OnlyFans, the social platform known best for adult content, just had its third leadership change in under three years as chief strategy and operations officer Keily Blair replaced Amrapali (Ami) Gan in the CEO job. For the 2 million or so creators on the platform though, the new face in the CEO suite is already fueling speculation about the identity of the OnlyFans site.
Adult content is the lifeblood of OnlyFans’ rumored $2.5 billion (annual revenue) business, and many of the creators of this content see Blair’s appointment as CEO as a sign that OnlyFans will return to its roots as an unabashedly porn-based site, or at least not stray further away from adult content.
“If OnlyFans ever fully recognized [adult creators] as their primary creators and devoted their marketing and branding efforts to reflect it, I would think everyone on the platform would see even more success,” says Sophie Dee, who makes over $300,000 per month on OnlyFans from her adult content. “Yes, [OnlyFans] has a massive user base, but we all know why the majority of users are here. They’ve already attempted to create something more brand friendly with OnlyFansTV, and it appears to have performed well below expectations, in my opinion.”
Blair, a longtime corporate lawyer, has been with Only Fans since January 2022. Her ascent to the CEO job comes after a period in which Gan touted the platform’s non-adult offerings like non-nude streaming service offering OnlyFansTV and called the company a “payments platform” in public appearances.
While the company declined to make Blair available for an interview, many creators on the platform have been looking closely at her past statements to try and infer her views on the matter. Reading between the lines of her comments, many adult creators see a welcome message.
“If you work hard you should be rewarded for your work and your creativity no matter what your background or your choice of career,” wrote Blair in an Instagram post after her new position was announced. “These values are at the heart of what OnlyFans offers to creators and are the reason I joined as Chief Strategy & Operations Officer 18 months ago.
When Sophie Dee, who is in OnlyFans’ top 0.01% of OnlyFans creators by earnings, first learned of the CEO change on July 18, she was nervous about what it might mean for adult creators, remembering the company’s past attempt to cleanse the platform of adult content. “Any change is scary to me, but I did take a look at her Twitter page and she did mention all genres of creators so that gives me a little hope that she’s not going to be taking off the adult creators,” says Dee. “My biggest hope is new leadership doesn’t go in the complete opposite direction and decide they don’t need adult creators anymore at all.”
Bryce Adams, who makes around $800,000 from her adult OnlyFans channels per month (confirmed by documents viewed by Fortune), feels similarly. “I’m pretty excited because Keily [Blair] was primarily focused on platform safety, which is huge, obviously for creators, fans and the content since OnlyFans has such an adult background–making sure that everything is dealt with safely,” says Adams.
While pro-porn messaging is great for the millions of adult creators who depend on OnlyFans income for their livelihoods, it’s less great for investors who are squeamish about associating with the bodily fluid-forward platform.
Though Gan and OnlyFans presented the leadership change as civil, and as an opportunity for Gan to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors (she’s launching a marketing agency), it remains unclear what occurred behind closed doors. Gan said she was not doing interviews at this time. One tech venture capital investor who is not invested in OnlyFans speculated that Gan may have been pushed out. “If she was doing a killer job migrating this platform away from adult content—satisfying the board’s goals or her own goals—I don’t think she would voluntarily leave or be forced out,” said the VC who serves on a number of corporate boards. “There’s clearly been a determination either by the board or by the outgoing CEO that something’s not working,”
In a January 2023 Fortune magazine profile, Gan stressed OnlyFans is a “creator-first company” and pumped the OnlyFans TV initiative that brought non-sex content to streaming platforms as well as a revenue share program that has paid creators $10 billion. In the profile, Gan declined to share specific financial performance information or details about the breakdown between non-adult and adult content on the platform. (A VC source whose colleague explored an investment in OnlyFans at one point, said that under Stokely’s leadership 90% of OnlyFans’ content was adult and that the company presented investors with breakdowns within pornographic categories to placate their concerns.)
A “world-class operator”
Blair was raised in Dublin, Ireland before moving to Oxford in 2000 to obtain her bachelor of arts in law and politics from Oxford Brookes University, per her LinkedIn bio. After obtaining her law degree and cutting her teeth litigating on behalf of large corporations, she moved to consulting firm PwC in 2017 to lead the data privacy law & strategy practice, likely building relationships with the tech giants during the social media boom. In January 2020, Blair started at big tech defender Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe where she led their cyber, privacy & data practice in London, representing big tech clients including OnlyFans. Apparently recruited from the firm to OnlyFans by company founder and former CEO Tim Stokely, Blair began her work as its chief strategy and operations officer in January 2022, and was in that position until she got the top job on July 18.
“She’s a world-class operator,” says a source with knowledge of the matter who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. “She is incredibly knowledgeable, coming from the legal background of how tech companies need to operate in today’s day and age.”
With the new CEO appointment, the question of whether the company is revisiting, or hoping to revisit, IPO plans has resurfaced. In March of 2022, the company was eyeing an initial public offering via SPAC, but failed to drum up sufficient investor support as financiers were reportedly concerned about the company’s porn profile, per Axios. Months later, Gan explicitly denied that the company was hoping to go public in a November 2022 interview at Web Summit.
Top OnlyFans creators Dee, Francia James, Adams and Taylor Gunner told Fortune they were unaware of any company plans to resume IPO plans at this time. A source with knowledge of the company thought that a British lawyer would be an odd CEO pick to lead an IPO, and the VC whose colleague had previously done diligence on the platform agreed. “If you think about the public market’s appetite for what essentially is basically a porn platform, you have to imagine it would not be strong,” said the VC, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Creators interviewed by Fortune expressed satisfaction with Gan’s leadership as well as excitement for the platform’s next chapter. Adult creators Sophie Dee and Francia James, who are both in OnlyFans’ top 0.01% by earnings, say they are excited for the next chapter of OnlyFans and hope it brings technical changes.
Both Dee and James complain of glitches, bugs and slowness with direct messages to fans, which they believe have inhibited their growth. “Ami [Gan] was an amazing CEO,” says Dee. “The only downfall that’s been happening is with mass DMs and the technology is just not enough to sustain the data.”
Some OnlyFans creators are hopeful that Blair will give both adult and non-adult creators their time in the spotlight. “I love that the site is all-inclusive to adult and non-adult creators,” says Francia James who makes adult content, and has nearly 12 million followers on Instagram. “I love the fact that they are getting more and more non-adult creators as this has lowered the stigma of having an OnlyFans page, in general. I hope the new CEO keeps pushing to expand to both types of creators for this reason.”
Adams, who says she’s most-liked creator on OnlyFans and exclusively wears sunglasses and masks in her social content to keep herself relatively anonymous, is excited for Blair’s safety background. “Keily [Blair] having this background—being so platform safety-orientated, especially with this new AI wave that we’re kind of going into, makes a lot of sense,” she says.
