MindGeek: The owner of Pornhub and RedTube
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I would just ask you to read some of the stories of the women who are abused by this industry. They're not uncommon, and they're not anything like the "abuse" somebody might describe in a manual labor job. Some of these stories sound like these women are essentially being raped, over and over, for profit, and then their abuse is being viewed by millions of people on the internet every day.
It's not cute, and there is a reason why the founder of this company would want to hide his name. He is trafficking in what is often times videos of the worst moments of some women's lives.
Read the stories that Mia Khalifa has put out, or Stoya, or girlsdoporn, or "exploited college girls", or watch the documentary "hot girls wanted". This stuff is horrible, and "mindgeek" appears to have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the toll that their exploitation of these women takes on them.
I know it's counterintuitive, but being on the receiving end of consensual "abuse"/disrespect etc in a sexual context is something loads of people are actually into. It's not just in porn.
>but being on the receiving end of consensual "abuse"/disrespect etc in a sexual context is something loads of people are actually into.
There is a difference between being "in" to fetishes, or being "in" to the trust play surrounding something like rape fantasy.
But that's not what is happening in these videos. These people are acting like they're "in" to these things when they're not, but still having to experience the act involved. It's not simulated.
Tom Cruise isn't really getting shot in Mission Impossible. In many of the videos on pornhub, the women really are being coerced into performing sexual acts that they don't want to.
And that isn't even the point I'm making. In some (many) cases, these women are being literally raped, and then pornhub, and their employees, are profiting off of people enjoying seeing them be abused. Read some of the accounts from "girls do porn", or like I said above, watch the "hot girls wanted" docu.
There are different levels of simulation, though. It may not in fact be a requirement to be turned on by the acts one is partaking in, despite consenting (or even enthusiastic consent). We do things for other people, for money (this is obviously the big one) or for some other motivation (someone may not enjoy deep-throating, but may enjoy the fact of being seen on video).
Tom Cruise likewise has probably been unenthusiastic about some roles. His stuntman may enjoy some stunts but not all of them. Some stuntmen probably enjoy very few. Do we demand that the actor in a horror movie is as horrified as the viewer? That the children's TV presenter is as enthusiastic about the alphabet as his audience?
The simulation is on two levels which are easy to conflate: story simulation, in which a rape scene, for instance, is played out (and just like Tom Cruise, he doesn't get shot and the actress isn't raped), and act simulation (as you point out, Tom Cruise isn't really shot, but the actress still takes a facial). The second is worthy of moral discussion, but there are several empirical questions to answer:
* Is there anything wrong with it? We may think the actress suffers, but we can't know that in many cases. That's the wonder of acting. It's also "toil" (as in Adam Smith's "toil and trouble" to produce a good). The sewage treatment technician toils in some particularly horrible work. Some such jobs could be described as degrading, and some may not even be as necessary as sewage treatment. I feel empathy for them, but I'm unconvinced that banning such jobs or heavily regulating them is a good solution.
* The act really happens, but the morally problematic part of the act, as performed, may not. An ordinary person may feel humiliated and degraded, but the actress may not. This can be true even if the actress doesn't enjoy the act (but still consents to it).
* What happens off-scene? BDSM practitioners will tell you the importance of after-care. Surely some porn production also affords this. Feminist pornography prides itself on aftercare when needed, for instance.
There are many instances where things "really happen" in acting outside of porn. Leonardo DiCaprio cut his hand in a scene of Django Unchained. Actors becoming so emotional and feeling sadness or loss may cry on stage.
People react to media and negotiate their limits and deal with moods in different ways. Actors are uniquely placed to do that even better.
On the other hand, I also think that talking only about consent is missing the point of the criticism - that porn shapes desires as much as it satisfies them, and it can create new desires and fetishes. It's not at all unreasonable to suppose that there would be fewer people interested in degradation and humiliation (fetishes consistently associated with lower than normal empathy in the available research) if porn hadn't fed into that desire.
Whether it should be socially acceptable to participate in a market which creates people (typically women) who find erotic pleasure in their own subservience and subordination is a valid point to raise.
The solution, if that concern does motivate you, may lie outside of regulatory measures - regulation on sexually explicit materials tends to harm those at the margins first.
But how is that different from any other illegal business? It is the same thing with drugs? people who smoke cannabis are aware of people in Colombia being killed for them?
Making porn legal and accepted is the way to go to solve those problems. Not making it forbidden. The more you will try to make it illegal or to hide it the more harm you will do to those girls.
I'm not sure pornhub is encouraging people to upload rape videos, child porn on their platform, and actually it is pretty rare to see that kind of content on pornhub. Contrary to telegram, periscope, vk, and small porn websites
Some people believe that pornography is inherently harmful; that viewing it degrades the viewer and psychologically harms them. Making pornography “acceptable” would be accepting this harm, inflicted on countless millions of people, in order to protect the relatively tiny amount of people who perform in it.
The same would happen if you were to ban porn. Demand would still be there, people would just be forced to go onto the unregulated black market to satisfy their demands. Meaning it would make the situation much worse.
If porn were to remain legal than the government can resolve these issues by proposing regulation to mitigate the abuses.
Sticking your head in the sand like we have been doing has helped no one.
Also, Porn is already legal.* And it is already accepted by large portions of the population.
Making porn more acceptable doesn't end the rape problem.
You severely missed the point. The comparison was between the relatively lack of outcry over cannabis smokers who presumably enable atrocities carried out by drug cartels in Colombia and elsewhere.
Cannabis wasn't grown in Colombia until very recently; cocaine has always been it's primary drug export, and unlike cannabis, cocaine has not been legal in the U.S. (or most of the West) during the lifetime of anyone alive today.
If you had said cocaine from the beginning I might have agreed with your sentiment if not the specific details, because porn has enabled sex trafficking and CP and other heinous crimes.
But you clearly meant cannabis, not cocaine, and so your statement doesn't make any sense.
Is the point; most things have an undesirable aspect that is disregarded by the consumer?
It's best to avoid analogy when the analogy isn't true.
surely you jest. are you unaware of the violence, death, and suffering created by the black markets from illegal drugs?
the comparison is very apt: keeping porn "in the dark" allows for a generally underadvantaged population like sex workers to be taken advantage of because there is not an abundance of legal, regulated institutions for them to be a part of. similarly, illegal drugs proliferate in dangerous circumstances because there is no other option.
The major studios are a small part of the problem, however, it's the non-U.S. and underground scene that generates most of the problematic content.
You can include references without linking.
How the Web Prevents Rape: All that Internet porn reduces sex crimes. Really: https://slate.com/culture/2006/10/proof-that-internet-porn-p...
In addition, the study finds that the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible.: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h...
These studies?
Columbia has legalized cannabis and is looking to legalize cocaine to undercut the criminal enterprises.
Porn is legal in many countries, especially in the USA and Germany, two big markets for creation and consumption. Yet, still a lot of women are raped. Your logic is just completely wrong.
Just to add another perspective, Scott Santens had an interesting reply[0] to a tweet AOC had about legalizing sex work
> Sex work is work, but as long as poverty exists it's impossible to tell who is doing it voluntarily and who is doing it because they feel they have no other choice in order to make a living. It's another reason unconditional basic income is so important.
[0]:https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1339053954144014338?...
But she was posting amateur porn on Reddit way before she became a porn star. This is going back to 2013-ish, she posted on r/cuckold and r/hotwife very detailed descriptions and photos of her first sexual encounter in her new open relationship with her husband at the time (or maybe it was fiancé?).
Like literally in real time.. she posted text "Waiting for him to arrive" along with pictures of herself ... all the way to the finish as it were.
This was the first encounter of many that she willingly posted. Along with verification photos.
A lot of this feels like having your cake and eating it too. You created this persona and you promoted it and shared with the world when it suited you and enjoyed the wealth and fame.
As with GDP, part of Mia's issue was that the content was distributed outside the terms she agreed to.
Rape by fraud is a form of rape in some states and many countries.
Her most known video was filmed for a very well known porn company that was definitely known to distribute in the United States and the content was specifically meant to be controversial. If she was somehow misinformed, there’s gotta be some agency on her part (without victim blaming, if some manipulation occurred of course).
Not really “way before”.
> This is going back to 2013-ish, she posted on r/cuckold and r/hotwife very detailed descriptions and photos of her first sexual encounter in her new open relationship with her husband at the time (or maybe it was fiancé?).
Wikipedia reports that occurred in 2014, the same year as her professional porn career started (and, if her account of only working in scenes for 3 months is true, the same year as essentially her entire professional porn career, which started that October and ended in January 2015, not counting 11 subsequent months as a camgirl.)
> A lot of this feels like having your cake and eating it too. You created this persona and you promoted it and shared with the world when it suited you and enjoyed the wealth and fame.
According to Khalifa she made $12K in porn @ $1000/scene, Bangbros claims $178K over two years; in either case not exactly notable wealth. And the fame included wider public death threats, being publicly disowned by her family, etc.
Really, it seems more like pursuing what you think is cake and discover fairly quickly is cow dung and regretting and fleeing from it, more than having your cake and eating it to.
If you think some people being exploited in an industry should poison the entire industry and outlaw it then careful.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democrat...
The cobalt used in all of our modern mobile devices is mined by children in dangerous situations.
The Chinese (well regarded in all labor matters I’m sure we will agree) are doubling down buying these mines: https://www.reuters.com/article/cmoc-congo-m-a-idINKBN28N0D9
I’d say it’s analogous to the NCAA. They do everything in their power to punish immoral institutions but there remains hordes of players that take steroids, haze others, sustain concussions, etc. Should the NCAA disband by the same logic you’re asking Mindgeek to disband by?
That's a rather controversial claim about the NCAA; a fairly common alternative view is that not only does the NCAA do little to identify and punish institutions which exploit beyond it's overt rules, which include a very large number of it's constituent institutions, including the biggest names, but the overt rules themselves are systematically exploitive.
You’re right though. We could fill up six pages of comments with all the corruption of the NCAA.
Quick search for argument seen before: https://mobile.twitter.com/DesireeLsk/status/133788772930513...
Seems that more of that stuff ends up on FB & twitter than on pornhub. So yeah: sadly this is very much just another tech company :(
All of these companies should work much harder to address this.
Deaths, slavery, kidnappings, permanent disability. Those kind of abuse is common in the three highest risk zones for human trafficking, ie mining, construction and fishing.
Sex and drugs has a common themes when it comes to making them illegal. If you want to forbid drugs that are harmful, you must first make an exception for drugs like alcohol and nicotine. If you want to make the sex industry illegal based on harm to workers you must make exceptions to industries that are worse.
The common response to human trafficking for non-sex related industries is to focus on regulation and enforcement of regulations. Sadly the crime rate is so high that last year, the police here in Sweden announced that they would stop investigating human trafficking in the construction industry. The reason was that such reports outnumber all other human trafficking to the point that they would have no resources to do any other investigation unless they dropped them. Unsurprising there are regularly news about slavery, passports being taken, fraud, threats of violence, and of course physical harm.
Aha!: https://imgur.com/a/j1Hhq#QhdMwoQ
It's about as SFW as this discussion is.
It's my understanding that the part of Mindgeek that rents colocation space, owns/leases/runs servers and buys wholesale scale Internet access in Canada, is the Cypriot corporation.
This isn't really a "new" thing in the internet porno business, people have been doing funny things with panamanian, cypriot, maltese, manx, channel islands, nauru corporations and such for 20+ years.
Your comment is spot-on, but technically the Channel Islands are two separate crown territories (Jersey, Bailiwick of Guernsey) with four sub-jurisdictions with its own rules on companies (Jersey, Guernsey proper, Sark, and Alderney), but there is some co-operation between the, uhm, governments (the best description I can use since the specific term differs between sub-jurisdictions).
In the 2000s many CD and DVD retailers setup shop there, as they could sell items without VAT.
I have a relatively scant understanding of the recent Dodd Frank legislation in the U.S. that has outlined how this could happen in the U.S. - fortunately it outlines that only non FDIC insured assets can be seized by banks.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2013/05/03/the-cypr...
You'd never see the US do the same because there's no need - a country that controls its own currency should always be able to pay its debts.
That only if it borrows in its own currency which may not work on small countries, big loans or weak currencies because the lenders want a safe currency(i.e eur, usd).
Delaware is used for many corporations because their legal framework is well understood, standard and unlikely to cause any questions.
Cyprus on the other hand is used for companies trying to do non-standard tax or legal affairs.
Canada doesn't have a favourable tax treaty with Panama (partly why the Panama Papers didn't impact Canadians much). Now, if Barbados or Bahamas leaked... oh boy!
Then the tech support case went on and they sent me the logs I requested... yeah lots of dns related entries for porn sites and etc.
I really don't know if they just provides services to other porn companies or what but it explained a lot. Even talking to them on the phone they were really careful about how the characterized the traffic. Accordingly I never asked them anything about it, just solved the issue(s) and moved on.
It looks very mundane when eyeballing the bare metal, like a few 44U cabinets full of supermicro, dell or custom whitebox servers.
Pretty much all of the big telcos, all of the networking equipment makers etc - are made out of porn money at the end of it all.
> In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That's about 4% of sites.
> From July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content.
Granted, that's number of sites and not content/traffic, but streaming has exploded in the past decade, so I doubt it's gone up.
They also specifically call out the "50%" claim, and say it's an outdated one from the early days of the web, from when it was more niche and had a more male-dominated culture.
Side note, the most interesting part of the article, and relevant here:
> So what’s the most popular porn site on the planet?
> The single most popular adult site in the world is LiveJasmin.com, a webcam site which gets around 32 million visitors a month, or almost 2.5% of all Internet users!
> You’re telling me a webcam site is more popular than PornHub?
But once again, ten-year-old data.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieruvolo/2011/09/07/how-much...
For a small ISP that's purely buying transit, once they establish a presence at a major IX point and can peer with some huge content sources, it'll drop their transit bill in half almost immediately.
Then you do have porno content coming from huge hosting companies/entities such as Choopa.
https://www.peeringdb.com/net/813
It's actually pretty rare to peer directly with a porn host, if I had to guess at it, I'd say most of the traffic is coming in via transits such as hurricane, cogent, telia, ntt, etc.
one note, ISP traffic isn't measured in disk space measurements like terabytes or petabytes, it's measured in present tense Mbps or Gbps.
https://www.webroot.com/us/en/resources/tips-articles/intern...
>Web filtering companies used to always release competing figures on the number of porn sites they blocked, but these numbers were almost certainly boosted to get sensationalist headlines and to seem competitive with other filtering companies that filtered "less" adult sites. For example, N2H2 claimed there were 260 millionpornsites (ed. correction: pages) --haha, one for every American citizen! :) Conservative groups are always coming up with porn figures that are crazy high, too, especially with regard to children's exposure to porn.
Ask your 18 year old son and he'll tell you the truth.
It's porn, it's not exactly illegal but from what I understand they were very careful about managing transactions. Always moving card processors, and they had to tell users the transaction was coming from different names simply because buyers didn't want Pornhub.com showing up on the credit statement.
This is something a pornstar elucidated for me on Eric Weinstein's podast[0] - note, he goes out of his way to keep the discussion "PG" so as to be listenable to as many people as possible. Payment procecessors are a de-facto regulator and skew conservative.
There are several Pornhub employees, reading HN, answering questions same happens on Reddit, they are pretty transparent actually.
I don't understand why we need those articles making feel like we are in science fiction. If you want really secret businesses look into dating apps or Google/Facebook ads
Edit: and just to add, imagine how hard is it to run pornhub. Even though watching porn is one of the most common leisure in the world. Nobody want to work with them, nobody want to rent them servers, nobody want to sell them their ads, nobody want to be their payment processor ,... because porn is taboo. So yeah they probably have to find tricky ways to do things. At the end of the day they only make 500m of revenu, which is nothing, Tinder only is making 3-4 times that.
I don't know TC for Mindgeek but 60k is not even close to the "typical" Montreal salary
That said all the numbers I’m finding online are more in in 80-100k Canadian dollars range for salary for the average, so 60k is definitely extremly low for TC.
I agree though that 60k isn't typical, that would be close to the starting salary. I'm still new though, so couldn't say what's typical, but I think 80k would be a pretty good bet.
Top of band for Senior at Shopify is low 200s (varies a bit depending on USD exchange rates) without stock appreciation and it's not particularly competitive
Engineers are about 80-140k$CA at MG as far as I know.
PornHub purging all the content they did is remarkable, and certain kinds of content on the site are all but gone. They've likely lost a lot of viewership that way.
This stands out as the single worst thing I've ever seen on their site: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/this-is-why-ill-...
Summary: Author whines about customer support experiences and makes an ass of themselves, then realizes that all their griping wasn't even necessary because if they had performed some basic troubleshooting they would have realized the problem was elsewhere all along.
As for Pornhubs viewership, I don't think it will go down much. I imagine a large part of their audience just goes to the site and clicks on what looks good to them, maybe filtering by category or searching, but still, they see what's there and they click.
Also in a roundabout way, since now everything on the site is either from their parent company, a partner company, or someone in their model program they are in control of all revenue and are more probably more likely to see people pay for content from their model program members, which they get a cut of.
As for Ars, they used to have a journo that would publish 10+ page reviews of the latest Mac OS release, and the dude had an extensive knowledge of Apple and Apple products. In a past life I was a journo for one of their competitors for a few years and my EIC was always pointing to Ars as our rival and competitor to take inspiration from. When our publication went downhill I turned to Ars to get the reporting that I wanted, and it feels like that well dried up a few years ago.
In-depth technical articles replaced with inspiration porn and geek fan service. They went from being a slightly-less-nerdy Anandtech to a slightly geekier BuzzFeed or TechDirt
Fuck Conde Nast!
John Siracusa. He left Ars ~5 years ago, I think. Even after I switched away from OS X, I would still read his reviews.
The absurdity of it is that there was a small minority of animated and computer generated (non-voice acted) nude "dance" videos featuring 3D models. Those were also removed, but likely unintentionally. You can't 'verify' stock 3D models, created from beginning to end by a single person.
They might have problems with huge monopolists like VISA. But with any competitive business, as long as they don't break the law, they'll just pay higher premiums.
“No entity exemplifies this more than MindGeek, which with very little scrutiny or accountability, has quietly become the dominant porn company. The Montreal-based business is the owner of several of the sector’s most visited sites including Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn. At least according to public financial records, MindGeek towers over the pornography industry in Europe and America.
Despite this, basic facts about the company are largely unknown. That includes its main owner—a businessman called Bernard Bergemar, whose name is almost completely invisible on the Internet but who has a claim to the title of the world’s most successful porn tycoon. Until this Financial Times investigation, his identity was secret, known only to a small circle of MindGeek executives and their advisers.”
"Pleased to meet you, I'm Bergemar, frequently known as the Lord of Porn, but you may also know me as the..."
edit - petabytes
That being said, this was the only introduction that elicited a chuckle out of me.
Source: worked in porn.
Everyone in adult uses shell companies. The vast majority of them don't tell their neighbors and the local PTA what they do, so they are pretty secretive. I knew some execs whose wives didn't even know what they did.
source: worked in adult for decades.
Should I assume in an IT-related role? If so, anything you can share (without naming names) about what's different or special, from a technical standpoint, compared to a "normal" company?
My experience was the performers tended to be pretty casual about mentioning it socially. Maybe not the first thing they bring up, but it would come around eventually. They also tended to be sort of proud of it.
The crew people tended to be a little more low key about it, but mostly because they did legit film crew work as well and worried it might hurt them if higher ups knew. And the union thing applied to some. Couldn't do non-union work officially.
I only ever met low-end producers. They didn't care who knew what they did, at all. My social circles didn't include the big time porn producers (this was back in the day when DVDs were still sort of viable).
Not something i would like to have on my business card.
At the same time he ran Manwin, he also owned several file hosting websites (some of which I wrote code for) he would directly promote on piracy & porn forums under alias. Most of these were filled with child abuse and his policy was to remove the links but not the files when receiving takedown notices (as he paid out through an affiliate system for promoting these links). He cashed out on most of these when people started digging, but kept hold of some of the torrent trackers he ran.
About time people like this are revealed for who they really are. The piracy, not so bad. Turning a blind eye to child abuse, pretty bad.
no employee can confirm nor deny this for legal reasons or just lack of access to that part of the system/code.
They don't seem to have anything up atm, maybe they stopped posting on indeed.
Some specific questions:
* When engineers and QE are doing their regular dev+testing work all day long, do they use actual videos from the site, or are there "tame" videos used for dev+test so as to not be so distracting?
* Similar to above, how much of the day (like, how many hours) would a regular developer or tester be looking at the content? Do people become totally desensitized to it? Like, I know people say "it's just a regular job", but I have a hard time believing people aren't aroused by it, at least part of the time.
It was, just a tech company doing tech things.
> or are there "tame" videos used for dev+test so as to not be so distracting?
We had some public domain videos playing on a loop for internal testing environments, or some "screensaver" type videos.
> Do people become totally desensitized to it?
Yes, and relatively quickly too. The regular content was more looked at as a curiosity. "You found someone doing _what_?" "Let me see."
Real videos. People not wanting to work directly in contact with pornography is a huge problem to recruitment.
> * Similar to above, how much of the day (like, how many hours) would a regular developer or tester be looking at the content? Do people become totally desensitized to it? Like, I know people say "it's just a regular job", but I have a hard time believing people aren't aroused by it, at least part of the time.
Depends what you do, a regular developer probably doesn't look at a lot of porn except when testing their stuff in a near-prod setting. Some people watch porn all day (eg video editors) and there's a high turnover rate there.
Oh, and the work environment was oddly corporate.
Now I am picturing an open office plan with a porn set one one end of it. Surely the studios are separated from the software departments?
What is the demographic? Are there a lot of women, gender minorities, etc.? Are things like harassment complaints taken seriously? In short, is it a "locker room" culture or more similar to what you find elsewhere at web agencies in MTL?
Agencies in general are more populated with women,gender minorities for a variety of reasons.
Porn doesn't hang on the walls. And you are more likely to find harassment outside of a business like this because everyone would try harder to make the female welcome because of the sigma.
Second question: Do you think there's anything unique about the culture in Montreal (as compared to the rest of Canada) that makes it a good place to have an office of people working on porno related content?
It covers a little bit of the MindGeek story but primarily how pornhub rebuilt the industry.
[0]: http://www.jonronson.com/butterfly.html
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Days-of-August-audiobook/dp/...
I know lots of Patreon creators too get there stuff pirated via pornhub.