She grins. “And if they do, then kind of the joke’s on them because you just made money out of them.” Misbehaviour is much easier to police on a platform that knows every user’s real identity and, unlike the ocean of free porn on the internet, its content can – in theory, at least – be accessed only by adults.

Actor Bella Thorne, rapper Cardi B and model Amber Rose have joined the OnlyFans site as content creators.Credit: Getty Images

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Before joining as chief marketing and communications officer in 2020, Gan had never worked in the adult industry. The 37-year-old grew up in Washington in the US, the only child of Indian-American parents, her father an engineer, her mother a teacher and homemaker, and studied marketing in California before working for a protein-bar brand, then Red Bull, and most recently the first cannabis café in Los Angeles, “which really helped prepare me for jumping into this business that everyone’s talking about in the zeitgeist. And to me, it’s so exciting. We’re disruptive. We’re disrupters.”

When Stokely stood down as CEO at the end of 2021, Gan was promoted from head of marketing to become one of very few women of colour in the world to lead a billion-dollar, big-tech household name.

In person, she is tiny, practically birdlike, and immaculately groomed, with a big smile and a faint Californian inflection. “So great to meet you!” she announces, mid-photo shoot, from the other side of the room. Her diction errs towards Silicon Valley, but her manner is a million miles from Mark Zuckerberg, closer – for the first few minutes, anyway – to what the glamour industry would call “bubbly”.

The photo shoot over, she sits down across the table from me wearing a “Go on, ask me anything” expression. If the world has been paying all this attention to OnlyFans, I say, and Gan is brilliant at marketing, I’m puzzled by why there would be lots of misconceptions about the company. She nods.

“OnlyFans is referenced regularly in the media, on talk shows. It’s used by a range of creators – glamour models, adult content creators, also athletes, musicians, chefs, etcetera. But there’s something about OnlyFans where it’s used as clickbait in the press.

It’s become this very culturally relevant platform, and that’s created a lot of conversations about, ‘What is it? Who’s on it? Who’s behind it? What does it mean to have a profile?’ So while people started to learn about OnlyFans, they didn’t fully know what it is. So they’re affiliating OnlyFans with things that might be in the media, and many of those things might not be accurate.”

“People think you can sign up for the platform and suddenly see a bunch of spicy content, which is not the case.”

I invite her to name a big myth she could take this opportunity to bust. “First of all, we are an 18-and-over platform, and at the heart of our business is safety. That’s something very important to me, to be able to provide a safe place for our community.”

And the misconception is? “People think you can sign up for the platform and suddenly see a bunch of spicy content, which is not the case at all. You need to find creators to follow and subscribe to their profile.”

Oddly enough I haven’t managed to find anyone who doesn’t understand this about OnlyFans. I suspect the big “misconception” she’d like to disabuse is that OnlyFans is a porn site. Is it? “So, we are an adult platform, meaning we’re for those 18 and over, we have very liberal content policies. So yes, we do allow adult content on the platform. And that’s something we have become known for.”

It is a porn site, then? “We are an inclusive content platform,” she replies. “So you can subscribe to creators that may be sharing adult content, or something on the spicier side. You can also subscribe to creators that might be doing yoga, or race-car drivers. We have over three million content creators on the platform.”

I’m curious to know what percentage of those three million are actually posting strictly non-adult content. “So, we don’t categorise anyone that’s on the platform. When you’re signing up, there’s not a box you tick saying, ‘I’m going to do this type of content.’ It’s up to each creator to decide what they feel comfortable sharing to their community. And some of it might be spicy, some of it may not be.”

The company regularly boasts of having made more than a thousand of its creators millionaires; of its top, say, 20 earners, how many don’t post porn? “So, we don’t reveal who our top earners are.”

When her predecessor announced in 2020 that the site would no longer host adult content, all hell broke loose, the decision was hastily reversed, and he resigned a few months later. There is plenty of evidence to suggest Gan is keen to diversify beyond porn. In her Twitter feed late last year she retweeted this post: “If you think OnlyFans is a porn hub, get your mind out of the damn gutter and think again. With a new woman in town wearing the CEO hat … to call OnlyFans just a place where girls post nudes would be a gross miscategorisation of this online safe haven for creators of all kinds,” with the words “Thank you for sharing this.”

One disgruntled glamour model’s reply was instructive. “You built this platform on our backs & you never miss an opportunity to take a jab at us. We make you millions & how do you repay us? You lift up any creator who isn’t an SW [sex worker]. You never acknowledge or post us unless it’s a desperate attempt at separating yourself from us.”

OnlyFans founder Tim Stokely and friends. He launched the site in 2016; it took off during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gan references non-porn creators throughout the interview. At one point, for example, in answer to a question about the gender balance of the OnlyFans board, she talks, instead, about investing in “OFTV” – the brand’s new non-subscription video site, which broadcasts exclusively “SFW” (safe for work, meaning non-X-rated) content. It is now producing its own reality shows for OFTV and has recruited former stars of the British reality show The Only Way Is Essex. In reply to a question about her pay, she segues into telling me about “our OnlyFans’ Creative Fund: Comedy Edition”, another SFW reality show launched recently on OFTV.

OnlyFans has been busy approaching reputable non-adult brands, inviting them to become creators on the site. Does Gan’s big vision for the company’s future lie beyond porn? “So, my vision is that we will always be a content-inclusive platform. So, that means we will have adult content creators, glamour models, and we will also have race-car drivers, comedians, chefs, fashion stylists. We’re not categorising anyone. So, in theory you can post yourself cooking or making a juice one day, [working on] fitness the next day and maybe some spicier content on the third day. I’m proud to be an inclusive platform. What’s important to me is that creators are safe.”

“In theory you can post yourself cooking or making a juice one day, [working on] fitness the next day and maybe some spicier content on the third day.”

It doesn’t take long on the site to see that most of what passes as SFW shares all the aesthetic tropes of porn, just without the genitals. On OFTV, the only presenters I can find on the home page who don’t dress, talk and act like Playboy models are men, who are in a tiny minority on the site.

On OnlyFans itself, the extremely non-SFW @sofiegonewild account does indeed also post fitness content – in the form of a photo of her standing next to an exercise bicycle, her top pulled up to expose bare breasts, captioned: “Who is ready to take a cycling class with me?” This post had received not one cent in tips. The post above it was a video clip of Sofie having sex with a man and a pink vibrator, captioned: “Full video is 10 minutes and 50 seconds long. Tip $20 on this post to get it in your inbox today!” This post had, at the time of writing, received $US4290 in tips.

Lottie Moss, the younger half-sister of the supermodel Kate, posts some relatively tame photos on her account, of which I could find only a handful that had received any tips at all. By contrast, a pixelated video purporting to be a “sixsome” that subscribers must “tip” to depixelate, had earned her $US220. The financial incentives to post content that Gan would call “spicy” speak for themselves.

Lottie Moss, half-sister of Kate, one of many celebrities who post on OnlyFans.Credit: Getty Images

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Safety is a buzzword for Gan – yet she doesn’t immediately know how many moderators she employs to monitor the site for anything illegal or in breach of its terms of service. “I mean, those are areas that we’re continuing to invest in staff. I’d have to go back and confirm the actual figures.” Her PR later emails to say the figure is more than a thousand. I struggle to understand how a strikingly bold claim Gan made last year – “While we do use some automated technologies to help us prioritise content, ultimately everything on the site is reviewed by a human” – can be possible.

If, and this would be a very modest estimate, each creator uploads a total of just 10 minutes of videos, images and text chats each month, that would produce 500,000 hours of new content to review. Divide that by 1000 and each moderator would need to work for 500 hours a month. Even full-time employees working a 35-hour week clock up no more than 150. How can “everything” be reviewed by a human?

After much prevarication she admits, “What’s important is that we are making the effort and not relying just on automated technologies to review everything happening on the platform. So, there’s definitely more we’re doing that other [social media] sites could potentially learn from.”

Each moderator would need to work for 500 hours a month. How can “everything” be reviewed by a human?

A BBC investigation in 2021 found one 17-year-old creator on OnlyFans posting videos of herself masturbating with sex toys. Reporters spoke to Childline counsellors who had worked with underage creators, one aged 13. A school careers adviser described a 16-year-old boasting about the fortune she was earning on the site; police forces reported complaints about children’s images being uploaded without their consent; a 14-year-old girl had opened a creator account using her grandmother’s passport and bank details.

OnlyFans claimed it had since improved its age-verification process to a “new exceptionally effective” system, but when the BBC tested this system it succeeded in opening an account for a 17-year-old by using her 26-year-old sister’s passport. Did OnlyFans take action? “Absolutely.” Gan doesn’t elaborate, other than to say she appointed a new chief strategy and operations officer “with a background in data privacy and internet security”.

The PR later emails me a list of steps taken, including additional age and identity verification measures, information-sharing systems with the UK’s communications watchdog Ofcom, monitoring of social media, and a third-party safety compliance auditor. However, a subsequent report on the BBC 2 show Newsnight alleged that terms strictly prohibited by OnlyFans’ terms of service, such as DDLG – which stands for “daddy dom/little girl” – had been found on the site.

A US online paedophile ring investigator told the BBC it took less than an hour to find 10 child-abuse images online, created within the past six months, that had originated on OnlyFans. “We do not want minors on the platform, we do not want anyone underage,” Gan says. “We do not want bad actors. We don’t want anyone to make the mistake of thinking they can come on the platform and upload any sort of illegal or harmful content.”

Wanting something doesn’t make it happen, though. What counts is what they are willing to spend. OnlyFans is not exactly short of money – its owner was paid more than $US500 million in the past two years – so what percentage of turnover is she spending specifically on moderating content and removing these “bad actors”? “That’s something that I am personally very passionate about. I’m not going to reveal any figures.”

Given her commitment to transparency, why not? She won’t say; she just repeats: “It’s a priority for us.”

“We do not want minors on the platform, we do not want anyone underage,” says Gan. Credit: Getty Images

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When I get home, I ask my 13-year-old son if he can outfox the age-verification process and subscribe to OnlyFans. He enters his own name and email address, and asks an unsuspecting 50-something female visitor to take a selfie on his phone, telling her it’s “for a school project”. He uses her image to verify his age, takes my bank card from my purse, enters the details – and he is straight in. It takes him less than an hour.

I delete his account right away, but had he done this in secret I would have had no idea until my bank statement showing OnlyFans transactions arrived weeks later.

OnlyFans unquestionably has done more than most big social media brands to try to enforce online age restrictions. Gan has described herself as an enthusiastic “ally” of England’s Online Safety Bill, currently going through parliament. The British government had bowed to pressure from Tory rebels backing an amendment that would jail bosses of big-tech platforms that break laws protecting children from harmful content. I ask which side of this debate she supported. “So, fortunately we are already compliant.” But does she support the amendment? “I haven’t read it in depth, so I’m not going to comment. What’s important is that there’s a conversation around online safety.”

We’ve been having the conversation for years. What achieves real change, I suggest, is not conversation but law. What would Gan consider a fair penalty for a big-tech boss who breaks online safety laws? “I’m not going to comment on it further.”

This fantasy universe doesn’t feel to me like proof that OnlyFans is more than just a porn site, but it does feel that the site can turn anything into porn.

Something the law can’t address is the insidious influence of OnlyFans. It’s true that what my son could see free on a site such as Pornhub could be far worse than anything here. But hardcore online porn brands aren’t trying to infiltrate the mainstream cultural landscape. The “safe-for-work” creators on OFTV that I saw were pneumatic young women wearing porn-star make-up and push-up bras, pouting, simpering and smouldering for the camera while supposedly teaching yoga or dispensing financial advice. This fantasy universe doesn’t feel to me like proof that OnlyFans is more than just a porn site, but it does feel that the site can turn anything into porn.

I had hoped we could explore how the normalisation of porn is shaping the sex and social lives of her generation. Single and child-free, Gan divides her time between Miami and London, and must know about modern dating culture and city nightlife. It’s the world my sons will grow up into, and I’d been hoping to leave reassured that the people shaping it had given this serious thought. But every time I allude to any concerns about porn’s impact on young men and women, either she misunderstands me or has been media-trained to pretend to.

I ask if she regards sex work as exactly the same as any other kind of paid employment. “So, what’s important to note about the platform is that every creator is sharing content they want to share. And it’s all happening digitally.”

But the question is whether sex work is different. “What we have done is developed a safe, content-inclusive platform that allows people to share and monetise content exclusively with their community.”

I can’t work out whether simply repeating words such as “inclusive” and “community” is supposed to put my mind at rest, or hers. Just how much media training, I ask as we part, has she had? “That’s not something I’m commenting on.”

This is an edited extract of a story that first appeared in The Sunday Times.

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