Pornhub completely disrupted the adult entertainment industry, and its influence on culture and our collective experiences of sexual expression online is undeniable.
But Pornhub, which bills itself as the world’s leading free porn site, is now attempting to adapt to the times itself. It’s facing a changing landscape of how people make and consume adult content, a reputation marred by accusations of child sexual abuse and pressure to abide by potentially invasive age verification laws.
Like many other tech companies, Pornhub was started by a handful of dudes with a dream of making tons of money — and they would do it by offering people what they wanted: free pornography.
The site was founded in 2007 by Concordia students Ouissam Youssef and Stephane Manos, and their competitive foosball buddy Matt Keezer. They spent the next several years treating it like the tech startup it was.
By the mid-2000s, Pornhub had become one of the most popular sites on the internet.
In an era of free everything online, Pornhub flourished by allowing anyone with an internet connection to upload pornographic videos to the site, regardless of whether they owned or appeared in them. In 2010, the site was purchased by a larger company that owned several other porn sites. It would eventually become known as MindGeek, based in Montreal.
Big-box porn in a mom-and-pop world
Pornhub’s grip on the online porn industry was like a big-box corporation coming into a mom-and-pop town. Independent porn websites that relied on paying customers faced an industry-wide reckoning.
Suddenly, their content could be stolen and reuploaded to a free “tube” site like Pornhub — tube being short for YouTube, which they were modelled after — and hundreds of thousands of people could watch it without ever having to pull out a credit card.
“That was the same year that you remember the mortgage crisis and the subprime crisis and the world economy is collapsing,” said Colin Rowntree, an indie pornographer who was running his own online adult business at the time.
“And right in the middle of that was the tubes giving away free stuff when, you know, Joe Blow had no money and his mortgage was due, but he still wanted to watch some porn. It was a perfect storm.”
Tube sites “literally decimated the adult industry,” he said.
Pornhub built its brand on a Wild West of free content, and in the process, trained people to never expect to pay for porn. Add to this the pervasive stigma against sex workers, and what resulted was a widespread entitlement to the labour of pornographers.
But access to free porn also expanded sexual horizons and brought pornography more into the mainstream. People no longer had to drive to a physical porn shop to rent a VHS tape. It was all online.
With free access to porn…
Read More: Delete history: Pornhub changed the world, but its empire faces a reckoning
