![]() The dark side of Pornhub is that its anything-goes buffet-of-kink format allowed it to become a haven for videos that depicted trafficking victims, child sexual abuse, and rape. As a de facto global mall of porn, Pornhub exerts a capitalistic energy that filters down, in an empowering way, to the workers who attach themselves to it. We meet a few of the sex workers who market videos and interactive services on Pornhub, like Gwen Adora, who describes the one-woman-band aspect of her business, or Siri Dahl, a porn performer who talks about how her earnings shot up when she began to use the site. The real Pornhub revolution was that every viewer of pornography would now be viewed as a consumer. The site is run a lot like those other Internet behemoths - it’s all about data, media marketing through search-engine optimization, and mining the tastes of users. ![]() It has marketed itself with a billboard in Times Square, and much of its profit comes from advertising (it has 3 billion ad impressions a day). ![]() The Pornhub site gets 3.5 billion visits a month, more than Netflix, Yahoo, or Amazon. The company’s steel-and-glass offices, replete with managers in cubicles and an HR department, were comparable to those of any other tech company. Pornhub is a subsidiary of MindGeek, a company privately owned in Luxembourg but based in Montreal, and as “Money Shot” captures it was run like a tech corporation. In the ’80s, bolstered by home video, it grew as a business and became even more mainstream, symbolized by the increased media prominence of something like the AVN Awards.īut it was in the Internet age that porn, even as it was becoming more kinky and fetishistic and extreme, evolved into a corporate entity. In the ’70s, porn had become a highly profitable business, controlled largely by the Mob. But though “Money Shot” doesn’t look too far into the sordid details, by focusing on how the site actually operated, it captures the story behind the story: how the spirit of porn, as a money-making enterprise, underwent a profound change. Along with profusion came variety: seemingly every category of kink and taboo, all just a click away.ĭid a site like Pornhub represent the normalization of extreme porn? I’d argue that it did. Pornhub featured literally millions of videos, some linked for pay to the sites of sex workers, but the vast majority posted anonymously, and for free. Porn was already thriving on the Internet, but never before had there been this kind of vast, seemingly endless supermarket of explicit material. The film opens with a strictly-business portrait of how Pornhub, about 15 years ago, became a game-changer in the world of online adult video. But as “Money Shot” persuasively argues, pornography may be a hot-button topic, but the closer you look at it the more you realize that nothing about it is simple. You’d think there would not be two sides to that issue. “Money Shot,” directed by Suzanne Hillinger and produced by Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, does touch on key aspects of how porn today is manufactured and consumed - notably how technology has helped to blur, if not obliterate, the distinction between the porn professional and the elevated “amateur.” But the movie explores this mostly in the service of telling the story of how Pornhub, the largest porn site in the world, became a lightning rod of controversy when it was accused of being a place that abetted sex trafficking and the sexual abuse of children. Someone should really make that documentary it’s a story that, like so much else about pornography, is totally out there yet hidden in the shadows. “ Money Shot: The Pornhub Story,” a documentary that drops March 15 on Netflix, is not a movie about the cultural prominence or significance of porn in our time. That’s when porn-on-the-computer innovation became the all-porn-all-the-time revolution. Then, in the age of Pornhub, it exploded on the Internet. ![]() Then it moved to video cassettes and DVD. Then it was shown in back rooms on 8mm one-reelers. Pornography, as a visual medium, has long followed the lead of technology. ![]()
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