Money Shot: The Pornhub Story

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story is a 2023 American-Canadian documentary film about the rise of the most successful adult entertainment website Pornhub, with the ensuing legal issues of the backlash and notoriety it received. Directed by Suzanne Hillinger. A Netflix Documentary(taglines) Wolf Hudson (porn performer) I remember either HBO or Cinemax having like, those late-night erotic movies, and I remember one of the first ones that I saw, it was two women together and I'm like, "Two women can do that?" In 2008, Pornhub was becoming pretty much omnipresent. And so, at the time, I had obviously a very negative opinion about Pornhub because they were the ones that were taking away the money. Noelle Perdue (porn industry professional) I was eleven, and I went onto Pornhub, and I wanted to be surprised, and I really was. The first piece of pornography that I watched was an eight-person geriatric gang bang. [giggles] Which did kind of set the tone for how extreme things could be on the Internet. So MindGeek owns Pornhub, and I worked there in three years in various positions. I just googled, actually, "Porn scriptwriter, is that a job?" And it was. And MindGeek was hiring, and I applied, and I moved to Montreal. Most people think PornHub is the biggest or most visited porn site on the Internet, which in terms of brand recognition, is true. It's the one people talk about when they talk about the porn industry. But MindGeek is a hilariously boring office space. Gray carpet, gray cubicle, open-concept kind of thing. It was really just like working at a tech company. I think it was more appealing to the executives to be executives at a very successful tech company than a very successful porn company. So, when the Internet was first developed. The only kind of pornography was, like, ASCII art, where somebody painstakingly went and drew titties out of semicolons and periods and stuff like that, and it would take forever to download because bandwidth was so low. Eventually bandwidth improved, and that gave way to people uploading scans of pornographic images and videos to share them. We started to see an evolution of people distributing content that they didn't have a right to. Especially compared to the 1960s, where [gestures] "porn piracy" would be... leaving a porn magazine in the woods for somebody to find, [giggles] you know, and maybe a group of six teenagers would find it in the woods, and you would make their day. Tube sites like Pornhub were very disruptive to the porn industry in the exact same way that Pirate Bay was disruptive to the film industry and LimeWire was disruptive to the music industry. People started to expect to get things for free very easily. Pornhub wasn't necessarily the one driving that, but Pornhub absolutely... was a part of this... this movement. Anything that has a lot of traffic, you can assume is really taking advantage of search engine optimization or the game of trying to get your page first. When somebody searches, like; "big titties". Pornhub wants "Pornhub big titties" to be number one and ideally number two, number three, number four, number five, number six. Pornhub fundamentally changed porn distribution and porn production as a result. We did a lot of collaborations with celebrities like Kanye. It's really interesting to see, on a very wide scale, people trying to remove pornography from the Internet. It feels almost like ripping the spine out of something, you know, given how much every element of the Internet has been influenced and led by pornography. It... It's just creating this absolutely, like, untenable tension between the two industries that... that actually exist so tight-knit. And the people who get often left in the dust are primarily sex workers, primarily performers, and also users trying to exist as a person with a sex drive online. And it just becomes a precedent for great censorship that we see over and over and over again, unreasonably applied to the most vulnerable people. The direct conflation of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation with pornography harms everybody involved. It harms people who are looking to consume porn in a healthy way, and it opens up the possibility for porn to be non-consensual, which should not be the case. In order for it to be pornography, it has to be consensual. Otherwise, it is documentation of sexual abuse, and that's what it is. There's no such thing as non-consensual sex, it is rape. There is no such thing as non-consensual pornography, it is rape. Pornography is pornography, and that has to inherently imply consent 100% of the time. Mark Stabile (porn industry professional) My aunt had a copy of Playgirl and I tore out all the pages. And when you see something like that, that connects with you, it makes you realize, who you areǃ I mean, the sex is almost immaterialǃ So MindGeek has a number of adult companies. Pornhub is its main platform. Brazzers does production. And there are a host of other tube sites, like Redtube or Xtube that are owned under the MindGeek umbrella. MindGeek came from outside the industry. They were really a technology platform. They didn't produce adult content, so they didn't have to have any relationships with studios, they just had to create a platform where people could share content. And that was the promise of Pornhub. In pre-Internet porn, you try to keep as low a profile as possible because you didn't want the feds coming after you, you didn't want people really focusing attention on you, you didn't want to make waves. But Pornhub knew that if they were gonna capture market share on a global level, they had to make waves. And with the Internet, you blew that wide open. Consumers learned that they didn't have to buy a $90 DVD and only get four scenes. They learned that they could have an endless amount of content for 19.99 a month. But the Internet was suspicious. People were afraid that, "If I put this on the Internet, it will be stolen." In some cases, that came true. By 2011, studios started to realize that it was better to partner with them. And in 2012, Fabian Thylmann was suddenly giving the keynote at a major industry conference. They were really great about brand recognition. They bough billboards in Times Square knowing they would be controversial and knowing they could benefit from all the earned media that comes with that. Pornhub insights got a tremendous amount of media attention. Their big push was always these end-of-year data numbers where they would list the number of videos, the top stars, the top search terms. It went into everybody's homes, and it got people talking about things that were scandalous beforehand. I think that was one of the things that later made Pornhub a target. Some people don't like that these things are not in the shadows. They want this stuff hidden. And, of course, the arguments are not new. It's just the medium that they're battling has changed. And so we started to hear the drum beat of people coming for Pornhub from outside the industry. What people don't realize is porn is traditionally the canary in the coalmine of free speech. Dani Pinter (senior legal counsel (NCOSE)) Once this is on the Internet, it's almost impossible to remove. 230 has become a complete shield of protection for really egregious criminal activity that even when people are being sex trafficked, sold, horrifically abused online, these website just throw up their hands and say; "Someone else put that on my site. That's not my problem". Unfortunately, they've been very successful. But when court after court was denying these claims on behalf of sex trafficking victims, Congress responded. They passed FOSTA-SESTA, which is Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act, and they said 230 was never intended to shield those who are knowingly profiting off sex trafficking. Martin Patriquin (journalist, The Logic) Pornhub came out of the fruits of three Concordia students who, like any other university students, apparently liked naked women. And they started this thing off, essentially, as a lark. But they sold the company in 2010 to a guy named Fabian Thylmann, and he wrapped it into his empire. And, to his credit, Fabian knew all about search engine optimization to make sure it was Pornhub that was at the top when you searched. First time I wrote about it, I had no idea there was a connection between Pornhub and MindGeek. That one company owned the other. MindGeek itself is basically a data-harvesting operation. This is company that does exactly what Netflix does, what Facebook does. It gathers data on its users to better tailor content towards those eyeballs. And they're extremely good at it. In fact, better at it than Netflix because they have that much more to build an algorithm around. And, of course, being able to monetize user-generated content with advertising was extremely profitable. But then Thylmann was convicted of tax evasion, and the assets were bought by MindGeek employees by the name of Feras Antoon and David Tassillo and a guy named Bernd Bergmair, who was an investor. And they were very successful in pushing Pornhub to the very, sort of, outer limits of mainstream acceptance. Bree Mills (porn director) Studios that were very used to having certain budgets and certain returns all of a sudden found most, if not all, of their content disposable and it becoming much more of a volume game. Fabian Thylmann [archive footage] I'm hoping that my openness throughout the speech will be beneficial to all of you, and some will understand a bit more of how we do things and why we do things certain ways. And why we're quite friendly people, although we own tube sites. So let's get back a bit and look at what the industry had to face over the past few years. I think the industry faces a lot of change often. I think it's normal that we do because we have always been more or less at the forefront of technology. And therefore face the negative change and the positive change at the same time. Trevor Noah [archive footage] As usual, when we need a little emotional uplift, we know where to turn. Pornography. [studio audience laughs] Specifically, the largest porn site on the Internet, Pornhub. Though many of you can probably get there by just typing 'P' into your browser. [studio audience laughs] Cherie DeVille (porn performer) In college, some of my downstairs neighbors had a whole DVD of Julia Ann and Janine Lindemulder. One of their classic Blondage films, where they were using an ice dildo, and maybe because it's all I had... or maybe because it's an amazing film, it was what I watched and then what I thought about for many years. Pornhub is pop... I mean, I think in our heads most people could even see the colors or hear the song. Asa Akira (PornHub ambassador) For the last 15 years, I would say, by far, it's the most household name. Natassia Dreams (PornHub ambassador and porn performer) So I had a page, and I had, like, millions of viewers, and I'm like, "Well, no wonder why people are noticing me in the train station, when I go flying. No wonder. Sixteen million people have seen my asshole." I know it's a dark demon, our industry, but I don't think it's as dark as they portray it. And on one that's juding me for what I'm doing for work was there for me when I had my bad days. Jimmy Kimmel [archive footage] Pornhub released their annual report of the top pornographic searches in the country. They broke it down by state, and the results are very interesting. In Arkansas, for instance, the number one most searched porn word was "divorced", which might be the saddest thing I've ever heard. Newscasters [archive footage] There is pressure on Ottawa and Quebec to act tonight after alarming allegations surface... Pornhub is one of the most profitable and powerful websites... Thirty women are now suing Pornhub's parent company MindGeek... The New York Times column accused the porn site... of profiting off the sexual exploitation of women... Mastercard says they might stop... This isn't about porn. This is about rape... Pornhub is not a porn site. It's a crime scene. [film title card] Siri Dahl I was not pleased with Pornhub early on. Piracy was a massive issue, and at the time, there wasn't a way to monetize my own content on Pornhub. I... I couldn't sell it on there. It was just a game of Whac-A-Mole getting my stolen stuff taken down constantly. If the attack on porn continues on the path that it's currently on, it's not just an attack on porn. It's an attack on women's sexuality, it's an attack on queer sexuality, it's an attack on people being able to express themselves openly, especially online. Gwen Adora My name is Gwen Adora and I am an adult performer, an online content creator, semi-influencer, babe. [giggles] That's who I am. I definitely identify as a sex worker. That's not the first thing I say to people 'cause I feel like it's such a broad term. I don't necessarily say that upfront. But that's something I identify as, like, politically and job-wise. The words "porn star" or "sex worker" doesn't really associate with my body type for a lot of people. So a lot of people are generally like, "Ohǃ I didn't, like, realize fat women could do pornǃ" People assume that, like, I'm in it for, like, the wrong reasons. They're like, "Oh, you're doing something that's, you know, taboo and underground and shouldn't be talked about, but we'll definitely jerk off to it." People automatically assume I'm doing mainstream porn just because that's the immediate connection, that's what people know the most of. Um, but in reality, I'm just in my room by myself making little videos. Just like a YouTuber, basically. I think a lot of people who were calling for the downfall of Pornhub didn't really realize what that meant. I think they just wanted the website deleted, and they thought, "Whoo, check mark. Like, this is great. We did it. We got rid of this material." While I do agree that Pornhub did not do a good enough job of helping those victims, the illegal content exists on every website. So if we are saying that all the websites should go down, like, that's not stopping the videos from happening. That's not fixing the issues. That's just gonna keep happening on different websites. So it's an exhausting fight because, realistically, those people don't care about the... the victims. They just care about getting the porn industry to be as small as possible. They don't want us thriving. Yiota Souras (Senior VP & General Counsel (NCMEC)) Operating a pornography website is like any other social media website, is almost like operating a firecracker factory and not banning smoking. You're creating an explosive situation for the most vulnerable members of our population. The bulk of Pornhub's content was probably completely legal, but they operate on this razor's edge, and that's where he tremendous danger zone for any adult site is. So the biggest law out there right now is the Communications Decency Act, Section 230. And that really just provides that if you are an interactive services provider, you are not responsible in any way for what gets published on your website. Dialogue Interviewer: Do you remember the first porn you ever saw? Asa Akira: It was at a sleepover. I was with a girlfriend. And at, like, 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. something special came on. It was, like, this Moother Goose porn. She would, like, tell you a fairy tale, and you would see them reenacting it. Siri Dahl: I think what makes porn "porn" is that you watch it expecting to be sexually aroused in some way. I think that's my entire definition of it. Interviewer: That's very broad. Siri Dahl: Yeah. So, like, I mean, anything can be porn. [archive footage] Kumail Najiani: I found the whole movie on Pornhub. Uh... I don't wanna... Conan O'Brien: [raises both hands] I don't know what you're talking about. Kumail Najiani: It's sort of a hub for porn. Um... Cast Michael Stabile, spokesperson for the Free Speech Coalition Martin Patriquin, journalist for The Logic Michael Bowe, legal representative for victims of non-consensual pornography on Pornhub Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times Yiota Souras, VP & spokesperson for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) Dani Pinter - Senior legal counsel (NCOSE) Whitney Burgoyne, ex-Pornhub employee Asa Akira (PornHub ambassador) Noelle Perdue, ex-Aylo employee Cherie DeVille - Pornographic performer Wolf Hudson - Pornographic performer Natassia Dreams - (PornHub ambassador) Gwen Adora - Pornographic performer Siri Dahl - Pornographic performer Allie Knox - Pornographic performer Bree Mills - Porn director External links tt26739529 Money Shot: The Pornhub Story Category:2023 American films Category:2023 Canadian films Category:Films directed by Suzanne Hillinger Category:Pornographic industry documentary films