To the people who want to pretend like pornhub is just another tech company, or who think it's cute that they might hold business meetings in front of pornography scenes:
I would just ask you to read some of the stories of the women who are abused by this industry. They're not uncommon, and they're not anything like the "abuse" somebody might describe in a manual labor job. Some of these stories sound like these women are essentially being raped, over and over, for profit, and then their abuse is being viewed by millions of people on the internet every day.
It's not cute, and there is a reason why the founder of this company would want to hide his name. He is trafficking in what is often times videos of the worst moments of some women's lives.
Read the stories that Mia Khalifa has put out, or Stoya, or girlsdoporn, or "exploited college girls", or watch the documentary "hot girls wanted". This stuff is horrible, and "mindgeek" appears to have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the toll that their exploitation of these women takes on them.
But how is that different from any other illegal business? It is the same thing with drugs? people who smoke cannabis are aware of people in Colombia being killed for them?
Making porn legal and accepted is the way to go to solve those problems. Not making it forbidden. The more you will try to make it illegal or to hide it the more harm you will do to those girls.
I'm not sure pornhub is encouraging people to upload rape videos, child porn on their platform, and actually it is pretty rare to see that kind of content on pornhub. Contrary to telegram, periscope, vk, and small porn websites
Jesus christ. It's "not normal"? What kind of absolutely detached statement is this?
Porn is legal in many countries, especially in the USA and Germany, two big markets for creation and consumption. Yet, still a lot of women are raped. Your logic is just completely wrong.
Just to add another perspective, Scott Santens had an interesting reply[0] to a tweet AOC had about legalizing sex work
> Sex work is work, but as long as poverty exists it's impossible to tell who is doing it voluntarily and who is doing it because they feel they have no other choice in order to make a living. It's another reason unconditional basic income is so important.
Are you aware that smoking cannabis is absolutely nothing like rape? and moreover is already legal in many U.S. states where cannabis can be grown and sold legally???
Also, Porn is already legal.* And it is already accepted by large portions of the population.
Making porn more acceptable doesn't end the rape problem.
>Are you aware that smoking cannabis is absolutely nothing like rape?
You severely missed the point. The comparison was between the relatively lack of outcry over cannabis smokers who presumably enable atrocities carried out by drug cartels in Colombia and elsewhere.
> It's best to avoid analogy when the analogy isn't true.
surely you jest. are you unaware of the violence, death, and suffering created by the black markets from illegal drugs?
the comparison is very apt: keeping porn "in the dark" allows for a generally underadvantaged population like sex workers to be taken advantage of because there is not an abundance of legal, regulated institutions for them to be a part of. similarly, illegal drugs proliferate in dangerous circumstances because there is no other option.
No, did not miss the point because you didn't make one.
Cannabis wasn't grown in Colombia until very recently; cocaine has always been it's primary drug export, and unlike cannabis, cocaine has not been legal in the U.S. (or most of the West) during the lifetime of anyone alive today.
If you had said cocaine from the beginning I might have agreed with your sentiment if not the specific details, because porn has enabled sex trafficking and CP and other heinous crimes.
But you clearly meant cannabis, not cocaine, and so your statement doesn't make any sense.
Where are you getting that women getting raped or abused is unique to only the porn industry? Is there any hard data, or is this just some bs that people assume happens in porn.
I don't claim that rape is unique to the porn industry; only that porn makes it worse. (Porn can be addictive, so supply increases demand increases supply. This has been documented with respect to CP. As those studies require library access, I will leave it to the reader to find someone with academic library access to read those articles.)
The major studios are a small part of the problem, however, it's the non-U.S. and underground scene that generates most of the problematic content.
First of all, it’s not just women appearing in pornography.
Some people believe that pornography is inherently harmful; that viewing it degrades the viewer and psychologically harms them. Making pornography “acceptable” would be accepting this harm, inflicted on countless millions of people, in order to protect the relatively tiny amount of people who perform in it.
You're not really addressing their point. Some people believe that drugs are "inherently harmful", but an outright ban or "war on drugs" made the problem worse. It pushed drugs to the unregulated black market.
The same would happen if you were to ban porn. Demand would still be there, people would just be forced to go onto the unregulated black market to satisfy their demands. Meaning it would make the situation much worse.
If porn were to remain legal than the government can resolve these issues by proposing regulation to mitigate the abuses.
Again, his point that making porn more "acceptable" means that people and our government will start having open conversations about it. This means making clear rules that both acknowledge the right of these sites to exist while also ensuring actors are treated fairly.
Sticking your head in the sand like we have been doing has helped no one.
But she was posting amateur porn on Reddit way before she became a porn star. This is going back to 2013-ish, she posted on r/cuckold and r/hotwife very detailed descriptions and photos of her first sexual encounter in her new open relationship with her husband at the time (or maybe it was fiancé?).
Like literally in real time.. she posted text "Waiting for him to arrive" along with pictures of herself ... all the way to the finish as it were.
This was the first encounter of many that she willingly posted. Along with verification photos.
A lot of this feels like having your cake and eating it too. You created this persona and you promoted it and shared with the world when it suited you and enjoyed the wealth and fame.
> But she was posting amateur porn on Reddit way before she became a porn star.
Not really “way before”.
> This is going back to 2013-ish, she posted on r/cuckold and r/hotwife very detailed descriptions and photos of her first sexual encounter in her new open relationship with her husband at the time (or maybe it was fiancé?).
Wikipedia reports that occurred in 2014, the same year as her professional porn career started (and, if her account of only working in scenes for 3 months is true, the same year as essentially her entire professional porn career, which started that October and ended in January 2015, not counting 11 subsequent months as a camgirl.)
> A lot of this feels like having your cake and eating it too. You created this persona and you promoted it and shared with the world when it suited you and enjoyed the wealth and fame.
According to Khalifa she made $12K in porn @ $1000/scene, Bangbros claims $178K over two years; in either case not exactly notable wealth. And the fame included wider public death threats, being publicly disowned by her family, etc.
Really, it seems more like pursuing what you think is cake and discover fairly quickly is cow dung and regretting and fleeing from it, more than having your cake and eating it to.
True, but based on reporting the one common issue for all of the victims was that they agreed to make private videos for the private viewing of wealthy one-off clients in a far-away country and were not aware that the videos would be made available to the general public in their home country.
Rape by fraud is a form of rape in some states and many countries.
I am sorry you will have spell it out for me because I still don’t understand; what were the distribution terms she wanted? And how would those terms have resulted in different outcomes?
Yeah, I understand the GDP complaints; but Mia Khalifa seems to be the odd choice here.
Her most known video was filmed for a very well known porn company that was definitely known to distribute in the United States and the content was specifically meant to be controversial. If she was somehow misinformed, there’s gotta be some agency on her part (without victim blaming, if some manipulation occurred of course).
Even if you completely ignore the rape and abuse, the front page routinely features some pretty brutal stuff. I'm not sure it's the sort of stuff that should be normalised.
Consent is consent. Don't tell people what they can and can't enjoy.
I know it's counterintuitive, but being on the receiving end of consensual "abuse"/disrespect etc in a sexual context is something loads of people are actually into. It's not just in porn.
Uninformed consent is not consent. You should take a workshop.
>but being on the receiving end of consensual "abuse"/disrespect etc in a sexual context is something loads of people are actually into.
There is a difference between being "in" to fetishes, or being "in" to the trust play surrounding something like rape fantasy.
But that's not what is happening in these videos. These people are acting like they're "in" to these things when they're not, but still having to experience the act involved. It's not simulated.
Tom Cruise isn't really getting shot in Mission Impossible. In many of the videos on pornhub, the women really are being coerced into performing sexual acts that they don't want to.
And that isn't even the point I'm making. In some (many) cases, these women are being literally raped, and then pornhub, and their employees, are profiting off of people enjoying seeing them be abused. Read some of the accounts from "girls do porn", or like I said above, watch the "hot girls wanted" docu.
>But that's not what is happening in these videos. These people are acting like they're "in" to these things when they're not, but still having to experience the act involved. It's not simulated.
There are different levels of simulation, though. It may not in fact be a requirement to be turned on by the acts one is partaking in, despite consenting (or even enthusiastic consent). We do things for other people, for money (this is obviously the big one) or for some other motivation (someone may not enjoy deep-throating, but may enjoy the fact of being seen on video).
Tom Cruise likewise has probably been unenthusiastic about some roles. His stuntman may enjoy some stunts but not all of them. Some stuntmen probably enjoy very few. Do we demand that the actor in a horror movie is as horrified as the viewer? That the children's TV presenter is as enthusiastic about the alphabet as his audience?
The simulation is on two levels which are easy to conflate: story simulation, in which a rape scene, for instance, is played out (and just like Tom Cruise, he doesn't get shot and the actress isn't raped), and act simulation (as you point out, Tom Cruise isn't really shot, but the actress still takes a facial). The second is worthy of moral discussion, but there are several empirical questions to answer:
* Is there anything wrong with it? We may think the actress suffers, but we can't know that in many cases. That's the wonder of acting. It's also "toil" (as in Adam Smith's "toil and trouble" to produce a good). The sewage treatment technician toils in some particularly horrible work. Some such jobs could be described as degrading, and some may not even be as necessary as sewage treatment. I feel empathy for them, but I'm unconvinced that banning such jobs or heavily regulating them is a good solution.
* The act really happens, but the morally problematic part of the act, as performed, may not. An ordinary person may feel humiliated and degraded, but the actress may not. This can be true even if the actress doesn't enjoy the act (but still consents to it).
* What happens off-scene? BDSM practitioners will tell you the importance of after-care. Surely some porn production also affords this. Feminist pornography prides itself on aftercare when needed, for instance.
There are many instances where things "really happen" in acting outside of porn. Leonardo DiCaprio cut his hand in a scene of Django Unchained. Actors becoming so emotional and feeling sadness or loss may cry on stage.
People react to media and negotiate their limits and deal with moods in different ways. Actors are uniquely placed to do that even better.
There is some strong academic debate as to whether it is "normalized" and in what contexts. Contrary to popular belief and anti-porn activists, porn is not getting more violent, and, in general, people aren't either. Longitudinal studies have failed to verify the results found in lab settings (though there are methodological problems on all sides and questionable assumptions).
On the other hand, I also think that talking only about consent is missing the point of the criticism - that porn shapes desires as much as it satisfies them, and it can create new desires and fetishes. It's not at all unreasonable to suppose that there would be fewer people interested in degradation and humiliation (fetishes consistently associated with lower than normal empathy in the available research) if porn hadn't fed into that desire.
Whether it should be socially acceptable to participate in a market which creates people (typically women) who find erotic pleasure in their own subservience and subordination is a valid point to raise.
The solution, if that concern does motivate you, may lie outside of regulatory measures - regulation on sexually explicit materials tends to harm those at the margins first.
I’m not sure Mindgeek can be held responsible for that though. They don’t associate with studios that are known to be unethical and break contact with unethical studios immediately. What more would you have them do?
I’d say it’s analogous to the NCAA. They do everything in their power to punish immoral institutions but there remains hordes of players that take steroids, haze others, sustain concussions, etc. Should the NCAA disband by the same logic you’re asking Mindgeek to disband by?
> I’d say it’s analogous to the NCAA. They do everything in their power to punish immoral institutions
That's a rather controversial claim about the NCAA; a fairly common alternative view is that not only does the NCAA do little to identify and punish institutions which exploit beyond it's overt rules, which include a very large number of it's constituent institutions, including the biggest names, but the overt rules themselves are systematically exploitive.
> they're not anything like the "abuse" somebody might describe in a manual labor job.
Deaths, slavery, kidnappings, permanent disability. Those kind of abuse is common in the three highest risk zones for human trafficking, ie mining, construction and fishing.
Sex and drugs has a common themes when it comes to making them illegal. If you want to forbid drugs that are harmful, you must first make an exception for drugs like alcohol and nicotine. If you want to make the sex industry illegal based on harm to workers you must make exceptions to industries that are worse.
The common response to human trafficking for non-sex related industries is to focus on regulation and enforcement of regulations. Sadly the crime rate is so high that last year, the police here in Sweden announced that they would stop investigating human trafficking in the construction industry. The reason was that such reports outnumber all other human trafficking to the point that they would have no resources to do any other investigation unless they dropped them. Unsurprising there are regularly news about slavery, passports being taken, fraud, threats of violence, and of course physical harm.
A lot of software work these days is dirty money. If you’re not building a porn site then you’re working on a social network that erodes the privacy of users until they’re basically stripped naked or building some mobile app that keeps eye balls glued to a screen and cued for the next hit of dopamine from some random notification.
Abuse is a term that can be easily applied to anything in this industry. Don’t like how much you were paid? Rape. Want better or more scenes? Threaten rape.
Small anecdote. At some point I was hiring designers and had a few candidates listing MindGeek on their resumes. I didn't think too much of it.. until I saw the portfolio! It was kind of an awkward moment looking at a designer's portfolio of porn landing pages with all my colleagues/employees around, and trying to keep a straight face while evaluating the design of huge boobs taking 90% of the page. Turns out MingGeek is a big employer of junior designers. They pay well and are extremely professional.
There was a scene/episode in HBO's Silicon Valley where they go to a pornsite operator conference that was b2b. Other than their hilarious made-up names for each website and their niche, it was just another boring business conference.
Did they really not provide censored versions of their screenshots or give you some sort of warning before you opened their portfolio? That's funny, but IMHO it doesn't sound very professional when applying to work at a non-porn business if that's the case.
There's a couple of mentions of Cyprus in the article, but I'm kind of disappointed in how the article doesn't expand into any more detail on how having a Cypriot corporation can be used for tax avoidance purposes, and to hide the beneficial owners of unusual things.
It's my understanding that the part of Mindgeek that rents colocation space, owns/leases/runs servers and buys wholesale scale Internet access in Canada, is the Cypriot corporation.
This isn't really a "new" thing in the internet porno business, people have been doing funny things with panamanian, cypriot, maltese, manx, channel islands, nauru corporations and such for 20+ years.
Your comment is spot-on, but technically the Channel Islands are two separate crown territories (Jersey, Bailiwick of Guernsey) with four sub-jurisdictions with its own rules on companies (Jersey, Guernsey proper, Sark, and Alderney), but there is some co-operation between the, uhm, governments (the best description I can use since the specific term differs between sub-jurisdictions).
I can't say that I've ever researched it in that much detail to know the legal and tax distinctions between the different channel islands. All I can say is that if I miraculously woke up in charge of a massive porno empire tomorrow, cyprus would be high on my list of places to start forming corporations..
The Channel Islands (before Brexit) had this weird situation where they were not part of the EU (compared to Gibraltar which was), but were part of the customs zone.
In the 2000s many CD and DVD retailers setup shop there, as they could sell items without VAT.
For porn and “gaming” (gambling) there aren’t many other places to register which is why you have these companies in places like Cyprus, Malta or Gibraltar it’s not necessarily for tax avoidance (although they surely do that too) but primarily to avoid harassment and legal issues that can arise from being registered most other nations.
Simple: Cyprus doesn't charge taxes on royalties. Meanwhile Malta and Panama do. And Canada has a tax-treaty with Cyprus.
Canada doesn't have a favourable tax treaty with Panama (partly why the Panama Papers didn't impact Canadians much). Now, if Barbados or Bahamas leaked... oh boy!
Cypress is attractive, except for the fact they are the first nation to have "tried" a "bail-in" of sorts where the gov't pillages the bank accounts of its citizens for monetary relief in 2013.
I have a relatively scant understanding of the recent Dodd Frank legislation in the U.S. that has outlined how this could happen in the U.S. - fortunately it outlines that only non FDIC insured assets can be seized by banks.
Funny. Other countries have inflated away their debt, which is essentially the same thing as just taking a certain fraction of everyone's money. Printing money to pay debts would also have the same effect (since it would cause inflation). The only reason Cyprus would have to resort to taking its citizens' money is because these options aren't available to it, since it doesn't control it's own currency.
You'd never see the US do the same because there's no need - a country that controls its own currency should always be able to pay its debts.
>> a country that controls its own currency should always be able to pay its debts.
That only if it borrows in its own currency which may not work on small countries, big loans or weak currencies because the lenders want a safe currency(i.e eur, usd).
Years ago I supported some networking equipment. We had a customer who had a name I didn't recognize. I was always curious about who buys our product and this company was hard to track down as to what they ... do / if they even existed.
Then the tech support case went on and they sent me the logs I requested... yeah lots of dns related entries for porn sites and etc.
I really don't know if they just provides services to other porn companies or what but it explained a lot. Even talking to them on the phone they were really careful about how the characterized the traffic. Accordingly I never asked them anything about it, just solved the issue(s) and moved on.
I went to a HN meetup many years ago and one of the engineers from Mindgeek was presenting. It was one of the better attended events (standing room only) and he was quite candid about the technology they were using. Cloud was still nascent and with TB databases and PB of videos AWS wasn't an option a serious option.
It's porn, it's not exactly illegal but from what I understand they were very careful about managing transactions. Always moving card processors, and they had to tell users the transaction was coming from different names simply because buyers didn't want Pornhub.com showing up on the credit statement.
This is something a pornstar elucidated for me on Eric Weinstein's podast[0] - note, he goes out of his way to keep the discussion "PG" so as to be listenable to as many people as possible. Payment procecessors are a de-facto regulator and skew conservative.
Lots of companies involved in selling, renting, leasing and supporting big piles of 1U servers at major traffic exchange points have had dealings with the porn industry. Whether they know it or not.
It looks very mundane when eyeballing the bare metal, like a few 44U cabinets full of supermicro, dell or custom whitebox servers.
> In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That's about 4% of sites.
> From July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content.
Granted, that's number of sites and not content/traffic, but streaming has exploded in the past decade, so I doubt it's gone up.
They also specifically call out the "50%" claim, and say it's an outdated one from the early days of the web, from when it was more niche and had a more male-dominated culture.
Side note, the most interesting part of the article, and relevant here:
> So what’s the most popular porn site on the planet?
> The single most popular adult site in the world is LiveJasmin.com, a webcam site which gets around 32 million visitors a month, or almost 2.5% of all Internet users!
> You’re telling me a webcam site is more popular than PornHub?
That's a web blocking software using inflated, completely unsourced numbers to sell a product. The Forbes article I linked called out this exact thing:
>Web filtering companies used to always release competing figures on the number of porn sites they blocked, but these numbers were almost certainly boosted to get sensationalist headlines and to seem competitive with other filtering companies that filtered "less" adult sites. For example, N2H2 claimed there were 260 millionpornsites (ed. correction: pages) --haha, one for every American citizen! :) Conservative groups are always coming up with porn figures that are crazy high, too, especially with regard to children's exposure to porn.
That says 35% of downloads, which might mean as you say. But it may also be using the word as it is commonly used by the general public; referring specifically to browsers placing a file in the user's '~/Downloads' directory. That page doesn't seem to clarify. It's unclear if 'streaming' is counted as 'downloading.'
I guess you are right, but to me even streaming videos are downloaded to your computer. I also have seen the 30% number of other sites so I thought it looked reasonable.
From an ISP perspective with a lot of singlehomed business and residential users, the vast majority of traffic by volume in Gbps is not immediately obvious as porno. It's normal looking traffic coming from the major CDNs, youtube, netflix, amazon, hulu, etc. And then from the big cloud providers (amazon aws, google/gcp, azure, etc)
For a small ISP that's purely buying transit, once they establish a presence at a major IX point and can peer with some huge content sources, it'll drop their transit bill in half almost immediately.
Then you do have porno content coming from huge hosting companies/entities such as Choopa.
It's actually pretty rare to peer directly with a porn host, if I had to guess at it, I'd say most of the traffic is coming in via transits such as hurricane, cogent, telia, ntt, etc.
one note, ISP traffic isn't measured in disk space measurements like terabytes or petabytes, it's measured in present tense Mbps or Gbps.
Sounds to me like it’s quite difficult to determine traffic percentages then. - Which in turn makes any discussion of “porn is x% of the Internet” kind of impossible to have in a realistic way.
Yes and no. When during peak evening traffic, by netflow analysis and sheer volume in Gbps on discrete peering connections, I can confidently say that 40%+ of the entire aggregate incoming traffic is netflix, youtube and amazon video, therefore that's 40% at minimum which for certain is not porn.
I tried specifically to find those numbers, but finally gave up since the most I could find was (barely) educated guessing on sites like quora. If anyone can find those numbers, I'd love to see it.
I would have guessed that the average person spends more time watching non-porn movies than porn and that non-porn streaming takes more bandwidth because it tends to be higher quality.
Sample size of one here, but I've seen vast amounts of customized for the purpose ZFS stuff. Some designed for longer term slower storage, sort of a cousin of the backblaze storage pod, and others designed for higher throughput.
I dont understand what is secretive about Pornhub and Mindgeek, it is pretty obvious that Redtube, Pornhub, Youporn,... belongs to the same entity as there is a banner at the top named "PornHub network".
There are several Pornhub employees, reading HN, answering questions same happens on Reddit, they are pretty transparent actually.
I don't understand why we need those articles making feel like we are in science fiction. If you want really secret businesses look into dating apps or Google/Facebook ads
Edit: and just to add, imagine how hard is it to run pornhub. Even though watching porn is one of the most common leisure in the world. Nobody want to work with them, nobody want to rent them servers, nobody want to sell them their ads, nobody want to be their payment processor ,... because porn is taboo. So yeah they probably have to find tricky ways to do things. At the end of the day they only make 500m of revenu, which is nothing, Tinder only is making 3-4 times that.
I think this is article is Ars Technica scraping the bottom of the barrel for eyeballs. The past few years they have a really nasty habit of publishing low-effort fluff pieces that cater to whatever is the current zeitgeist
PornHub purging all the content they did is remarkable, and certain kinds of content on the site are all but gone. They've likely lost a lot of viewership that way.
Ars is still generally good and I think they write mostly informed pieces that you don't see elsewhere every few months there is something just truly terrible/inane on there. They're also reposting Wired articles which are often not the best.
Summary: Author whines about customer support experiences and makes an ass of themselves, then realizes that all their griping wasn't even necessary because if they had performed some basic troubleshooting they would have realized the problem was elsewhere all along.
As for Pornhubs viewership, I don't think it will go down much. I imagine a large part of their audience just goes to the site and clicks on what looks good to them, maybe filtering by category or searching, but still, they see what's there and they click.
Also in a roundabout way, since now everything on the site is either from their parent company, a partner company, or someone in their model program they are in control of all revenue and are more probably more likely to see people pay for content from their model program members, which they get a cut of.
Depends on one's tastes. There's a lot of fetish material from anonymous uploads that is simply gone. Which sucks for them, cause now I just go to xvideos
As for Ars, they used to have a journo that would publish 10+ page reviews of the latest Mac OS release, and the dude had an extensive knowledge of Apple and Apple products. In a past life I was a journo for one of their competitors for a few years and my EIC was always pointing to Ars as our rival and competitor to take inspiration from. When our publication went downhill I turned to Ars to get the reporting that I wanted, and it feels like that well dried up a few years ago.
In-depth technical articles replaced with inspiration porn and geek fan service. They went from being a slightly-less-nerdy Anandtech to a slightly geekier BuzzFeed or TechDirt
> As for Ars, they used to have a journo that would publish 10+ page reviews of the latest Mac OS release, and the dude had an extensive knowledge of Apple and Apple products.
John Siracusa. He left Ars ~5 years ago, I think. Even after I switched away from OS X, I would still read his reviews.
>PornHub purging all the content they did is remarkable, and certain kinds of content on the site are all but gone.
The absurdity of it is that there was a small minority of animated and computer generated (non-voice acted) nude "dance" videos featuring 3D models. Those were also removed, but likely unintentionally. You can't 'verify' stock 3D models, created from beginning to end by a single person.
Their purge was a broad-brush panic reaction to a smear piece that ran in an issue of the New York Times earlier this month. I'm sure a lot of perfectly fine content got deleted
I don't think that at their scale they have too much problems. I mean, "nobody" quickly will turn to "somebody" with higher prices.
They might have problems with huge monopolists like VISA. But with any competitive business, as long as they don't break the law, they'll just pay higher premiums.
This article has genuine information not easily accessible. The true owners of Mindgeek’s debt are still unknown. The title might be a bit forced, but nothing warranting so much derision.
Just because you run in circles with people who make super high salaries doesn’t mean they’re that common. Unsurprisingly, people who make 300k TC are more likely than the average to meet other people who make 300k TC.
That said all the numbers I’m finding online are more in in 80-100k Canadian dollars range for salary for the average, so 60k is definitely extremly low for TC.
Plenty do make 60k and 300k is pretty far from being "typical" in Montreal.
I agree though that 60k isn't typical, that would be close to the starting salary. I'm still new though, so couldn't say what's typical, but I think 80k would be a pretty good bet.
120-150k is closer to the average I would say if you work for a public company or a well funded start-up
Top of band for Senior at Shopify is low 200s (varies a bit depending on USD exchange rates) without stock appreciation and it's not particularly competitive
If I owned MindGeek I don't think I'd be too open about it either given the types of articles I'd start seeing on the front pages of outlets about me. What do they expect?
It’s not so much that a secret that MindGeek is the holding company behind all this, it’s more that MindGeek itself is a cipher. From the article…
“No entity exemplifies this more than MindGeek, which with very little scrutiny or accountability, has quietly become the dominant porn company. The Montreal-based business is the owner of several of the sector’s most visited sites including Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn. At least according to public financial records, MindGeek towers over the pornography industry in Europe and America.
Despite this, basic facts about the company are largely unknown. That includes its main owner—a businessman called Bernard Bergemar, whose name is almost completely invisible on the Internet but who has a claim to the title of the world’s most successful porn tycoon. Until this Financial Times investigation, his identity was secret, known only to a small circle of MindGeek executives and their advisers.”
Porn tycoons don't refer to themselves as porn tycoons. But it's not like they're secretive about it. They're about as open about it as other people are about their non-porn business. Sometimes it comes up in conversation, sometimes it doesn't, but it's not like anyone's out denying it or anything.
I lived in LA for a long while and met lots of porn people over the years.
My experience was the performers tended to be pretty casual about mentioning it socially. Maybe not the first thing they bring up, but it would come around eventually. They also tended to be sort of proud of it.
The crew people tended to be a little more low key about it, but mostly because they did legit film crew work as well and worried it might hurt them if higher ups knew. And the union thing applied to some. Couldn't do non-union work officially.
I only ever met low-end producers. They didn't care who knew what they did, at all. My social circles didn't include the big time porn producers (this was back in the day when DVDs were still sort of viable).
Ah, I didn't consider that things would be like that in the US, with unions and puritanism hurting careers. It's nice to get a different view point, thanks.
Everyone in adult uses shell companies. The vast majority of them don't tell their neighbors and the local PTA what they do, so they are pretty secretive. I knew some execs whose wives didn't even know what they did.
Should I assume in an IT-related role? If so, anything you can share (without naming names) about what's different or special, from a technical standpoint, compared to a "normal" company?
Before Fabian cashed out of Manwin/MindGeek, I spent a short time writing code for him in the early days. It is for sure a very deep, shady network of people and entities.
At the same time he ran Manwin, he also owned several file hosting websites (some of which I wrote code for) he would directly promote on piracy & porn forums under alias. Most of these were filled with child abuse and his policy was to remove the links but not the files when receiving takedown notices (as he paid out through an affiliate system for promoting these links). He cashed out on most of these when people started digging, but kept hold of some of the torrent trackers he ran.
About time people like this are revealed for who they really are. The piracy, not so bad. Turning a blind eye to child abuse, pretty bad.
Would be great to hear in general what the work environment was like, what the work itself was like, the holiday parties, etc. From previous AMAs for this and similar companies, the takeaway seems to always be: It's a lot more "normal" inside the company than people expect.
Some specific questions:
* When engineers and QE are doing their regular dev+testing work all day long, do they use actual videos from the site, or are there "tame" videos used for dev+test so as to not be so distracting?
* Similar to above, how much of the day (like, how many hours) would a regular developer or tester be looking at the content? Do people become totally desensitized to it? Like, I know people say "it's just a regular job", but I have a hard time believing people aren't aroused by it, at least part of the time.
> * When engineers and QE are doing their regular dev+testing work all day long, do they use actual videos from the site, or are there "tame" videos used for dev+test so as to not be so distracting?
Real videos. People not wanting to work directly in contact with pornography is a huge problem to recruitment.
> * Similar to above, how much of the day (like, how many hours) would a regular developer or tester be looking at the content? Do people become totally desensitized to it? Like, I know people say "it's just a regular job", but I have a hard time believing people aren't aroused by it, at least part of the time.
Depends what you do, a regular developer probably doesn't look at a lot of porn except when testing their stuff in a near-prod setting. Some people watch porn all day (eg video editors) and there's a high turnover rate there.
Was there any effort to hide the end product to employees? I know that from the outside, MindGeek tries to look like any regular tech/data company. Is there a gap between the software side of things and the "pornhub website" team? Is the video department hidden? How is the culture?
No, porn is very much part of the culture. There are posters of porn stars on the walls (like, official company-sponsored posters). Asa Akira is one I remember being a popular "ambassador". They've had porn stars at their office parties.
No it's not. It's pretty open overall. People sometimes discuss tech/business details in front of porn scenes as well because you have to. And perhaps among the first few questions HR is going to ask if you are OK with working for a XXX company (they didn't say it directly on my case but hinted enough) during the recruit process.
No it's just some videos played in a TV in meeting room. It was for looking at Chrome dev tools I believe. Studios are not even in Montreal AFAIK but I could be wrong.
Alright, thanks. My other question was about culture.
What is the demographic? Are there a lot of women, gender minorities, etc.? Are things like harassment complaints taken seriously? In short, is it a "locker room" culture or more similar to what you find elsewhere at web agencies in MTL?
Agencies in general are more populated with women,gender minorities for a variety of reasons.
Porn doesn't hang on the walls. And you are more likely to find harassment outside of a business like this because everyone would try harder to make the female welcome because of the sigma.
Second question: Do you think there's anything unique about the culture in Montreal (as compared to the rest of Canada) that makes it a good place to have an office of people working on porno related content?
Yes, and I don't think so. People are generally open-minded here but I think the same would be true for most of America at least when it comes to "professional" pornography.
I'll chime in. No they are not offering FAANG or bay areas salaries for equal experience. They would pay wokay for the montreal area. Glassdoor lists a system developer role for under 100,000 cnd.
Trial got terminated because (as a manager) I told my superior who had just kicked off a project specifically mentioning overtime would be needed that if overtime was needed it was likely because we didn't plan properly.
I don't know how much I can say here but when it comes to PornHub and Ads, they're hosted but they pretty much own the host (although they don't, just in the sense that they probably account for 90%+ of that host's income). I was always curious why they didn't straight up buy them - and when I asked I was told it was just less trouble this way. They don't have much of an ops team though they do have a small (<10 devops team)
I can't really speak to the early history, but I mean they bought most of the Tubesites back then which we all know had a fair amount of piracy - so from a guess, I'd say they were aware and it was part of the strategy, yeah. For the takedown requests, no idea.
i think the record speaks for itself on this. its pretty well understood what the previous owners were up to and how they originally populated the site with content.
no employee can confirm nor deny this for legal reasons or just lack of access to that part of the system/code.
There's a real corporate feel to it that I didn't expect. Some people have been there for a decade and have gotten very comfortable. There's a strong hierarchy - directors, managers, leads, and everyone else.
I used to live on Montreal and came across PornHub job postings a few times on indeed. Very open, claiming unique challenges due to being the largest porn site in the world, etc.
They don't seem to have anything up atm, maybe they stopped posting on indeed.
Pornhub have disabled user-generated content last week unless you're a 'verified' model (ID Verification system). It's preventing (most of) illegal uploads for now.
I would just ask you to read some of the stories of the women who are abused by this industry. They're not uncommon, and they're not anything like the "abuse" somebody might describe in a manual labor job. Some of these stories sound like these women are essentially being raped, over and over, for profit, and then their abuse is being viewed by millions of people on the internet every day.
It's not cute, and there is a reason why the founder of this company would want to hide his name. He is trafficking in what is often times videos of the worst moments of some women's lives.
Read the stories that Mia Khalifa has put out, or Stoya, or girlsdoporn, or "exploited college girls", or watch the documentary "hot girls wanted". This stuff is horrible, and "mindgeek" appears to have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the toll that their exploitation of these women takes on them.