Pornhub parent company has new owner and Mastercard partly lifts blockade
MindGeek, parent company of Pornhub, YouPorn, RedTube, Brazzers and more, has a new owner. A newly formed Canadian capital firm called Ethical Capital Partners wants to run the business with more openness.
In the meantime, Mastercard has also decided to grant MindGeek access to its payment system again. However, that only applies to payments for subscriptions to MindGeek’s porn sites and not to payments to the company’s advertising arm, called TrafficJunky. According to the Financial Times This is because the judge has ruled that credit card companies may be partly responsible for illegal content that shows advertisements that have been paid for through their systems. Visa has not yet reversed any blocks.
According to the new owner, none of the old shareholders are left at Pornhub, but some of the management is still there. Regarding the desire for more transparency, one of the founders of the capital company says: “We want regular contact with stakeholders, including the media.”
Pornhub came under fire in 2020 following a piece in The New York Times. It writes about videos of rape, private material and minors. Pornhub does take steps to remove such material, but it keeps coming back, and Pornhub does profit from the included ads. Shortly after the NYT piece, Pornhub removed all videos from unverified uploaders. Two months after that, MindGeek dropped out letter to the Canadian parliament know the biometric age verification tools from Yoti to be used for age checks.
In the meantime, Visa and Mastercard withdrew their services. A year before PayPal had already withdrawn for other reasons. To fill the gap, Pornhub started accepting Monero, in addition to a slew of cryptocurrencies it was already accepting.
How much was paid for MindGeek is not disclosed. Pornhub is according to SimilarWeb number eleven in the ranking of the most popular websites in the world. The NYT piece mentions 3.5 billion visitors per month in 2019. Lawsuits against Pornhub following the abuses at the site are still ongoing, FT writes.