Pornhub, to which Netflix devotes the documentary Money Shot. The Pornhub Story (French title: Pornhub. Close-up on the giant of sex), by Suzanne Hillinger, is a free online pornography site launched in 2007, on the model of the YouTube platform. Paid contributions from independent performers (cisgender or trans actors and actresses) were then added, accessible through the partner platform Modelhub, which receives a percentage of the revenue.
“Actually, I just make videos in my bedroom, like a YouTuber,” assures Gwen Adora, Pornhub and Modelhub's curvy hit actress; Siri Dahl, another star of the trade, promotes the virtues of her freelance activity: “If I had been employed by the studios, I could not have bought myself a house. »
Until 2020, Pornhub, a subsidiary of the sprawling MindGeek (parent company of many other pornographic sites), based in Montreal and tax domiciled in Luxembourg, allowed the posting of free videos without verifying the identity of the contributor. As a result, fraudulent uses have multiplied: stolen private videos, revenge porn, child pornography... With, in particular, rapes of minors filmed live.
The case was revealed, in December 2020, by Nicholas Kristof in an investigation for the New York Times with the explicit title: "Children of Pornhub". Faced with outcry, pressure, investigations and withdrawal from payment sites (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal), a lot of content has been removed by Pornhub.
Journalistic investigation
From then on, all contributors had to present identification papers, while "moderators" monitored what was uploaded. But these, in too few numbers and having to watch (fast-tracked) up to 1,000 videos a day, inevitably let many potentially illegal clips slip through the meshes of this too loose net. Victims' protests continued to be too late to heed: by the time the stolen footage was removed, it would go viral.
MindGeek executives (seen in the documentary being questioned by the Canadian Parliament) had to step down in June 2022 after their moderation policy failed. On March 17, MindGeek was acquired by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners for an estimated $400 million.
Pornhub. Close-up on the sex giant is a journalistic investigation full of diverse testimonies (lawyers, journalists, actresses and actors, former employees of MindGeek, libertarian or ultra-conservative lobbies and leagues, anti or pro-porn feminists). This avoids the pitfall of the strictly incriminating investigation, but not always that of a probably a little rosy vision of porn, as proposed by the documentary.
We will note a certain complacency in showing a little too long the telesexual services of Gwen Adora and Siri Dahl. The latter judges and notes, by commenting on them for their owners, photos (blurred) of penises as if she were reviewing baguettes for the program "La Meilleur Boulangerie de France", on M6. But the whole is exceptionally rich in proportion to a subject as complex as it is controversial.
