IN THE SUMMER OF 2021, Vanniall was adapting to a new reality. At 25, she’d tested positive for HIV. A caseworker and doctor assured her the diagnosis was far from a death sentence. Medicine kept her healthy and symptom-free. Still, she was terrified of losing her career. As a sex worker and porn performer, she worried her HIV-positive status would eliminate her from the running for clients and casting.
Luckily, she had the security of OnlyFans, the U.K.-based subscription platform for content creators that has become the go-to site for the adult content industry. From her East Village, Manhattan, apartment, Vanniall (whom Fortune is identifying by her first name) staged videos and photo shoots for her OnlyFans account on her own terms, without always needing to incorporate another performer. By August 2021, she had been on the platform for almost three years, and OnlyFans earnings accounted for 60% of her income. “It felt like a saving grace for me in that moment,” says Vanniall.
But that month, OnlyFans announced a new policy that she and her industry peers had long feared. The platform was banning the sexually explicit content that helped it earn nearly $1 billion and reach almost 200 million users in 2021, making it one of the U.K.’s fastest-growing tech firms. Founder and then-CEO Tim Stokely blamed financial institutions, including Bank of New York Mellon, JPMorgan Chase, and the U.K.’s Metro Bank, for blocking the platform’s payments to its creators and closing accounts belonging to sex workers or businesses they rely on. “When that happened, I genuinely feared my OnlyFans career would be over too,” Vanniall says.
A week later, Vanniall and her peers got a reprieve: OnlyFans reversed the decision before it went into effect, saying it had “secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community.” The episode was brief, but OnlyFans’ flip-flop had cost it the trust of the sex workers whose content fueled its rapid rise. And on the other side of the webcam, the company began a business shake-up. In December 2021, Stokely stepped down as CEO, making way for an unlikely successor: Amrapali “Ami” Gan, the company’s 37-year-old chief marketing and communications officer.
OnlyFans was already
