How the Porn Industry Changed In 2020
Pornhub got burned by the fact that it turned out to be full of sex abuse videos, rape of children, pornography posted on the Internet for revenge, filming with a hidden camera, and so on.
2020 has changed the porn industry too. The most popular porn site in the world, Pornhub, has faced tough opposition from activists, journalists, and social media users. Against this background, a competitor, Onlyfans, has grown up, winning the sympathy of Generation Z and attracting big stars of the genre.
Pornhub problems
Pornhub is the most popular porn site in the world, with an average of about three billion visitors every month. That’s more than Netflix, Yahoo, or Amazon. In recent years, Pornhub has tried to stop pornography from being embarrassing, such as publishing user preference statistics and doing charity work. And with the onset of the new coronavirus pandemic, it opened free premium access to everyone.
However, the service has another, unsightly side ‒ it is full of videos that capture real cases of violence. In 2020, this side came to light and hit hard on the # 1 porn site business in the world.
For “girls under 18” or “14yo”, the site could find hundreds of thousands of abused videos. For example, one woman found 58 videos on Pornhub of her 15-year-old daughter after she disappeared without a trace. Also on the porn site posted abusing porn of a 14-year-old California resident. The authorities were not informed about this by the service, but by the girl’s classmate, who recognized her in the video. The perpetrators were punished, while Pornhub was not prosecuted for distributing such videos and making money on them.
All of this was covered in a special article in The New York Times Magazine, after which Pornhub deleted all videos on its site that were uploaded by unverified users or members of its modeling program. Out of the 13.5 million videos, 2.9 million are left.
“As part of our policy to ban unverified authors, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or modelers,” saif Pornhub in a post. The site said the videos will be removed pending review, which will begin in the new year. Since the platform launched in 2007, anyone has been able to create an account and upload any video.
The changes on the platform began just after the devastating article in the New York Times, which said that the site administration did not check the content of sufficient quality, which led to the appearance on the site of a large amount of illegal porn, including those with persons under the age of 18.
Pornhub will also prohibit downloading videos from the site ‒ this option was criticized because videos uploaded to the service without the consent of the filmmakers continued to be distributed after being removed from the site.
Besides, Pornhub decided to use CSAI Match and PhotoDNA technologies to combat the proliferation of child sexual abuse videos, as well as the Content Safety API to search for illegal recordings.
As Motherboard notes, Pornhub has taken steps that have long been insisted on by activists and people, videos of which were uploaded to the site without their consent.
Payment systems Mastercard and Visa have banned the use of their cards on Pornhub. The Mastercard told the newspaper that it had confirmed a “violation of the standards” of the payment system prohibiting illegal content and stopped operations using its cards. Visa instructed “financial institutions serving MindGeek to suspend processing payments through the Visa network” pending investigation.
Another Issue
And that wasn’t the end of Pornhub’s problems. By the end of 2020, a petition to shut down Pornhub in the United States had amassed more than two million signatures. It is addressed to the US Department of Justice, the FBI, and 13 other structures and politicians.
The Financial Times also named the real owner of Pornhub. Before that, it was mentioned in Google only three times. The largest co-owner and beneficiary of the Luxembourg-registered company MindGeek, which owns the porn sites Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, turned out to be businessman Bernard Bergemar.
Until recently, Bergemar’s personality was known only to a narrow circle of top managers at MindGeek.
Strong Rival
Opposed to Pornhub in 2020 is Onlyfans, which in 2020 has turned into a porn shooting platform. Onlyfans gradually moved on to big porn stars who, due to the suspension of filming, were locked at home. Onlyfans is not censored and has a dedicated fanbase. People pay donations directly to the content of the author for access to his videos.
Interestingly, none of the creators has ever called the service a place to post nude photos. But there was a coronavirus, then a financial crisis ‒ people stopped going to strip clubs, porn studios stopped working, actresses began to film themselves at home.
Gen Z people love Onlyfans because they can support content creators directly with map transfers. However, what is known about the origin of the service (that little) raises questions. The creators hide information about themselves, control the media writing about the sex industry, and never give interviews. At the head ‒ Leonid Radvinsky, nicknamed “Leo”, a billionaire originally from Odessa. He is the owner of this service and also one of the contributors to MyFreeCams and SuicideGirls. The media wrote about Radvinsky’s secrecy, that even in the industry few people had heard of him, and that complaints were received from his former colleagues and employees of his services as an employer.
