According to CEO Keily Blair, OnlyFans has paid out $20 billion to creators since its founding eight years ago – much of that comes from porn, but she said the platform also offers a great place to monetize material of all stripes.

OnlyFans gives “artists the freedom to say what they want, to be controversial and to have a point of view,” Blair said Thursday at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in LA. “Everyone assumes it’s sexy content. Some of it Is sexy content – and we are very happy with that, we are an inclusive platform and for good reason… We believe that it is very important for adult content creators to have a safe space to create and earn money also to be able to do this together with other content creators.”

“We’re all adults, we’re all adults, we all get to choose what content we subscribe to,” Blair said.

Blair emphasized that OnlyFans does not sell advertising, does not track user behavior and is entirely opt-in. “Other social media platforms have had difficulty adopting this subscription model,” she said.

Appearing at the conference alongside Blair were comedian, actor, podcaster and Whitney Cummings. Last year, Cummings released her latest special, “Mouthy,” via OnlyFans, after joining the platform a year earlier to share “dirty jokes” (but no nudes) with subscribers. “Mouthy” is available on OnlyFans’ free promotional video streaming service OFTV.

Cummings joked that when she received a call from OnlyFans about whether she wanted to do a streaming comedy special on the platform, she wondered: “Is that because my last name is Cummings? It seems a little on the nose.”

OnlyFans, of course, “isn’t just about sex,” Cummings said, noting that there are YouTubers who host content about cooking, working out and other non-adult topics. For comics, OnlyFans offers far more freedom than TV networks or other online platforms, including YouTube, she said: “I like the idea of, ‘Let me go to this place that’s a little bit taboo’… where there’s not so much censorship, where I can recreate the atmosphere of a real comedy club atmosphere.”

Cummings added: “And money. I love money.”

Despite the abundance of freely available porn on the Internet, Blair said, “The reason people pay for OnlyFans is because they want to engage with these creators” and “ask for specific content.” For some fans, she said, ” “It’s actually an ethical decision about how they consume content, especially for adults.” In other cases, it’s about exclusive content, said Blair, pointing to interviews conducted by tennis pro Nick Kyrgios on his OnlyFans account.

OnlyFans’ gross revenue rose 19% to $6.63 billion last year in the fiscal year ended Nov. 30, 2023, according to a regulatory filing last month. That means OnlyFans creators made $5.32 billion in total distributions in the last fiscal year. Net sales rose 20% to $1.31 billion (two-thirds of which came from the U.S.), while the company’s pretax profit rose 25% to $658 million.

“Yes, it’s been a good year,” Blair commented at the Bloomberg conference, adding that OnlyFans has no plans to go public. “We definitely don’t need to raise capital,” she said. Additionally, being a publicly traded company would “taint” its business model as it needs to take care of shareholders rather than focusing solely on founders and their success, she said.

Blair, previously OnlyFan’s chief strategy and operations officer, took over as CEO in July 2023. Prior to joining the firm in January 2022, she was Partner – Head of Cyber, Privacy and Data Innovation at London-based law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

OnlyFans argues that it is one of the safest adult sites on the Internet because it requires an extensive ID verification process before anyone can create an account. Additionally, the content is not freely accessible – users must pay a subscription fee or otherwise opt-in to view OnlyFans accounts. According to OnlyFans, creators earn 80% of all payments made on the platform.

OnlyFans is owned by Leonid Radvinsky, who is also the founder of cam site MyFreeCams, which received $472 million in dividends for fiscal 2023, up 40% from $338 million the previous year, it said in the submission.