A documentary, available since March 15, lifts part of the veil on the online pornography giant. On the menu: audiences on the Internet to rival the other giants in the sector, colossal financial results and some dark backstage.
“Pornhub: close-up on the sex giant”: more seller, you die. The World’s Most Visited Adult Platform Documentary, directed by Suzanne Hillinger under the leadership of Jigsaw Productions, produced and broadcast since Wednesday March 15 by another juggernaut, Netflix, is already shaping up to be an event. With, on the program, a “immersion in the heart of successes and scandals” from Pornhub, the star of porn sites.
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So much for the promise, broken down into 90 minutes of “interviews with actors, activists and former employees” of the Canadian “adult entertainment” site which claims 2.5 billion visitors for the year 2022.
Sticking to the classic criteria of what promises a success with the audience, the case looks promising: a sulphurous, well-known brand, which waltzes with astronomical sums behind the scenes, and some past legal setbacks. , present or future. All in XXL format.
Dizzying audiences
At the end of 2022, Pornhub was ranked thirteenth among the most visited websites in the world, with 2.5 billion annual visitors. This is far behind Google, which takes first place (85.1 billion annual visitors), but ahead of Netflix (2 billion), TikTok (1.8 billion) or LinkedIn (1.6 billion). The average age of the visitor is 37 years old: the latter, indicates Pornhub in its annual statistical report, fixing its attention “generally from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.”, rather on Sundays, a little less on Fridays.
In the lot, France holds the rank and is in third place in the ranking of large consumers. In detail, at the top of the trends this year, all geographical areas combined: “reality porn”. The “Reality” category is progressing by +169%, indicates the adult site in its 2022 annual report. The “Transgender” category is progressing in 2022 by +75% to become the seventh most popular category in the world.
XXL cash
Mindgeek, the publisher of Pornhub, has a virtual monopoly on pornographic films and describes itself as “one of the world’s leading information technology companies”. In its lap, X-rated “cash machines”, such as Brazzers, Digital Playground, Twistys.com, WhyNotBi.comOr Sean Cody. She can spare herself modesty: in 2021, the company posted a turnover of 500 million dollars, a figure probably below reality. In December 2020, the value of Pornhub was estimated at one and a half billion dollars.
At the head of Mindgeek, Fabien Thylmann, 44, born in Aachen, Germany and described as “the emperor of porn”. Founder of Manwin, historical publisher of Pornhub, he sold his shares for 100 million dollars in October 2013 to Feras Antoon and David Tassilo. Born from the merger of Manwin with RedTube, the group takes the name of Mindgeek. In the summer of 2022, Feras Antoon and David Tassilo resign: the group evokes a departure planned since the beginning of the year. It comes a few days after the publication in the New Yorker of a child pornography investigation and mismanagement involving Mindgeek.
“Decor Hell”
Behind the successes, behind the scenes of the adult site, the sordid rubs shoulders with the criminal. On June 17, 2021, a complaint is filed in California by 34 women. They accuse the Pornhub and Mindgeek platform of having posted videos showing rape and sexual abuse, and sometimes including minor victims. Iprevious year, the New York Times denounced ” child abuse and non-consensual violence” . In 2022, the Visa and Mastercard companies decide to suspend transactions through their intermediaries for Mindgeek’s advertising management. Under pressure, Mindgeek has to remove millions of videos from its adult sites.
In France, a senatorial report entitled “Porn: the hell of the decor”, unveiled on September 27, 2022, evokes “systemic violence”minors too easily exposed to traumatic content. “Producers are not afraid to exploit the economic and psychological vulnerability of young, even very young women, and to shoot in deplorable conditions.“, note the authors of the report.
On January 5, 2022, the Court of Cassation refuses to address to the Constitutional Council the priority question of the constitutionality of the Pornhub platform, threatened with blocking by justice if it does not prevent minors from accessing its content. DAccording to Médiamétrie’s Global Internet Audience measurement, in the 1st quarter of 2022, all porn sites recorded a cumulative average monthly audience of 18.3 million unique visitors in France, 12% of whom were minors. In 2017, the average age of first exposure to pornographic images was 14 years old. She is 11 years old in 2022.