The business behind OnlyFans, with CEO Keily Blair

0:02 Hey folks. Jeff Berman here. This week we're sharing a conversation with the CEO of OnlyFans, Keely Blair. If you're not yet familiar with it. Only Fans is a digital platform for creators that lets them share exclusive content with paying subscribers. It's best known for its lucrative not so safe for work content.

0:26 But it's also an incredible story of scale. In under a decade, OnlyFans says it has grown to about seven billion dollars in annual revenue and over four hundred million users around the world. Remarkably, it has also distributed twenty five billion dollars to its more than four million creators. Keely joined me on stage in Lisbon at Web Summit for a lively conversation about how she leads this rapidly growing business.

0:56 We talked about scaling in the face of massive regulatory hurdles and the intense scrutiny that comes from making and platforming adult content as part of your business model. I hope you enjoyed our conversation as much as I did. Hello, Web Summit. Healy, welcome to Masters of Scale Live at Web Summit Lisbon. Thanks, Jeff. It's lovely to be here. Thrilled to have you. Keely, I think you have perhaps

1:31 The most intriguing I'm gonna call it brand problem. of any CEO we've had on the show because you have I'm guessing ninety nine percent brand awareness in this room.

1:44 And with those folks, you probably have a hundred percent who identify OnlyFans with adult content, not say for work content. Is it a brand problem? So I disagree with the fact that it's a brand problem because most brands would love to have a level of brand awareness that only fans have.

2:05 We also have an incredibly loyal community. We have four hundred million users globally, and we have four million content creators. In addition to that, as we can see from the room out here, it's a huge draw. Everyone's intrigued by OnlyFans. Everyone's a little bit interested. And the reality is that even though lots of people have heard of OnlyFans, they may never have actually been on our platform. So there is a bit of a disconnect between the reality of how we approach the world of content creation at OnlyFans versus I would say the general perception or mood music sometimes, but I love a challenge, so I like to change that. And yet there is a stigma, right? I mean when you all hire, you ask people, are you prepared to sit at a holiday dinner with your family and and talk about what you do, right? For creators who might otherwise use OnlyFans Maybe there's a hesitation, even if your tools are better, they're gonna go to Patreon or Substack or what have you. So let's just level set for a moment before we get to this. The scale of the business is quite extraordinary. Six plus

3:02 billion dollars in revenue last year. 25 billion. So the massive numbers, but to get to 10, 15, 20 billion in revenue, payouts fifty, 100 billion in revenue. I assume you're gonna have to go beyond the core of this adult content. Well Jeff OnlyFans was never created as an adult content site. It was always created as a site for adults, so people who are over 18 plus. And they can choose to share whatever content they wish to share that's allowed under our terms of service.

3:36 What adult content creators realized quickly was that OnlyFans was the only platform that was built with monetization in mind, direct monetization of your fan base, right? At a fair eighty twenty split where the creators retain eighty percent of any payment on the platform and we retain twenty percent. That's applied to every creator on the platform, right? And from day one. So you don't need to achieve a certain minimum number of followers or have something else in your back pocket to already be a celebrity. you can start earning and monetizing your content with your fan base immediately as soon as you sign up and go through our creator onboarding process. Adult content creators are exceptionally savvy.

4:16 exceptionally smart and have been marginalized from other areas of the internet. We also know that adult content appears on a lot of other traditional social media platforms, but without the safety and controls that we have in place to help keep our community safe. And many of those other social media platforms are accessible by people as young as thirteen. So to my mind, it's not a stigma. It's actually something to be incredibly proud of. Okay, fair. Yes. And particularly in the US, we have a less sex positive culture. You've got United States Senators who are not your biggest fans in the world. And yet I have to imagine that for a Brene Brown or a Mel Robbins or for a Reed Hoffman, for example, they might hesitate to come on the platform because of the association with the spicier content. That's true, but we don't try to be everybody's cup of tea. We're happy to be someone's glass of champagne, is how I would put it. So I think for us we recognize that actually the creator economy is accepted. You know.

5:18 Always pick to be the champagne, never picked to be the tea. And I think for us, we recognize that the creator economy is exceptionally broad. Most creators appear on a variety of different platforms. In fact, over two hundred million internet users now identify themselves as a creator. That's one in thirty people who use the internet says they're a content creator. You're a content creator, Jeff. Not a great one, but yes. You are. I'm a content creator with my amazing LinkedIn posts, obviously, and my OnlyFans account, which is on Beekeeping. But more and more people are sharing more and more of themselves online as content creators. And they're not typically doing that on one platform. Each platform has its place in the ecosystem. OnlyFans is not going to be a place for everybody who wants to share their content, but I'm seeing it as being more and more of an avenue for people within the adult content space, but also athletes, musicians, race car drivers. Anything and everything in terms of the content that people want to share, as long as it's within our terms of service. And they can directly monetize.

6:16 The thing that makes me very proud about that twenty five billion figure, Jeff, is that for me A lot of tech companies do not actually create wealth for other people. Right. They create wealth for themselves and they create wealth for others in the tech ecosystem. But this is putting money back into the hands of real people who are creating content and cutting out the middleman, which I think is A pretty incredible business model, and as I said, I don't view it as a stigma. I view it as something to be very proud of. And I responded. And one of the things that I was saying is not only is your scale and and your creator tools and and your monetization, all that

6:56 Your place in the ecosystem it clearly merits this conversation and this stage, but there are creators creating sex content who otherwise might be on the streets. who otherwise might be in much more dangerous positions than they are today. How do you think about your role in society, not the internet, not monetization, but in society in in what OnlyFans does? I think it's twofold. So I think when we look at it from the adult content creator perspective, I do think we've made things an awful lot safer for the people who create adult content. So a lot of people don't understand that in order to open an AnyFans account, you have to basically complete what is bank KYC on steroids, I would say.

7:36 So you've got to give us your name, your date of birth, your address, your social security number or tax ID information number, your bank account details, your other social media accounts, a copy of your government ID, and then go through a third party age assurance or age verification process. So it's not something you can just do like that, right? then all of the content that creators share on our platform is not end to end encrypted. So we can moderate and do moderate all the content that appears on our platform. And we actually have a lot stricter terms of service than people think. It's not the wild west of the internet. There's things that happen on other traditional social media platforms that simply don't happen on OnlyFans. And one of the main reasons is actually because everybody is verified. So it's a true social network in that sense. We know who our creators are, we know who our fans are. And so we believe that that creates a unique opportunity for them to engage in sharing content in the way that they want to.

8:30 So Circling back to do we feel that this is a good thing for society? I think that we need to be realistic about the society that we live in. Sex has always been a part of the human experience. Right. Or we wouldn't be here without it. Exactly. Kind of necessary. And I think we would actually be a whole lot better and healthier as a society if we talked about it and acknowledged it. And if we said, Okay We know that the majority of adults look at adult content online.

8:57 Wouldn't it be nice if that content was consensual? Ethical? directly monetized, monitored, and was made in a safe way, and so that then as a fan, you can be like, I'm making an ethical choice in choosing to engage with adult content in this way. It's also a huge part of the LGBTQ plus community as well. So we're very proud of those members of our community. And it always kinda pains me a little bit because when people talk about stigma or anything else, they

9:23 Always talk about it in the context of women. They very rarely focus on our male content creators either. Oh interesting. And we attribute this to misogyny. Your it's not mine, Jeff, but I mean I can tell you what the empirical reality is that I'm seeing. And the questions that I always get asked are always about why are women doing OnlyFans? It's never why are men doing only fans? Shouldn't these women be doing something else with their body or shouldn't they be earning money in a different way? That question never gets asked about our male content creators and I can guess why.

9:55 Still ahead more with OnlyFans CEO Keely Blair. What does the AI revolution mean? For jobs. For getting things done.

10:10 Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El Kalyubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur. Investor and now host of the new podcast Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI.

10:27 with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. You're listening to Masters of Scale, and you can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel. Also be sure to check out the link in our show notes to subscribe to our newsletter.

10:51 This week the newsletter has an epic book list of all our favorite reads. Just in time for your holiday shopping. You embrace your not say for content creators, you are proud of them on the platform and You want to diversify. You want to push in other categories. If you look at the history of the big platforms and and YouTube quite famously with a$100 million creator fund, they started seeding an ecosystem. Do you think about market makers, do you think about going to a Brene Brown or an Andrew Huberman or a Reed Hoffman and saying, look, we want to incentivize you to come on our platform? How are you thinking about that? So we like to do things very deliberately at OnlyFans. We don't like to take

11:32 risky big bets for no good reason. So one area where we've been exploring that is in comedy. So we have OF TV, which unlike the platform is a free streaming service. It's all safe for work content, so don't get too excited. Very good content, but not that kind of content. And What we did with OFTV and comedy is that we started a grassroots comedy show called LMAOF. It looks better written down rather than said out loud. But for us, we were like, comedy is a place where you have fanatical fans, incredible creators, and unless you're in the top one percent, you're getting paid nothing, basically. You have no exposure and it's very hard for you to make a living. So for us, we're like this is an area that's ripe for disruption. So we started doing a touring grassroots live comedy show where we pay the comedians. And they turn up on the night, they have to open an OnlyFans account where they're sharing comedy content and connect with their fans. We record LMAOF and then we put that on OF TV. And so for us that's been a a really great experiment in that sort of

12:28 Premium creator payment structure model. We've done the same thing with a number of different athletes as well. And we're starting to see really great success there. The hard thing is Threading the needle, I would say, because A lot of people want to put Everybody in a box. They want to say, you, Jeff, are only a podcast host. And you're like, but I'm not only a podcast host. I also do amazing conferences and I do this and I do that. Most people are multi-hyphenated in terms of how they are and what they do.

12:57 And for OnlyFans, people are always very keen to say it's just an adult content platform, even though factually that is simply not correct. Well factually not correct and yet Ninety eight percent of your revenue, ninety-nine I mean some huge portion of revenue does come from there, and it is where the brand is currently associated. And I very much appreciate what you're doing with O of TV and and using platforms like YouTube to promote it and bring people back to the platform. It's a very smart playbook being executed. These are ripples. And there are splash opportunities out there. Should we expect to see OnlyFans splashes with a set of huge globally known creators in comedy and wellness, et cetera, coming on to OnlyFans in the next couple of years.

13:41 I would expect to see more of that, yes. Are you having those conversations to get them there? We are having those conversations, but for me it's also really important that it's with the right creators and it's the right brand opportunity, right? So I always look at actually Red Bull's brand evolution as being a really good character arc for OnlyFans. You know, if you think about Red Bull originally it was seen as a sugar water, highly caffeinated sugar water drink that had no place in sports. And obviously They built an incredibly successful Formula One team. They branched out into doing everything else. So when we look at the creator economy, it's not every creator is gonna be right for us. We're not gonna be their cup of tea. And and that's okay. So it's about finding the right big moments, the right big deals, the right big partnerships that align with our brand values as well. Like the reason why I ask people that question during our recruitment process is because I need them to be true believers.

14:30 We are a mission driven company. A lot of people don't understand that about us. And so it's incredibly important for me to understand that the person who I'm looking at hiring, because we only have 42 full time employees, is actually really believes the mission, can articulate the mission back to me. understands why they want to work somewhere, not just because it's cool and we have awesome merch, but because actually they believe in what we're doing and they understand the story and the role that we have to play in society. I think we just slid over something very powerful here, forty two full time employees with north of seven billion dollars in revenue, one of the highest revenue per full time headcount of probably any company in history. How are you doing that? Yeah, so that's another thing that we're very proud of. Just over thirty seven million per head in terms of revenue. So we're a pretty efficient bunch, to be honest. We

15:24 Mm. That's why every hire is very important. You gotta make sure you keep the revenue back up to make sure it matches that. For us, it's actually a structural decision about how we run the business. So we hire incredibly senior talent, and then we hire incredibly hungry junior talent, and we look for attitude and aptitude in hiring rather than experience. And we do not have that sort of squidgy layer of middle management in the middle,'cause nobody's ever had a really good middle manager, in my experience. And so for us we were like actually let's get rid of that model. Let's keep things very lean. Let's scale up teams when we need to for projects. So we have forty-two full time employees, but we've got a big dev project to do. We might hire some additional dev engineers in on a contract. Also, what that means is that I also get to try before I buy in terms of hiring, so I know whether they're gonna be a really great culture fit and really have that roll up your sleeves attitude that we need to continue to maintain that lean team.

16:23 I also think as well though that actually A lot of big companies reward empire building. As a leader in that company, you think, well, I'm gonna be judged on the number of people who are reporting to me. I'm gonna be judged on the size of my team. Whereas we've said to our teams, you know, you can be a team of one. and deliver exceptional results and that will be so valued. And you will not be metriced on like your KPIs will not be how many people report to you. In fact, if you come and you tell me uh you need a hire, I'm gonna make you say, What is the project you can't do?

16:53 Right now. without this person. Trevor Burrus Yeah, and I think one one of the important things here also is in so many companies, you can be an extraordinary individual contributor and then you hit a ceiling and you have to become a manager to move up in compensation and title, et cetera. And it sounds like you have built a team and a culture where actually that's not the case. No, we actually say there is no manager track. Like we have said that to people and and in the past where people have started to sort of get that in their head that that's what they should be looking for. They should be looking for like oh a bigger title or a I would say a bigger office, but we remote work, so that's not a case here either. But we actively sit down with them and say, that's not how your value is measured here. That's not what we're looking to see from you. Everyone is an individual contributor. I'm still an individual contributor. Our CFO is still an individual CTO is individual contributor. And that means that we're close to the business and we know what's going on operationally and we can make decisions fast. So it's a a very different business model and it's very deliberately

17:51 Structured that way. As we sit here in November of twenty twenty five, I think we're actually legally required to talk about AI. It's a mandate. I know that OnlyFans has been deploying AI slash machine learning for years. I'd like to focus in on the on the creator side of AI. You all have banned a set of AI content. Could you talk about what your policies on that are and what the rationale is? So if we all got a given a dollar for every time AI was mentioned at Web Summit, we'd all be tech billionaires, it'd be great. But instead that's only for a few. Um but for us and AI, the key thing for us is actually every business decision needs to benefit. the creators, right? So for that reason we've made the decision not to allow wholly AI accounts, because ultimately that would cannibalize our creators' ability to directly monetize their real content. Yeah.

18:40 In addition. All of the research points to humans not wanting AI. To produce media and entertainment content. So Ipsos have been tracking this for the last three years. And now it's three in four Americans say they want humans to produce their media and entertainment content, not AI. And that figure has been increasing over the last two years, not decreasing, right? So don't buy the hype. I I do not think that we all want to be scrolling through millions and millions of AI generated content. And so for us

19:10 when we say to our creators, what do they want and what do they want to see us bring in, it's ways that they can use AI to enhance their content, right? So it's still clear it's their content, there's still that human element to it. You still have that connection to the creator. But Let's imagine they've got a funny background on, or your hair's pink, Jeff, or whatever you want to do in that sense. As long as we can tell that it's still you. then that's fine. And they should be able to the fans should be able to know that it's AI content as well. So that's very clear. So I want to come back to how creators might use AI in a appropriate way on the platform. I want to spend one minute on the AI creators because I hear you in terms of what people say they want, and I believe that they believe that that's what they want. And yet. We can go back to the movie Her as sort of a rudimentary prototype of what is coming. I was having a conversation here yesterday where I'm like, look, we're gonna have a Kim Kardashian AI that is going to be able to engage with you and give you everything from beauty advice to marketing advice to business advice, et cetera. And you're going to feel like you have a one-to-one relationship with Kim, and that's how she's going to scale her brand and her business in this next generation. There's some version of that that's coming. The ability to personalize content through

20:19 AI where someone in in a more wholesome way could generate an image or a video of That customer sitting with that AI creator, that completely computer gendered creator at a coffee shop or walking down the beach, or in a much more spicy situation, I have to believe that there's a meaningful set of people who will want that, and that that begins to eat away at the one to one relationship that your customers and your creators have through your platform. See, I disagree. I don't think there is a meaningful set of people who want that. I think if you actually turn to the person next to you and you said, Do you want a real friend or an AI friend? What's the answer that they're gonna give you? That's fine, but that's not gonna replace people.

21:05 Like it's gonna be an augmented set of reality, that's absolutely sure. Like I love to video game, but I don't video game twenty four seven and I now all of a sudden don't do anything else. Like it's again this idea that we have to be all or nothing, that it's either gonna be wholly AI or wholly human. I think it'll be a combination of the two, but I think We're gonna crave more authenticity. We're gonna crave more human as we get fed more AI slot, we're gonna go. Actually, I think I like the human bit over there. More. In terms of your human creators using AI, there's been a good bit reported about

21:40 OnlyFans creators using chat farms effectively to engage directly with the audience and try to pull them into these one on one relationships, pay for custom content or what have you. That feels like a quite natural use case for AI. What's your view on that? piece of it, should they be doing that, are they doing that? Yeah, I mean that's the difference, right? When you look at oper uh AI, I would say that's operational AI. Like are there AI tools that can help creators to optimize their business? Absolutely, that's very different from content creation AI in that sense. Our terms of service have always been very clear. Creators can and do use third parties to help them manage their accounts. If you're a creator with millions of fans, like it's natural that you're gonna use some tools and some individuals to help you to prioritize. But the content that you're making is your content. That person is subscribing to your content or purchasing that content on a pay-per-view basis. I mean, I should say that people always associate OnlyFans. One off purchases is actually dwarfing subscription revenue. So it was sixty seven percent last year, it was one off purchases, which I think is also showing a real trend in terms of how people want to engage with specific pieces of content and have a much more a la carte approach to how they consume media on the internet.

22:53 You and I are both lawyers by training. We both practiced. I think we both actually liked being lawyers. And it clearly gives you some some special expertise in this role. One of the things I was at MySpace, which half of you probably don't even know what it is, we took a proactive role in shaping early social media legislation. You have taken a proactive role in shaping online safety legislation, bring it back to AI. How should regulators be thinking about AI regulation right now and how should industry be leading or following on that front? I think we can look at what went wrong with the early days of social media and privacy. Uh really good cautionary tale about the importance of getting regulation right and getting it right early.

23:42 But you need to also not stifle innovation as well, right? So and the problem is actually that a lot of the people writing the legislation don't understand the technology, right? So it begins with dialogue. And I think there's far too little dialogue in general at the moment in the world, but when it comes to AI regulation, I really believe that technology companies need to accept that regulation is necessary. It's Responsible?

24:07 and that they should be helping governments to understand how to legislate In a way that doesn't stifle innovation, and in a way that, you know, the proclamation that China's gonna win the AI race doesn't become a reality, right? But first of all, that requires A an acknowledgement from government that all technology is not bad. be an acknowledgement from technology sector that all regulation is not bad, and then everyone to sit down and get some really smart people in the room and figure out how they're gonna navigate through this, and to not be too prescriptive. I think when it comes to legislation, principles based legislation is often easier and then more detailed guidance as particular threats emerge. But that's just my view. If I was Queen for a day, Jeff, that's what I'd do. We could explore what else you would do there if we only had another half an hour. We really royally screwed up the first version of the internet. Going through web one point, no, the social media are creators create, they give it away for free. It's not like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, et cetera, built monetization in. Everything was given away. You had to move people off platform.

25:05 You, Patreon, others evolve to create monetization, but it's not engaged to the behavior, and it's super difficult to say, you've been getting all this for free, now you have to pay for it. Right. I know you and I agree on this. So as we move from what is likely more of an open web into more of an AI agent driven engagement world. How do you imagine that evolving from a monetization perspective and the role that you all will play? Well I think it'll be interesting because are you gonna say to an agent, go and find me ten surfer creators to subscribe to? You could and you could ask the agent to rank them and then you could ask the agent to technically make the payment for you. You can ask the I agent to watch them. Right. So there still has to be that level of human engagement as to why. And the AI agent won't have decided that surfing is maybe it will have just maybe we'll just give up all autonomy entirely. And the AI agent, we know may decide that surfing is your g gonna be your next thing, Jeff, rather than when you enter your forties and it's you can pick a hobby, it's gardening. Craft be air, beekeeping, you know, the usual.

26:04 So I think it'll be interesting to see how that happens, but I don't foresee a world where we just give up all of our autonomy in that way. I know other people are pushing that vision. I think they're quite self-interested in pushing that vision, candidly. I see a world where we should be using AI to help us to do the things that we don't want to do, but where we should be very careful about what we give up in doing that. Like as we talked about with the you know, phase one of the internet. You know, we just thought, oh great, we're gonna get all this stuff and it's not gonna cost us anything. But the reality is we were paying in our data and we were paying in our behavioral insights, and we were paying and we continue to in that way. And we still haven't solved for those problems yet. So we're kinda jumping ahead in some respects, but we have to decide what's important to us as a society. We've got to be like

26:50 What matters to me? What do I want the technology to do for me? It should serve me. Like that's what it should do. And so we should be having that conversation. And I think encouraging people to have a healthy degree of scepticism about the opportunity. The opportunity of AI is real, 100%. But That opportunity is not going to be evenly distributed for everybody. Last question for you as we wrap. You and I are fortunate enough to be invited back here two years from now to have a follow-up conversation. And you have succeeded to the full extent of your dreams with OnlyFans. What are you sharing about the business that is different in two years from where you are today? Oh God, it's the tech sector. It moves so fast. In two years it's almost impossible to say what would be different. I think I would like to see a greater acceptance for the brand.

27:37 I would like to see more payment options for creators and for fans. So we recently actually just integrated PayPal as a method for fans to be able to pay on the platform. Which is a big deal. Which is a big deal. A big deal. Like if you think about how closed out of the ecosystem OnlyFans was when we first started. That's a huge change. I want us to create more financial opportunities for our creators. I want them to be included in the financial system, included in the conversation, included in talking about what AI looks like, rather than everyone just putting them to one side. So greater inclusion. More money for our creators and greater opportunities. Well, I hope we get to come back in two years to have that conversation. Uh my friends, Keely Blair, thank you so much. Thanks again to OnlyFans CEO Key Lee Blair for joining us, and thanks to Web Summit for having masters of scale for the event's first ever, believe it or not, first ever.

28:34 On stage podcast recording, you can find this conversation and much more. on our YouTube channel. Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our senior producer is Trisha Bobida. Associate producer is Masha Makatanina. Senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Letal Molad. Visit mastersofscal to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter. And please make sure. to check out our YouTube channel.

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