the documentary of Netflix “Money Shot” tells the story of one of the most visited websites in the world: Pornhub. With interviews with sex workers, activists and former employees of the porn giant, the film is one of the premieres of the month (March 15), and “offers a deep dive into the successes and scandals of pornhub”.
More specifically, it chronicles how Pornhub changed adult entertainment, allowing erotic content to reach a mass audience, and turning pornography into a multi-billion dollar industry. While exploring allegations of traffic and non-consensual material on the site, and the subsequent self-censorship of pornhub.
“Money Shot: The Pornhub Story” It is directed by Suzanne Hillinger, a documentarian proven with pieces of a political nature who here develops her social and economic perspective on the phenomenon of the giant of the porn industry.
Resignations
The company mindgeekknown for operating Pornhub, one of the most popular adult content sites in the world (it has 28.5 billion visits per year), lost two of its top executives in September last year: CEO Feras Antoon and COO (Chief Operating Officer) David Tassillo who resigned after a long period of bleeding on the company’s finances.
The resignation came just after the US outlet The New Yorker published a report on non-consensual and underage material hosted by the site and available to its users. The outlet was able to verify that searches on the site produced thousands of results in which minorsin addition to narrating several stories of victims of abuse and violence who had found the videos of their attacks.
These complaints, which have been repeated since 2020, led to Visa and Mastercard will withdraw their support to process payments from the platform: the first faces an investigation for allowing shipments for a long time, allegedly knowing the illegal activity on Pornhub.
And most recently, Meta Platorms, Inc. (formerly Facebook) deleted all Instagram accounts from Pornhub, in which the site advertised its contents. “Instagram is bravely choosing to stop its alliance with Pornhub, it is time for all corporate entities to follow suit,” said Dawn Hawkins, CEO of the National Center for Sexual Exploitation in the United States.
“No content is now published without going through human and automated moderation, and when a user flags a video, it is disabled until a review is made,” it is now defended. MindGeek, the group that owns Pornhub and YouPorn -among other platforms- that produces profits close to 100 billion dollars annually, and today is under the magnifying glass of justice.
The beginning. The founders of Pornhub are four Canadian college friends dubbed ‘the kings of smut’ who made millions creating the YouTube of pornography in 2007.
Matt Keezer, Stephane Manos, Ouissam Youssef and Feras Antoon -from Montreal-, they had seen the advent of YouTube and the porn industry was going through the same transition of paid images to a video-only search engine. In 2003 they had already founded websites like Jugg World, A** Listing, KeezMovies and XXX Rated Chicks, where you could view nude photos and download short videos. It was the gene for Pornhub, a domain that Keezer bought for $2,750 from someone he met at a party at the Playboy mansion.
First they founded brazzers, a payment site whose name was a pun on their Middle Eastern roots and the pronunciation of the word “brothers.” Under Brazzers, they began hiring production companies in Los Angeles and Las Vegas to produce high-quality videos. The operation continued to grow and Antoon, Manos’s brother-in-law, was hired to coordinate them.
The company doubled in size every year. “Youssef was the visionary, Manos the salesman, Keezer the search engine expert. And Antoon who led them to success,” says “Money Shot”, the Netflix documentary. Over time, all but the leader would leave the conglomerate of the porn: Keezer runs a flight booking website, and Manos and Youssef run Valsoft, an app incubator.
reboot
In 2010 they sold the company for $140 million to Fabian Thylmann, a German billionaire. But then Antoon bought back that stake in 2013, continuing to serve as CEO of Pornhub, which has 1200 employees Worldwide. move some 3.5 billion users every month and attracts 120 million visitors a day. And it makes money through banner ads, but also from paid premium content, which were hit hard after the sudden ban by Visa and Mastercard.
With its viability at risk, Pornhub took drastic measures in 2020: It removed all videos uploaded by unverified accounts and de-verified every account not owned by one of its partner studios. “They took down my little girl roleplay videos,” explains Suzanne Ferrari, the creator and director behind the studio SlutInspection.com. Less than 3 million videos left. Animated and erotic content that had been produced by people who did not want to reveal their identity disappeared.
But Pornhub would find other powerhouses for content: if the USA, Hungary and the Czech Republic were until then the hubs of porn (with 10,000 professional stars), Russia would appear as a new supplier (surpassed the Czech Republic in number of pornographers). Eastern Europe still contributes a significant portion of the triple x industry today and Prague is the capital of industry, and home to WGCZ Holdings, owner of xVideos Pornhub’s main competitor.
by RN
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