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OnlyFans runs with just 42 full-time employees despite 400 million users, CEO Keily Blair reveals
At OnlyFans, CEO Keily Blair said, performance, not team size, defines success.
Keily Blair, chief executive officer of OnlyFans, has revealed that the company operates with just 42 full-time employees despite serving over 400 million users globally and hosting nearly 4 million content creators.
Speaking to Jeff Berman on the Masters of Scale podcast during the November Web Summit in Lisbon, Blair said the company’s intentionally lean workforce is the result of a deliberate strategy to eliminate middle-management roles. She explained the philosophy behind the approach.
OnlyFans, a subscription-based content platform founded in 2016, generates around $7 billion in annual revenue. Berman described the company’s output as “very powerful” given the size of its workforce. Blair agreed, calling her team a “pretty efficient bunch,” according to a report by Business Insider.
She explained the hiring philosophy by saying, “So we hire incredibly senior talent, and then we hire incredibly hungry junior talent, and we look for attitude and aptitude in hiring rather than experience.” She added, “And we do not have that sort of squidgy layer of middle management in the middle, because nobody’s ever had a really good middle manager in my experience.”
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CEO explains company's philosophy
Blair argued that many large organisations wrongly judge leaders by the number of people reporting to them. At OnlyFans, she said, performance, not team size, defines success.
“We’ve said to our teams, ‘You can be a team of one and deliver exceptional results, and that will be so valued,’” she said, adding that there is no “manager track” for career progression at the company. Every employee at OnlyFans is an individual contributor, she said.
Blair, who became OnlyFans’ CEO in 2023 after working for several years as a lawyer, also addressed the platform’s identity. While it began as a tool for creators to monetise paywalled content, OnlyFans has since become widely associated with adult and NSFW material.
She said in the interview that OnlyFans has 400 million users globally and 4 million content creators. She also acknowledged that the company’s organisational structure reflects a broader trend across Big Tech, which in recent years has cut back on middle-management positions.
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