Watching Porn

by Lynsey G

  I had heard a few grumbles about the newly dubbed Manwin by the time it went on an acquisitions spree, adding small companies to its roster by the bucketful. By July 2013, the company had acquired tube sites YouPorn, GayTube, SexTube, TrannyTube, and RedTube, effectively cornering the market in porn tube sites, since it already owned several of the biggest. By that same date, Manwin had also acquired Twistys, Digital Playground, and Reality Kings, some of the premier porn site networks in the world. It additionally controlled the online operations of industry titan Wicked Pictures and the online and television operations of Playboy. In under a decade, Manwin had become the primary player in the adult industry and showed no signs of slowing down.

  According to many in the industry, particularly outspoken antipiracy advocate Stoya, Manwin’s modus operandi is to allow porn piracy to undercut producers’ profits to such a degree that those producers are willing to sell for peanuts. Once small companies have been purchased, they are allowed to continue creating content, but their profits are constantly sucked away by the tube sites, which still feed into the larger conglomerate. In effect, Manwin is making money no matter what, and the hundreds of people working for the company’s content-production side simply have to make do with less, since the people paying them are also the ones stealing from them. As Nate Glass of the anti-piracy company Takedown Piracy told me in 2016, “It would be as if Twentieth Century Fox owned the Pirate Bay!” (Or, in the publishing world, as if Amazon owned Penguin Random House and used book stores.)

  In 2013, Manwin had become public enemy number one in adult entertainment, but since so many still were still on its payroll, there was little to be done. Thylmann sold his stake in Manwin to Ferras Anton and David Tasillo, who had been with the company for years, and they renamed it MindGeek. These two now quietly oversee a gigantic share of the porn industry—a share so big that most in the business, along with plenty of journalists, have called it a monopoly. But the day that governments around the world start to care about monopolies in smut is still far off and, in the meantime, the holdouts still remaining independent have continued to seek out new avenues for money-making that can either cut MindGeek out of the equation or make peace with the looming Big Brother of porn.

  By the time I hit AVN in 2011, the effects of tube sites were already being felt, although Manwin (which hadn’t been renamed MindGeek yet) hadn’t reached its zenith. The AVN expo in 2011 was much smaller than the year before. People were reporting drops in profits of up to eighty percent. At the awards ceremony, an anti-piracy PSA starring prominent industry faces was played, to raucous applause, and a number of acceptance speeches included pleas for viewers to pay for porn instead of watching it on the tubes. These entreaties didn’t go unheard: The AVN Awards were being broadcast on Spike TV, which, ironically, was owned by—you guessed it—Manwin.

  Since then, the trend has continued, even escalated. To my dismay, in 2012, the Adult Entertainment Expo was even smaller than the year before, and had been moved to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino—a smaller venue well off the Strip. By the last quarter of 2014, production in Porn Valley was down seventy-five percent from 2008. The Pornography Industry author Shira Tarrant estimated in 2016 that at least $2 billion was being lost to online piracy, largely via tube sites, every year. MindGeek is now rumored to be one of the top three consumers of bandwidth in the world, with much of that mouthful going directly to its tube sites—of which it currently owns eight of the top ten worldwide. MindGeek has reported that its sites get over a hundred million views every day, with the vast majority of those views coming from the tube sites and a tiny percentage transitioning into paid subscriptions to its many pay sites or click-throughs to advertisers. Tube sites have become so ubiquitous that many studios upload trailers and clips as promotional material in the hopes that even one out of a thousand viewers might click the link to their pay site and make a purchase.

  Studios that have managed to avoid the MindGeek leviathan must try to outmaneuver it while still eking out a profit in a market that just keeps shrinking. Given that most production companies own many sites that feed into one another, ownership in the industry is quite opaque, which means that whether industry workers want to steer clear of the monopoly or not, it’s difficult to make a living without working for MindGeek. Some of the performers I’ve spoken to can’t tell me whether they’ve shot scenes for a MindGeek company because they don’t actually know. Others refuse to even speculate—they choose not to talk about MindGeek at all, lest their words get around and they find themselves blacklisted by the biggest bully on the playground.

  There is resistance from the grassroots, however. A startup called Takedown Piracy entered the scene in the spring of 2009 when Nate Glass, a salesperson for an adult production company in LA, decided to do something. “I kind of took it as a personal challenge, and I have a total hero complex! I saw people I knew getting laid off, I saw us downsizing,” he told me. And he thought, “This is not justice! This is not right!” So he set about developing digital fingerprinting technology that would identify copyrighted content by scanning tube sites and pinpointing unique markers for each studio. His company generates and sends DMCA takedown notices to the site illegally hosting its clients’ content. They started in 2009, and as of the time I’m writing this, Takedown Piracy has removed over fifty million copyrighted videos from free websites on behalf of their clients, and has worked out deals with a number of tube sites to block those clients’ pirated content in the future. Takedown Piracy has made a noticeable dent in the mountains of pirated porn in the world, and Glass is hopeful that dent will grow.

  And, for better or worse, the tube site model may soon change, if MindGeek’s latest innovation takes root. At the end of 2015, Pornhub introduced Pornhub Premium, a Netflix-style, $9.99-per-month subscription service that entitles members to faster, higher-quality streams of all the content available for free on the rest of the site, as well as exclusive full-length films produced by Pornhub’s partner studios. As of February 2016, the Premium package also offers Pornhub original content. It launched with Full Holes, a Full House porn parody that, frankly, looked god-awful to this porn journalist. (But I’ve never been a big fan of the Full House franchise, so don’t take my word for it.)

  The tube site subscription model has yet to prove itself, but it’s another double-edged sword for the rest of the adult industry. On the one hand, it offers a pay-for-your-porn, Netflix-style model from the biggest tube site of them all, which could be a boon in that it’s reintroducing consumers to the idea that pornography is a product with monetary value. And, for studios who partner with Pornhub to shelter their content behind the paywall, it could help to keep piracy at bay. However, so far there have been no plans announced to kick any of that $9.99 per month back to the industry in a meaningful way, which leaves adult industry workers in more or less the same position they’re in now.

  The monopoly isn’t all bad, of course. MindGeek’s flagship tube site, Pornhub, is so profitable and so widely recognized as the biggest porn site in the world that it has taken the opportunity to give back to its users in quirky, sometimes delightful ways. In 2012, Pornhub launched a month-long “Save the Boobs” campaign by donating one cent to breast cancer research for every thirty “big-tit” or “small-tit” videos its users streamed. Shortly thereafter, the company launched the Pornhub Cares initiative, which has since made charitable donations to reforestation efforts (donations based on views of the “big dicks” category—get it? wood?), domestic violence (via a clothing line cofounded with domestic violence survivor Christy Mack), and whale conservation (one cent per every 2,000 videos streamed). They’ve even started a $25,000 scholarship, awarded to the winner of an essay contest every year.

  In early 2017, Pornhub launched the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center, a sex education site that brings together sex experts and doctors to school the masses on issues ranging from basic sexual anatomy to gender issues to sexually transmitted disease, and more. The move w
as roundly lauded by porn fans and mainstream media as a responsible answer to the fact that pornography serves as sex education for many of the tube site’s viewers. Pornhub’s vice president Corey Price told Refinery29, “As a leading provider of adult entertainment, we thought it important that we also offer a platform on which carefully sourced information about all aspects of sexuality be made available to our viewers.” But adult industry insiders were skeptical—one of the primary reasons that so many people are learning about sexuality from porn in the first place is because they can watch it easily and for free. Illegally. On Pornhub, where the vast majority of the fare available was filmed with the intention of entertaining, not educating, in exchange for legal tender. But now that it’s available for free, it’s serving both purposes. And rather than cracking down on copyright violations in an effort to get pornographers paid, Pornhub has made itself a one-stop shop for education and smut, theoretically eliminating the need to look elsewhere—say, pay sites or VOD sites—for sexual material online.

  Pornhub has also leveraged its popularity into brilliant ad campaigns that inhabit a solid middle ground straddling salaciousness, titillation, humor, and wry winks to the public acknowledging that porn is a secret we all share. In other words, MindGeek has dropped its consumer-facing brand directly into the space I myself have been trying to occupy for years by bringing people together to talk about porn in a real way. With its sixty-four million hits a day in traffic, Pornhub is in an incredible position to collect and process information that the world has been wondering about for years. And it recognized its potential, launching Pornhub Insights in 2013. Looking at every imaginable metric for porn consumption, the company has examined porn viewership during various sporting events and holidays, the correlations between income and porn-watching habits, political divisions and porn use, marijuana in porn searches, and more.

  The results of these data-crunching and processing efforts are fascinating, to say the least (just a nibble: “lesbian” is far and away the most searched-for word on the site, and Kim Kardashian is one of the most popular porn stars—even though she’s not a porn star), and could be of immense value for pornographers. But more than that, Pornhub is demystifying the dirty habit that we almost all share. By giving us feedback on our habits and laying them out for all the world to see—and doing it in a friendly, SFW way—they’re clobbering the stigma surrounding porn use. (For instance, one of their biggest reveals has been that easily a quarter of their registered users are female—and then breaking down what these female viewers are watching. The results are riveting. Did you know for instance, that women are 122 percent more likely to search for gangbang porn than men, at least on Pornhub?)

  But it must be stated that, just as algorithms on Facebook and Google cultivate the consumer tastes that they then cater to, so too is MindGeek steering its viewers. All this data collection on the part of Pornhub is likely part of a larger effort to direct users to content they’ll enjoy, much like Amazon’s “You Might Also Enjoy …” function that introduces shoppers to similar products. Those suggestions don’t come up arbitrarily—the site is tracking your interests and comparing them with those of millions of other users. The end result is, as Shira Tarrant put it, “You’re being spoon-fed a limited range of pornography … Online-porn users don’t necessarily realize that their porn-use patterns are largely molded by a corporation.” With this wisdom in mind, one starts to question the prevalence of, say, “teens” as a search term, or “MILFs.” Are we really all thirsty for these two age groups, or have we entered into a feedback loop that tells us these categories are popular, so we must want to watch them, so they continue to get made? It’s a question that I couldn’t begin to answer, but it makes me look a tad askance at the information Pornhub puts out.

  Still, it’s interesting to watch the porn monopoly’s prize website—and possibly the industry’s biggest enemy—going to such lengths to be a good citizen. And, skeptical though I may be, I can’t help also being impressed. But the cynic in me must ask: Wouldn’t it be nice to see them spending as much time and energy on giving back to the community upon whose backs all of this data—and money—is generated? While MindGeek is making us feel a little better about watching porn, most of us are still getting it for free—from MindGeek. For the industry, that means that there is still less work to go around, and less money. Studios are still failing, rates are still falling, and the public doesn’t much care because they’re getting all the porn they want free of charge, as well as a winking pat on the back from the Pornhub Cares folks.

  In December 2016, superstar adult performer Nikki Benz tweeted that she had been assaulted on a Brazzers set by the director, Tony T., who had choked her during a scene that she said “wasn’t supposed to be a rape scene,” but in which she had been pushed well past her limits. She’d called for a cut multiple times, she said, but filming had continued. Her eight hundred fifty thousand Twitter followers, who call themselves the #BenzMafia, were outraged and began immediately calling for justice, denouncing Brazzers and Tony T., and pulling their memberships from the company that had employed Ms. Benz as a brand ambassador and contract star. Brazzers backpedaled, publicly siding with Ms. Benz while also denying culpability. Tony T., you see, was an independent third party, contracted to film a scene according to his own whims, which would be purchased by Brazzers if it met their requirements. Brazzers reported that they would not purchase the scene, nor would they ever work with Tony T. again. Yet the statements rang hollow: Nikki Benz was one of the biggest stars in the industry, with one of the largest fan bases, and she was unwilling to be mollified. The company was so big, they maintained, that they clearly didn’t care about the well-being of the people at the bottom: the performers themselves. Nikki Benz, known for shooting high-end, mostly vanilla scenes, should never have been paired with a director like Tony T., whose career in porn started as an aggressively dominant male performer for hardcore gonzo companies and who had earned himself a reputation for aggression on set. Whatever he was planning to film with Nikki Benz, Brazzers should have seen the writing on the wall well before they booked their biggest contract star to work on one of his sets. As performer Gen Padova told me shortly after the incident, “It was Brazzers’s responsibility. There’s a contract there. You take care of that person who is representing your company. That’s a lot on the line. You’re the largest and the most successful company in the industry, and have been for years, you’d think you’d be a little careful with something like that.”

  The fallout is still raining down on the largest of MindGeek’s production outfits. Tony T. and Ramon Nomar, the director and performer who Ms. Benz called out, have filed a defamation lawsuit for unspecified damages. Tony T. has categorically denied the truth of the allegations, even showing the raw footage of the scene in question to a small group of industry insiders in an attempt to clear his name. Still, many performers have come out publicly in defense of Ms. Benz and to add their own stories to hers: Brazzers, it seems, has a history of hiring producers who mistreat female talent on set, then silencing their complaints by withholding pay and pressuring performers to stay quiet. A huge company’s word, the thinking seems to go, will be valued above that of a mere porn actor. But the tables may be turning: nearly a million angry fans on Twitter and an increasingly loud outcry from the people on whose bodies the whole of pornography is created are refusing to let MindGeek live this one down.

  And in the meantime, performers and independent producers have been finding workarounds to stay free of MindGeek’s tightening fist. The result is an intriguing post-apocalyptic porn landscape. Since 2010 or so, I’ve been witness to some truly genius changes in porn. Just as Amazon’s dominance and large-publisher conglomeration has left a space for indie publishers to proliferate and self-publishing to flourish, the corporate titan of porn has encouraged small producers and performers to think creatively and find more ways to make money.

  Kink.com is an excellent example of independent success
. Started in 1997 as Cybernet Entertainment and renamed Kink.com in 2006, the company is dedicated to, as its mission statement attests, “demystifying and celebrating alternative sexualities by providing the most ethical and authentic kinky adult entertainment.” With its focus on the wide world of kink, ranging from simulated water torture to fucking machines to standard bondage and domination and everything in between, Kink has managed to do well by filming specialized content that MindGeek doesn’t have a particular interest in owning. (The company’s production efforts don’t make much in the way of kinky content, and Pornhub isn’t very interested in fringe material, which it offloads instead onto MindGeek’s smaller tube sites.) With its ever-evolving focus on the ethical treatment of models and other workers, Kink has set itself up as a progressive force within the industry, aiming to expand and improve at every juncture. The company also pays well—slightly less, on average, than a standard mainstream company might, but more than smaller companies can afford.

  Many independent studios have taken a hint from Kink.com’s success and specialized in fringe content that doesn’t fall under MindGeek’s purview. Back in 2010, industry veteran Debi Diamond, who had just returned to porn after a fifteen-year hiatus, told me, “To stay in the game you must be creative and serve up fresh niche content,” and that has only gotten more true with the continued role of piracy. At most industry gatherings I have attended in recent years, new faces I’ve struck up conversations with have often told me that they do fetish work, ranging from balloon popping to farting to foot fetishes—for themselves, from home, with extremely low overhead costs. “With hand jobs, pegging, foot fetish—that stuff—there’s less constraints, so you can shoot more of it in a day. It’s easier on your body, and there’s zero, zero, zero chance of anybody passing [an STI] on to anyone,” says Lance Hart of kinky porn and payment company PervOut.com. Companies like his are too small for MindGeek to notice, and they shoot content that MindGeek doesn’t particularly want, anyway. And because the tube sites host relatively few fringe offerings, the increasingly kinky public finds content where it can—very often paying small producers for it in the process. (It’s worth noting that this doesn’t mean that fringe content doesn’t get pirated or put on tube sites, merely that this happens less frequently to non-mainstream content.)