17th March 2023 – (Los Angeles) Money Shot: The Pornhub Story is a new Netflix documentary that reveals the unglamorous reality of working in one of the most famous adult sites. The documentary, released on 15th March and directed by Suzanne Hillinger, sheds light on the dark side of the porn industry. The documentary includes interviews with former employees, journalists, activists and adult performers, such as Cherie DeVille, Natassia Dreams, Asa Akira, Siri Dahl and Wolf Hudson, who talk about the controversies surrounding the site and how it has affected their work. Here are some of the key revelations from the documentary:
MindGeek, a Luxembourg-based company in Canada, is responsible for some of the most popular adult companies such as Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube and Xtube. According to porn industry advocate Mike Stabile, MindGeek started as a technology platform without any studio or experience creating adult content.
Noelle Perdue, a former employee who worked at the company for three years, revealed that the office was “hilariously boring” with grey carpets and cubicles. It was just like working in a tech company.
Martin Patriquin, a journalist, stated that MindGeek is a data-harvesting operation that gathers data on its users to tailor content towards their preferences. He believes that they are better at it than Netflix because they have much more information to build an algorithm around.
Several adult content creators feel that subscription sites like Modelhub and OnlyFans have opened the door to financial freedom, giving them autonomy, power and more money. Before these sites existed, performers were “at the mercy of studio-produced porn,” according to Cherie DeVille.
The lack of verification on Pornhub made it easy for people to share content that was not theirs or not consensual. It was also difficult to track down the person who uploaded the content. This led to performers advocating for mandatory verification, which was not implemented during Perdue’s time at the company.
Dani Pinter, senior legal counsel for The National Centre on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), alleges that Pornhub knowingly profits from sex trafficking. She claims that traffickers intentionally create content for the site or knowingly distribute child pornography, and that Pornhub facilitates it intentionally because they know there is a demand for it.
A New York Times article and the ‘#Traffickinghub’ social media campaign led MindGeek to ban all uploads from unverified users and remove millions of videos from the site. This caused a public uproar, and major credit card companies detached themselves from the site.
Content moderators sometimes had to guess someone’s age when going through thousands of clips a day. This meant that some illegal content slipped through the net.
Money Shot: The Pornhub Story uncovers the reality behind the glamorised adult site and reveals its controversies and impacts on performers and the porn industry as a whole.