Money Shot: The Pornhub Story

 Announced as a sensational investigation documentary into that one site nobody knows but pops up in your browser as soon as you type the letter P, what you get is what feels like a corporate video.

A dull one to boot as well...

The thing is, there are two red lines through this documentary.  On the one hand, how both adult stars and amateurs alike make now gazillions of dollars by uploading content to digital platforms... and the fact that since Donald Trump signed the FOSTA / SESTA law, Pornhub, and it's parent company MindGeek, cannot be held responsible for the content that is uploaded.

First of all, the money thing is very relative, because not everyone makes the millions as the adult stars that are brought to the fore like Siri Dahl.  Secondly, when they come to the tale of an exploitation from a young girl when her ex uploaded a nude video of her, it gets painfull.  Even more painfull if you google Serena Fleites and the parts of the story that aren't shown in this "promotional documentary".

The rest of the documentary follows the regular pattern of these days: interviews, snippets of social media articles, and comments on those without really going in any deeper on given subject.  It also follows the rise of MindGeek / Pornhub, and the fallout for the executives when some christian organisations out to ban porn alltogether from the internet come into the mix, including the burning down of a mansion from one of the CEO's.

It also follows how an article written by Pulitzer price winning journalist Nicholas Kristoff set the ball in motion on how Mastercard and Visa withdrew from the platform, and the panic it brought as OnlyFans also declared (for a whole week before coming back on it) that they would ban adult content of the site.  But the incomes of the site come from banner adds, so it missed the ball and hit mostly the content creators instead of the platform.

All in all, it was a documentary that said a lot without actually saying anything, and I can imagine it got watched so much and talked about so much due to the subject, and not the content.  Like it tricked me into watching this, and it won`t be remembered for long...