PornHub has a new owner
A Montreal company has a new management team. We tell you why it's important.
Did you know that the most popular porn site in the world is owned by a Canadian company headquartered in Montreal? Until recently, PornHub was owned by MindGeek, also a Canadian firm, but MindGeek was bought by an investment company Ethical Capital Partners. This is the company's first deal andthe conditions of the deal were not disclosed. The new management team will be pursuing a new policy, and here are the reasons.
In December 2020, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published stories of young survivors of sexual abuse and videos of them ended up on Pornhub. The article called on the Canadian site to make its publication policy strict and led to a series of lawsuits.
The company has denied allegations of wrongdoing, but MindGeek is now involved in several lawsuits. The firm is alleged to have made money from child sexual abuse material. Since December 2020, the platform has removed all unconfirmed content and changed its authorship policy: when uploading videos to the site, the author of the publication must confirm the identity of everyone shown.
When the scandal appeared, Visa and Mastercard payment systems stopped their relationship with the website, the company began looking for a buyer, and the Canadian Parliament announced hearings on the case in the House of Commons. They resulted in several recommendations, one of which mandates that the platform require proof of 18 years of age for all participants in the video.
"The adult entertainment industry will always be the subject of significant legal and regulatory scrutiny," says Derek Ogden, one of the partners at Ethical Capital Partners.
Pornhub's new owner plans to protect sex workers and share the platform's moderation tools. Ethical Capital Partners Vice President of Compliance Solomon Friedman said there is tremendous social and financial value in sharing how MindGeek posts and moderates content about "sex-positive expression between consenting adults."
On average, in 2021 it took Pornhub slightly less time to remove reported child sex abuse material (CSAM) than other platforms, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Pornhub responded to three notifications of CSAM from NCMEC in less than five hours on average, compared to the total average from all websites, which was slightly more than 24 hours.
According to Similarweb, that calculate website traffic, Pornhub was the 12th most visited website in the world last year.
