If you browse through OnlyFans’ social-media advertising, you’ll find a sea of TV personalities, influencers, and fitness instructors. But you won’t find a word about the community and content that built OnlyFans into a platform worth more than $1 billion. Sex workers are the core of OnlyFans’ success, as the company was recently forced to concede after a backlash following their announcement of a ban on adult content.

After OnlyFans was founded in 2016, many sex workers turned to it as an alternative to traditional sex work. The platform offers creators greater autonomy and charges a lower commission on earnings than other digital options. In 2020, 2 million creators and 130 million subscribers generated $2 billion in sales, of which OnlyFans took a 20 percent cut. Adult videos and photos make up the vast majority of this content.

As the company announced on Saturday last week, from October 1, OnlyFans will prohibit sexually explicit content. Creators will have just two months to remove existing content that breaches the new policy.