pornhub is one of Mindgeek's properties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek I've never understood their business model - they seem to host endless illegally uploaded porn yet more and more porn seems to be being created. Not clear where the money is made ultimately. Mindgeek dominate the online porn world which gets huge traffic.
https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2018-year-in-review
Tumblr was historically another repository of illegal uploads of other people's adult materials.
I thought Slate or someone did a story on this - by making porn so easily available they make the market for performers low, they can lowball the creatives who appear on camera/make the videos, and also make money on the advertising on the illegally uploaded porn.
If you're interested, you should find Jon Ronson's podcast on the topic. It's a finite series of shows called "The Butterfly Effect", and it covers what happened to the porn industry as it was overrun by Mindgeek. If I remember correctly, the gist is that the consolidation of the industry drove down rates for production and pushed a lot of participants into independent projects like custom videos.
Yes the economics of this industry are really puzzling to an outsider. As someone who has tried running ads on these properties it’s hard for me to imagine how anyone is making money in this business. And yet...
My guess is the sheer volume of traffic they get makes it appealing for certain advertisers. Throw in the upselling to premium features and that they don't have to pay much if anything for the actual content, and there's probably some pretty good money to be made.
Exactly. Porn has always led some form of tech innovation.
PornHub now offers purchasable videos now competing with manyvids who owned the space before.
There is also a premium subscription ala Twitch with monthly recurring. Live, a chaturbate competitor, with tokes and everything.
Really they are a huge industry powerhouse with a large marketing and PR department. They are also pretty good with tech. It reminds me of how Netflix or Facebook stumbled into being a top tier tech company just due to business needs.
Over a decade ago, I recall the studios that produce feature films for DVD or other high quality productions complaining that MindGeek (they had a different name back then) were either turning a blind eye to or very slow to react to DMCA notifications submitted by these studios. Over time, MG were able to buy out many of their former competitors so now they do own the copyright for a lot of the content uploaded to tube sites.
