Money Shot: The Pornhub Story

Do you remember the first porn you ever saw?

It was at a sleepover. I was with a girlfriend.

And at, like, 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. something special came on.

Here you are, Cinderella. Don't be fooled by your stepsisters again.

It was, like, this Mother Goose porn.

She would, like, tell you a fairy tale, and you would see them reenacting it.

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 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.

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 are.

I mean, the sex is almost immaterial.

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.

Just what she needs.

Which did kind of set the tone

for how extreme things could be on the Internet.

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.

- That's very broad. - Yeah.

So, like, I mean, anything can be porn.

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.

So MindGeek owns Pornhub,

and I worked there for 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 Montréal.

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 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.

...watchin' Spice.

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.

- -

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.

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.

We started to see an evolution of people distributing content

that they didn't have a right to.

Especially compared to the 1960s, where porn piracy would be

leaving a porn magazine in the woods for somebody to find, 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.

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.

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.

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 that it was Pornhub that was at the top when you searched.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 a 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.

As usual, when we need a little emotional uplift, we know where to turn.

Pornography.

Specifically, the largest porn site on the Internet, Pornhub.

Though many of you can probably get there by just typing 'P' into your browser.

- I found the whole movie on Pornhub. -

- Uh... I don't wanna-- - I don't know what you're talking about.

It's sort of a hub for porn. Um...

They were really great about brand recognition.

They bought billboards in Times Square knowing they would be controversial

and knowing they could benefit from all the earned media that comes with that.

We did a lot of collaborations with celebrities like Kanye.

Pornhub is pop-- I mean, I think in our heads

most people could even see the colors

or hear the song.

- -

For the last 15 years, I would say, by far, it's the most household name.

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."

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.

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,