How Pornhub Became Public Enemy Number One for Christian Crusaders
Netflix tries to steal back some eyeballs from one of its biggest online video-streaming competitors with Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, a documentary about the creation and travails of the internet’s pre-eminent X-rated emporium. Viewers hoping for salaciousness or titillation, however, will be sorely disappointed by Suzanne Hillinger’s feature (March 15), which eschews nudity (much less hardcore material) to an almost disingenuous degree in favor of a skin-deep and saggy look at the 21st-century porn wars.
Money Shot: The Pornhub Story’s title comes from the term for an adult film’s climax, but it also more subtly refers to the revenue side of the business. Whereas porn content was traditionally available via theatrical films, VHS tapes and magazines, the rise of the web begat a host of sites that—using YouTube as a model—allowed users to upload whatever they wanted. Of those pioneers, Pornhub quickly became the biggest and most successful, attracting 3.5 billion visitors a month and, in the process, ranking as the 10th most visited site in the world. Unsurprisingly, the national media spotlight followed, making its name synonymous with digital erotica.
Pornhub is owned by MindGeek, a private Luxembourg-based company whose center of operations is in Canada. According to former employee Noelle Perdue, it was a “hilariously boring office space,” full of gray carpets and cubicles, and run by executives—CEO Feras Antoon, COO David Tassillo and co-founder Bernd Bergmair—who cared more about spearheading a thriving tech giant than a porn empire. The key to their success was a data-harvesting system that allowed them to tailor content to consumers in a way that far outpaced their non-porn rivals (because they simply had more material with which to work), as well as a paradigm-disrupting focus on unauthorized distribution. Anyone could post clips to Pornhub, and while those uploaders didn’t earn anything for their efforts—verification was mandatory in order to profit—Pornhub itself benefited greatly from this tidal wave of free, unsanctioned videos, courtesy of increased traffic that led to enormous ad revenue.