OnlyFans Is Promoting Its OFTV App in an Attempt to Broaden Its Image ⇥ bloomberg.com

Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg:

The most common question customers ask Tim Stokely, the chief executive officer of OnlyFans, is why he doesn’t have an app. Some 130 million people use his service every month to follow fitness instructors, get cooking tips or access nude pictures. But they have to access the service using its website because Apple and Google won’t allow OnlyFans in their app stores.

That’s all about to change. OnlyFans has created an app, called OFTV, that offers videos featuring many of OnlyFans biggest stars. There is a catch, however. There’s no nudity.

For the past couple of months, I have noticed that OnlyFans is attempting to shake its not-safe-for-work image. Cooking videos on YouTube now occasionally have an OnlyFans preroll ad promoting the platform’s food-related creators, and it seems similar ads are on Facebook.

But — and this is just a small thing, but also imagine I am doing a great Columbo impression for something so petty — is this really OnlyFans’ first app? Shaw seems to be under that impression and Bloomberg’s fact checkers seemingly could not dispute that. Shaw’s framing has been picked up by Tubefilter and TechSpot. Mashable apparently spoke independently with OnlyFans and it, too, says that the company “couldn’t launch an app” before now, and the Verge used similar language in its report.

However, it seems that OnlyFans used to have iOS and Android apps, which it promoted on Twitter and linked to on its website. If OnlyFans has been telling the press that this is its first app, that is not true and should have been caught by fact checkers. But if all of these publications have come to that conclusion because there has not been an iOS or Android app for years, that is sloppy work all around.