Before the emergence of "tube sites," websites where users upload often-pirated porn for others to stream, viewers usually bought DVDs or subscriptions to watch their favorite content. Then, in 2005, several PayPal employees founded YouTube, allowing non-tech experts to easily upload and share videos.
It didn't take long for the adult industry to start using the same technology. Two years later, founders of the porn studio Brazzers started Pornhub, and thus began a shift in how people consume — and create — porn. Fifteen years later, Pornhub remains the king of the tubes. It was the eighth most trafficked website in the world in December 2021 according to Semrush, sandwiched between Reddit at #7 and Walmart at #9 — and the only adult site in the top 15, with over a billion visits that month alone.
Pornhub no doubt irrevocably changed the industry by making porn viewing and creation more accessible — yet maintains a complicated relationship with performers and producers, according to experts.
History of Pornhub
Pornhub, which didn't respond to multiple requests for comment, wasn't the first tube site. RedTube and YouPorn both preceded it in 2006, as New York Magazine reported in a 2011 deep dive into Pornhub and the proliferation of free porn. Nonetheless, these places fundamentally changed the industry because, for the first time, viewers were able to watch free porn on a massive scale.
Before tubes, studios dominated porn creation; they produced and distributed porn on their own websites, or through DVDs. Tubes then received ire from these performers and producers in studios because they pirated content and flouted copyright, said Mike Stabile, representative for the Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry lobby group. There was pirating before tubes, but it exploded with these sites.
Another invention that ushered in this new era was the iPhone, also first-released in 2007. Now, not only did people have screens that fit in their hand — perfect for doing other activities with the free hand — but they also had cameras, too (though some pre-iPhone cellphones had cameras as well).
If Pornhub wasn't the first tube, why is it the household name it is today?
It could be because of the savvy dealings of the people behind the scenes, said Maggie MacDonald, a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto studying porn platforms.
While other studios decried the existence of tubes, founders of the studio Brazzers created Pornhub themselves. One founder even wrote that content pirates "will not steal it and get away with it" in an online forum — after Pornhub already launched, condemning the exact move he made, New York Magazine reported.
Three years later, in 2010, businessman Fabian Thylmann purchased Pornhub as part of the corporate conglomerate Manwin; the name later changed to MindGeek. Manwin/MindGeek went on to scoop up many tubes (including RedTube and YouPorn, in addition to Pornhub) and studios (including Digital Playground, Reality Kings, and Sean Cody, among others).
A reason behind these acquisitions, Stabile explained, was that studios were suffering financially (due to piracy and copyright issues). MindGeek knew that they had a massive amount of traffic from free content, and that a percentage of those viewers would ultimately buy subscriptions to watch what wasn't uploaded to the tubes. Pornhub became a traffic partner for studios, many also owned by MindGeek.
"They're often seen as a company that really destroyed the studio system," said Stabile of MindGeek. "At the same time, they are also the largest studio there is."
MindGeek is such a big conglomerate that some call it a monopoly. This leaves performers with limited options. As performer Tasha Reign told ABC in 2014, "I kind of have to shoot for them...because they own almost everything." Even independent producers may have to create content in tandem with what's popular on Pornhub, because that's what sells, said MacDonald.
Neither Stabile nor MacDonald agreed with that labeling, though, as Pornhub and its parent company do have competitors (such as OnlyFans). MacDonald, however, called it an oligopoly: a market with few dominant players.
Cashing in (or not) in the creator boom
In recent years, the ability to monetize your own content as an independent creator — or your own time as a "gig economy" worker — has led to a boom in both SFW and NSFW markets. One of the biggest sites in the latter is OnlyFans. Pornhub "laid the groundwork for OnlyFans," said Stabile, "with products like Modelhub, which allows individual models to sell content and sell subscriptions."
"Now with Pornhub, everyone can create content," said performer Valentina Bellucci, who's uploaded content to the site for around two years. "I see a lot of independent models who are extremely successful."
Not everyone sees extreme success on the tube, though. Bellucci herself sees Pornhub as more of a promotional tool than a moneymaker. With the ability to upload content so accessible, there's a lot of competition from other models.
"For the average sex worker, no, [Pornhub's] not the ideal," said performer Brie Nightwood. Nightwood's also the co-founder of platform Unlocked XX, which she calls more sex worker-friendly than OnlyFans due to fewer restrictions on content (whereas OnlyFans banned certain kink and fetish terms).
Bellucci said she makes more money from videos on XVideos, another tube site, but said she's not going to stop uploading on Pornhub anytime soon because of the exposure.
Nightwood also said some models are on Pornhub for exposure rather than money. She herself has never uploaded to Pornhub in her five years in the industry, citing child abuse sex material (CSAM) on the platform. In 2020, MindGeek had around 13,000 reports of illegal material like CSAM according to a report by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), an anti-porn lobbying group. Facebook, by contrast, had over 20 million reports.
In late 2020, the New York Times published an opinion piece about CSAM on Pornhub. Many people Nightwood knew fled the platform. "I definitely didn't want to join it at that point," she said, but she did acknowledge that the platform took down illegal content and made attempts to be safer. After the Times published the piece, Pornhub made a sweeping ban of non-verified content and purged millions of videos as a result.
Still, she wouldn't join now. "The money is so much better monetizing [videos] via OnlyFans," she said.
Pornhub's impact on content
Pornhub not only changed how people entered and worked within the industry, but it also changed the content itself.
MacDonald pointed to the structure of oligopolies, which aren't unique to porn. Take the music industry for example. "It doesn't matter if Spotify isn't technically a monopoly if their subscription service model becomes what…the user base wants to keep seeing," said MacDonald. "And so the same is true with porn."
There's a convention to the type of video that succeeds on Pornhub: a few minutes long, say five to seven minutes, with the inclusion of several sexual acts. Anyone who's browsed the site can tell the look and feel of a popular Pornhub upload as well, with well-lit shots and crisp audio.
"All of those things are absolutely under the influence of the big porn sites," said MacDonald. "[Creators] do have to adhere to the stylistic standards that Pornhub is setting in the industry." Performers who want to do more avant garde scenes may find that the money doesn't follow because it doesn't follow Pornhub convention.
While the ability to create porn has become more streamlined thanks to Pornhub and OnlyFans, there's still stigma in the profession — as evidenced, partly, by the stamping out of sexual content by legislation, tech companies, and credit card companies. Stabile believes Pornhub normalized conversations about porn and sexuality, but MacDonald thinks the site only normalized conversations about the business of porn. People talk about Pornhub in the sanitized way they talk about tech giants like Amazon and Facebook, she explained.
Regardless, Pornhub has driven the conversation the last 15 years. No one can speak to the next 15, but it's likely the site's not going anywhere.
"I don't know what they have next up their sleeve," Stabile said, "but they're well capitalized enough and creative enough that I would never discount them."
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