For years I’ve wondered how Pornhub can keep doing business year after year without being sued into oblivion. My complaint has always been about the widespread piracy and unauthorized posting on the site. They’ve been an ongoing frustration for me for years, with lots of my videos uploaded without my permission, for which I don’t earn a dime. And while I can get them removed, they make producers jump through hoops, requiring me to give them my personal and business information and to click off a bunch of boxes swearing under threat of perjury that I’m the copyright holder. And this is for my own videos! Wildly frustrating.

This week though things changed dramatically. I’d heard that something was going on but didn’t look into it in much detail till an online friend wrote me. A recent article in the NY Times outlined numerous cases on the site of child porn, revenge porn, and non-consensual sex videos, plus illicit bathroom and shower cam videos. Some of the accounts of the consequences suffered by victims are truly horrifying. A few days later Visa and Mastercard dropped Pornhub and Mindgeek, their parent company which owns numerous other “tube sites” as well as porn production companies such as Reality Kings and Brazzers. Pornhub has since deleted about eighty percent of their videos and is now only allowing uploads from verified accounts, a change that many have asked for for years.

Not surprisingly, there’s been lots of talk on social media, some from people way more informed on the subject than I am (a particularly good thread here). While no one is downplaying the horrible reality of how prevalent child sex abuse material (CSAM) is online, some online voices question the wider anti-porn motives of some anti-trafficking groups, as well as the impact of Visa’s and Mastercard’s actions on legit performers and models who use Pornhub to make a living (selling videos and camming and so on). Obviously those avenues for earning an income are gone for now.

There’s also the question of how much the credit card companies will now start scrutinizing other websites. Certainly other tube sites such as xHamster (where some of my videos are also reposted without my permission) must be sweating bullets right about now.

There’s also legislation being considered in Congress to clamp down on online porn in general, banning downloads, for example, and other measures which could have a devastating impact on the business. At this point I doubt that these actions will end in numerous sites (such as mine) going offline but I’ve always known it’s possible the tide could turn against adult websites. If billing companies such as CCBill were to lose the use of Visa / Mastercard that would be it. And that’s basically what happened to the old Insex website, where Homeland Security allegedly talked to the billing companies, claiming that Insex was laundering money for terrorists – an absurd charge. Once Insex lost the use of credit cards though it was all over.

The thing about Pornhub is that they’ve brought all this on themselves due to their lazy approach to moderation and self-policing. Their approach has always been, “Hey, we’re not the producers – we’re just offering a platform.” All the checks that Pornhub uses to vet their content come after the fact, whereas anyone can make an account and immediately start uploading. A well-written article from the Oxford University student paper points out that while “pre-publication checks…are integral to ensuring the platform is abuse-free, they are incompatible with the business model upon which Pornhub has built its success.”

Obviously I have no affection for Pornhub. It will be interesting to see where all this goes. I suspect Pornhub / Mindgeek will weather this and hopefully clean up their act and adjust their business model to be more ethical, though I’m not holding my breath. What the wider effects will be on the porn / fetish industry, we shall see. More to come, I’m sure.