Good morning, Broadsheet readers! A Monterey Park lawmaker reflects on the tragedy in her hometown, a prominent executive leaves Spotify, and OnlyFans' chief is an unlikely CEO for an unusual company. Have a great Tuesday.
- Over at OnlyFans. Amrapali Gan didn't follow the typical path to CEO. A longtime marketing and communications exec, she hopped between organizations as diverse as Quest Nutrition, Red Bull, and a Los Angeles cannabis cafe before landing her current gig.
But perhaps that's fitting for a CEO who's leading a far-from-typical company. Gan, 37, is the CEO of OnlyFans, the subscription-based platform known as a popular home for creators of adult content. Gan, formerly the company's chief marketing and communications officer, took over the job from OnlyFans founder Tim Stokely in December 2021.
She's spent the past year on a dual mission, which I dive into in a new feature for Fortune's February/March magazine issue, published online today. First, to welcome adult content creators and sex workers to the OnlyFans platform after a short-lived plan to ban them in 2021 lost the trust of many of the site's highest-earning stars. Second, Gan aims to broaden the public perception of OnlyFans from a home for nudes and porn to a mainstream-style social media site that can be used for content of all kinds, with a username listed in a bio right next to Twitter and Instagram handles.
With her comms training, Gan calls that strategy "clearing up misconceptions" about OnlyFans, which brings in nearly $1 billion in annual revenue. The company takes a 20% cut of the earnings its 3 million creators receive from 220 million users. That allows creators to keep 80%, among the most direct sources of monetization available online, compared to the 45%-55% cut of ad-share revenue vloggers keep from YouTube or the brand deals and product-hawking required to earn a living on Instagram.
OnlyFans has had an eventful history since its 2016 founding in the U.K., including some run-ins with major financial institutions, which I outline in my story. Creators like Kazumi, a porn performer who earns $300,000 a month, or Vanniall, a sex worker who relied on OnlyFans after an HIV diagnosis threatened her ability to earn a living in the pornography industry, told me how the platform has changed their lives.
Gan says OnlyFans continues to be a "creator-first platform"—especially as it works to evolve in public. As OnlyFans chief strategy and operations officer Keily Blair told me: “We’ll have succeeded as a company when it’s clear that you can join OnlyFans for whatever reason, and there isn’t an assumption that you’re going to be taking your top off. But equally—it’s fine if you want to, as long as you’re 18.”
I hope you'll read the full feature here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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