How "Free" P*rn Sites Really Work (and Who Runs Them)

Summary

In the video, Theo Von explores the enigmatic operations and ownership of major adult entertainment sites. It delves into MindGeek's dominance, rebranding efforts, scandals, lawsuits, and the ethical dilemmas faced in the wake of these revelations. The narrative uncovers a hidden world driven by profit, tracing the history of ownership and the stark reality of content moderation issues, while highlighting efforts to rebrand amid scandal.

Highlights

• MindGeek's strategic monopoly parallels 'Big Pharma' or 'Big Tobacco', dominating porn. 📈
• The company's rebranding to ILO was an attempt to escape its notorious past. 🕵️‍♂️
• Fabian Thylmann, dubbed the 'Zuckerberg of porn', revealed crucial insider information. 🕵️
• The purge of unverified videos marked a significant shift amid severe backlash. 🚫
• Employees suffered ethical and psychological strain from the task of content moderation. 😟
• Survivors and whistleblowers have propelled significant legal challenges against the industry. 👩‍⚖️

Key Takeaways

• MindGeek, rebranded as ILO, holds a near-monopoly on the global adult entertainment industry. 🌍
• The company is shrouded in secrecy, with mystery surrounding its former majority shareholders. 🤫
• Fabian Thylmann played a pivotal role in exposing MindGeek’s secrets as part of a larger agenda. 🎭
• MindGeek faced enormous scandal over unverified content, leading to a massive content purge. 🧹
• The industry faces challenges in moderating content, with minimal personnel handling massive volumes. 👀
• Ongoing lawsuits and rebranding efforts paint a complex picture of systemic issues in the industry. ⚖️

Overview

Beneath the surface of mainstream pornography websites lies a complex network of corporate ownership and ethical dilemmas. MindGeek, recently rebranded as ILO, holds a significant hold over the global adult entertainment industry, akin to big corporations in pharmaceuticals and tobacco. This video intricately discusses the monopolistic control these corporations wield, shrouded in mystery, through ownership by anonymous investors and secretive operations.

The dark side of this monopoly comes to light as revelations about the company’s content moderation practices unfold. With a lack of robust security checks and minimal personnel managing millions of video uploads, this has led to vast unverified or illegal content flooding their platforms. The fallout led to a historic purge of content amid threats from credit card companies and legal actions.

Amidst ongoing lawsuits, attempts to sanitize the brand emerge, with 'ethical' rebranding under new dubious leadership. Yet the core issues remain, as many of the original key players continue to operate within the system. This exposes a critical lens on the complex dance between profit, ethics, and exploitation in digital adult entertainment.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Mindgeek Monopoly The chapter discusses the dominance of Mindgeek, a company with a monopoly over the global porn industry, similar to big players in other industries like tobacco and pharmaceuticals. It highlights Mindgeek's ownership of PornHub and its rebranding to ILO in an attempt to distance itself from its reputation.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Acquisition and Ownership The chapter titled 'Acquisition and Ownership' discusses the consolidation of the global porn industry under one corporation through financial backing. With a $362 million loan from a hedge fund named Colc Capital and investment from 125 disclosed investors, including major financial entities like JP Morgan Chase and Cornell University, a company called MindGeek effectively acquired control over the industry. MindGeek managed a wide array of entities including Playboy, Digital Playground, Wicked Pictures, Brazzers, Reality Kings, and more, consolidating them under its own management.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Secret Shareholders Revealed This chapter delves into the ownership of popular adult websites such as PornHub and its sister sites like RedTube and Tube8. These websites are part of a larger network owned by MindGeek, a company whose major shareholders were previously shrouded in secrecy.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Company Operations and Financials The chapter discusses the investigation into the ownership of MindGeek, a company that was not based in America. It reveals the secret majority shareholder of the company, Bern Bergm, who lived in Austria and part-time in Hong Kong. The investigation was part of a series called 'hunt for the porn king.'
• 02:00 - 02:30: Content Takedown The chapter titled "Content Takedown" provides a brief biography of an individual who grew up as the son of farmers in Ansfelden and attended grammar school in Lind. He later transferred to study at the University of Lind and worked at Goldman Sachs in New York. In 2013, he became the owner of the porn site RedTube and eventually sold it to Manwin, which is now known as Alo. Furthermore, he was a former majority owner of PornHub.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Moderator Challenges The chapter 'Moderator Challenges' discusses the ownership and management structure of an international corporation. The majority shareholder is highlighted, while Feros Anun and David Dillo are mentioned as the CEO and COO, respectively, and minority shareholders who have remained relatively unknown to the public. The company, headquartered in Canada, has a significant number of employees based there but also maintains international offices, including one in Texas.
• 03:00 - 03:30: Whistleblower Revelations The chapter titled 'Whistleblower Revelations' unveils the operations of a gigantic multinational corporation, with offices in places like Romania, that's involved in the global big porn industry. This corporation is highly lucrative, generating approximately half a billion dollars annually. The value of the company extends into the multiple billions, with PornHub serving as the flagship site, acting as the primary revenue generator or 'Cash Cow.'
• 03:30 - 04:00: Fabian Thilman's Role The chapter discusses the business strategy employed by Fabian Thilman, emphasizing the role of advertising pay sites on free porn sites. It highlights the high volume of daily impressions and traffic generated by these sites, which Thilman uses to promote their own brands like 'browsers' on platforms such as 'PornHub.' The content suggests an ecosystem where traffic is driven between various owned websites, with content being a crucial element for the success of porn tube sites.
• 04:00 - 04:30: Legal Actions and Discovery This chapter discusses the significant legal actions and discovery experienced by a company dealing with massive amounts of online content. The company initially aimed to increase its visibility and drive traffic by utilizing free porn content to boost Google search results, thereby selling a large number of ad impressions. However, legal challenges or other significant factors prompted them to undertake a massive takedown of content, deleting approximately 10 million videos and over 30 million images in a very short timeframe. This substantial removal of content was recognized by the Financial Times as possibly the largest takedown event of its kind.
• 04:30 - 05:00: Rebrand to Ethical Capital Partners MindGeek, the company responsible for adult content, rebranded to Ethical Capital Partners. The motivation behind this change was largely influenced by the need to address past controversies and regain trust, particularly from credit card companies. In what is described as a pivotal moment in internet history, MindGeek took the drastic action of deleting all unverified videos to prevent illegal content, such as those featuring underage individuals or instances of non-consensual acts, from proliferating on their platform. This decision was primarily driven by financial concerns, aiming to alleviate the worries of credit card companies and encourage them to re-establish business relations with the company.
• 05:00 - 05:30: Criticism of the Rebrand The chapter 'Criticism of the Rebrand' outlines the significant issues faced by PornHub in moderating its content. It highlights that at the time, PornHub employed only 30 moderators to oversee millions of videos, in stark contrast to Facebook's 15,000 moderators which were still deemed insufficient. These moderators were tasked with reviewing between 800 and 2,000 videos per shift, often without sound, leading to a process compared to playing 'Russian roulette' with people's content, indicating a severe underestimation of the resources needed for effective moderation.

How "Free" P*rn Sites Really Work (and Who Runs Them) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 so it's not just PornHub right PornHub is owned by parent company that all of this kind of I learned over the last five years so called mindgeek okay now mindgeek has a monopoly on the global big porn industry so we call it big porn because there's big porn just like there's big tobacco there's big Pharma there's big porn and it's dominated by one company MH that company was was called mindgeek they rebranded to ILO to try to escape their reput as Peddlers of
• 00:30 - 01:00 crime but they so with a $362 million loan from a hedge fund called Co colc capital and 125 secret investors who were outed as including JP Morgan Chase and Cornell University they had basically rolled up the entire Global porn industry under one company so so they owned it mindgeek yes so they owned you know they were managing Playboy um Digital Playground wicked pictures browsers uh Reality Kings pay sites
• 01:00 - 01:30 subscription sites and then the tube sit so they so PornHub and it's sister s so PornHub up porn red tube tube baate gay tube x tube you know all I I could go on and on they own the most popular tube site so vegan tube is that one that's no time for jokes um and who owns mindgeek so mindgeek was owned by a secret share M majority shareholder so nobody knew
• 01:30 - 02:00 who the owner of mindgeek was when all of this began and were they in America no we found out so we found them you know through the course of this there was a an investigation called hunt for the porn king so they're they're not an American company so you started on the hunt for the porn King right so we discovered who was the secret majority shareholder of the company and his name was burn bergm and he was an Austria and he lived part-time in Hong Kong and bernberg mayor let's bring a picture of him up yeah you can I just want people to know is bernberg Mayor and let's look
• 02:00 - 02:30 at his Wikipedia I just want to get a little he grew up as a son of farmers in ansfelden attended grammar school in Lind transferred to he studied at University of Lind wherever that is he worked at Goldman Sachs New York he became the owner of porn site red tube in 2013 he sold to the site manwin now known as Alo he was a former majority owner of PornHub and M geeek okay
• 02:30 - 03:00 want to make sure we see he was yeah he was the majority and then feros anun and David Dillo were the CEO and the COO and they were the minority shareholders and they kind of hidden themselves from the public as well for a really long time okay and are these guys all from Austria are they all from specific place so Canadian so the company is an international corporation they are headquartered in Canada so they have most of their employees in Canada but they have offices in now they have an office in Texas they had one la cyp
• 03:00 - 03:30 Romania offices everywhere everywhere wow yeah so they are a multinational corporation huge corporation hundreds of millions of dollars a year multi-billion dollar Corporation with a monopoly on the global big porn industry and how much money was that was it bringing in a year do is it yeah they're estimated about half a billion um per year it's a the value of the company is multiple billions of dollars um and you know PornHub was a flagship site so this was the Cash Cow of the company is not only
• 03:30 - 04:00 are they Mak M on 4.6 bilon Impressions every day and all the traffic they're getting but they're advertising their pay sites on the free sites right so they kind of have this ecosystem where they advertise browsers on PornHub and drive traffic to all the other websites that they own I thought it was brazers which is crazy but also I don't care I mean it's either way it's bad yeah content is King for the porn tube sites you have to understand this that uh it's about getting
• 04:00 - 04:30 unrestricted massive amounts of content so that they could get picked up in Google search results so that they can drive massive amounts of traffic so they can sell all those ad Impressions and make hundreds of millions of dollars a year on free porn Okay worst thing they could do is take content down from the site but they started to delete millions of videos they deleted 10 million videos and over 30 million images basically in 24 hours um and what Financial Times called probably the biggest takedown of
• 04:30 - 05:00 content in Internet history they deleted all of their unverified videos because they had no idea who was a child and like who was 16 and who was 18 right who was uh what was rough sex and what was rape they had no idea what was consensually recorded and non-consensually uploaded right and so they took down that much content because they're worried about the money yeah they wanted to woo the credit card companies back is they said okay we have to we have to do this they basically
• 05:00 - 05:30 deleted their site uh they uh well 80% of it at the time they had 30 moderators 30 moderators moderating the millions of videos on PornHub now compare that with Facebook's 15,000 moderators and they still don't have enough these moderators they were viewing between 800 and 2,000 videos per shift clicking through those videos with the sound off just clicking through them guessing like I call it the underage guessing game like this is a game of Russian roulette with people's
• 05:30 - 06:00 lives they're trying to guess who's 15 and who's 18 who's 16 and who's 19 like nobody can do that on a like even a pediatrician can't do that yeah and what happens to your brain at a certain point after seeing so much traumatic stuff that you were even a like that should be a crime in putting a employee through that well I and I've spoken to those and some of those employees I call friends today because they have they said that they've seen some it's been really conscience was pricked they came for forward and I've spent hours and hours
• 06:00 - 06:30 in person and you know online and on the phone speaking to them trying to understand how all of this worked and one of them um is especially dear to me and he told me that it was so hard on him to do this job but he needed the money um and he was abused as a child he was sexually abused as a child wow so it was especially hard for him to do this but I think you almost wonder why he went and did it it's like you could find something else to do
• 06:30 - 07:00 not calling him out but it's like maybe there's some weird thing that's created there too that like I don't know but I appreciate what he did and coming forward so this is the company this is the this is who we're kind of coming up against right and so all of this started to take off and go viral and victims are coming forward whistleblowers I told you about um the former owner who came forward his name is Fabian Tillman and he was called the Zuckerberg of porn he's the one let's bring him up I want to get a l i want to put a face to these guys Fabian
• 07:00 - 07:30 [Music] Tilman he looks Danish huh it's th y yeah there you go yep Fabian thilman he's the one that put PornHub on the map you know he kind of had this vision for the German entrepreneur who once built the biggest adult entertainment company in the world let's see him that's him uh Fabian okay so he is he's one of the guys slepping it so he yeah so he's the
• 07:30 - 08:00 one who actually revealed to me who the secret majority shareholder was that he sold the company to yeah he reached out in summer 2020 to say he wanted to help and so one of the things that he did was he exposed the secret majority shareholders name and he said go after the credit card companies as the O as the former owner he said if you want to make a difference here you go after the credit card companies to cut ties um and so that was now what what I didn't
• 08:00 - 08:30 realize at the time I was suspicious right why is he wanting to help and I kind later found out that he had intention to try to buy back the company so he kind of wanted to make a killing again so I think he wanted to help take it down buy it then find a way to do it back probably with crypto or something on a on a different chain I don't know what he was thinking but he wanted to buy it back which I found out later on but the CEO and the CEO coo and the CEO were forced resign as well and today
• 08:30 - 09:00 they're being sued by nearly 300 victims in 25 lawsuits including multiple class actions on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims and they're doing amazing in the courts uh so much more evidence has been uncovered in legal Discovery so Discovery is this amazing tool when you engage in a civil lawsuit the the Court gives you permission to get behind your opponent so you can get their text messages you you can get their emails
• 09:00 - 09:30 you can get and so much has come out of the complicity like you just couldn't believe the site is still online you know it's been purchased now they're trying to do this whole Rebrand so it was sold as a distressed asset okay to a company that they created themselves to buy PornHub okay and they are called ethical Capital Partners wow what a name ethical Capital partners and who is the who are the main big wigs in that
• 09:30 - 10:00 company do we know yes we do they have themselves online you the the guy that's out there kind of trying to do this whole Rebrand of PornHub like we're ethical Capital Partners um his name is Solomon fredman and he is a criminal defense attorney so is he really a Jewish guy from where where's he from uh Canada may je I Canada yeah um so he wants to Rebrand just make it more ethical well I mean that's what they're saying right they're saying they called themselves ethical Capital yet at the same time time you know they so so
• 10:00 - 10:30 ethical Capital Partners there's still there's still stuff out there that's not supposed to be there yes they still haven't actually implemented the preventative policies it's just a farce I mean it's just uh you know and that's why I think it's so important to sound the alarm on this Rebrand because from a victim's perspective like this is also a miscarriage of justice for them to go out there and try to resuscitate pornhub's brand to say oh we're ethical Capital listen the men who made that decision de ision to have 30 moderators
• 10:30 - 11:00 just guessing what's rough sex and rape guessing and they guess wrong all the time they were skipping through 2,000 you know thousands of videos per shift and they're still running PornHub today so they're still on the sixth floor aquamarine Montreal Tower of that Corporation running PornHub today yes the CEO and the cooo were forced to resign but they have the same CFO they have the same clo who's the CFO let's see Eddie Danto Eddie Danto bring him up I don't know if you'll find him they try
• 11:00 - 11:30 to they his they Tred to but some of them I mean you can find Ryan Hogan Matt khichi so you can look up Kareem Al morazzi he is the CPO and he's running it today Kareem Al Marazzi so he is so and so he's there today right yep about him from Canada as an integral part of the mobile broadband team telecommunication engineering went to University of Montreal
• 11:30 - 12:00 H so they're still running they're just trying to rebuild this company and still make money off so I mean what I'm say ethical Capital right if they were coming in and saying like we're going to Rebrand we're going to do this new thing why would you still have the same men responsible for the decisions that destroy the lives of countless victims just running the site today that's why I it's like right it's just a farce like it's not real yeah for