We Don’t Know Enough About the Pornhub Acquisition

It’s always weird to go viral, but it’s especially bizarre to do so for a thread about Pornhub. 

On March 20th, I tweeted out: “I’m like 99% sure Pornhub’s acquisition is a scam.” My thread went supernova hot with over a million views. Instantly I was inundated with potential sources who claimed to have the inside scoop about the deal and DMs calling me an idiot. I've had a lot of conversations with all of the above in the weeks since. 

Although I don't have a definitive explanation of this weird deal, I decided to share my theories and the context I've learned here. I’ll also explain why the purchase of Pornhub’s parent company should be attracting more media attention and analysis: 

1. This transaction raises a ton of questions and is deeply, deeply weird
2. There are three possible financing scenarios for this buyout, all of which are troubling
3. Given Pornhub’s reach, regulators should be paying closer attention

It is tempting to ignore this transaction because the business is some pervy corner of the internet. But I would argue that Pornhub (and by proxy its parent company MindGeek) is one of the most important websites in the world. Pornhub had over 2B visits last year and 100M+ daily active users. Visitor’s average time on site is 9 minutes and 54 seconds. Meaning that in 2022, a grand total of ~38,026.51 years of time was spent at this URL. 

Anything that aggregates this much attention matters. It will spawn content ecosystems devoted to monetizing the audience in whatever way is most profitable. An AI recommendation algorithm will tailor the experience for each user, trapping them in webs of personalized content. Money, power, influence, all of it flows downhill from this amount of eyeballs. And when there is this much influence, served across hundreds of millions of users, we often see bad actors and harmful repercussions. . 

Because of the adult nature of Pornhub, the consequences from this aggregation are extreme. Pornhub monetized videos of women being raped. The site was a hotbed of human trafficking. It hosted child pornography. It’s true that any website that allows users to share content—Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Dropbox, literally anything with a button that says “upload”—have to deal with users sharing this type of content. But MindGeek seems to be particularly susceptible to these issues.

Whoever owns this website will not only have a direct influence over the state of sex trafficking globally but will also hold the emails, credit card numbers, and most private browsing habits of tens of millions of people. So, this deal matters beyond mere intellectual curiosity.