AMSTERDAM — OnlyFans’ Chief Financial Officer revealed today that he had “underestimated the strength” of OnlyFans’ adult creator community during the controversy caused by the platform’s 2021 decision, later reversed, to ban adult content.
OnlyFans’ CFO’s Lee Taylor made the unusually candid comments during the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam, as CNBC reported today.
“It was obviously a challenging time,” Taylor added. “The thing I’m proud of the most is how quickly we were able to reverse it.”
The original decision to ban adult content prompted “an uproar from creators and sex workers who had come to rely on it as a source of income,” Bloomberg wrote at the time, and “was forced in part because of pressure from ‘banking and payment services.'”
Keily Blair, OnlyFans’ chief strategy and operations officer, told the financial sector conference attendees that OnlyFans has continued to grow “with its team increasing 2% to 3% each month.”
“We are aware of the cost of living crisis,” Taylor explained. “We are building a team in the U.K. to help our creators maximize their earnings.”
Blair also noted that unlike other pandemic-era economic success stories (e.g., Netflix), OnlyFans is not experiencing a slowdown in subscribers.
Although the CNBC reported remarked that “OnlyFans isn’t exactly a name you’d associated with fintech,” adult industry observers have long identified the company’s main strength as a middleman for payments.
The platform, the CNBC report noted, “has sought to branch out into other areas of content beyond porn, an industry that has had an awkward relationship with the mainstream financial world.”
The report did not mention how that supposed “awkwardness” was directly connected to religiously inspired anti-porn crusading lobbies like NCOSE and Exodus Cry, or their mainstream media mouthpieces like Nicholas Kristof.