Pornhub is the world's largest adult website, but the public doesn't know much about MindGeek behind the site, and the three bosses rarely give media interviews. However, a fire has unveiled the mystery of Pornhub and MindGeek.
In the early hours of April 25 last year, Feras Antoon, one of MindGeek's three owners, fell into a deep early morning slumber. In his sleep, he did not expect at all that all kinds of information in the mobile phone were rushing madly.
All the news pointed to one thing — his near-finished, $16 million mansion was caught in flames.
The flames were so thick that they were 150 feet long, and neighbors around them were evacuated in an emergency.
The fire was enough for eighty firefighters in Montreal to extinguish it in time and did not allow the fire to spread.
And the fire for several hours also completely reduced the mansion, which was jokingly called "P Palace" by the media, into ruins.
Bizarrely, the fire was so ferocious that none of the houses next to it were affected.
Three days after the incident, a security guard broke into the mansion in the surveillance video of the day the "P Palace" was discovered.
It just so happens that the street where the "P Palace" is located is where the BigWigs of the Italian gangster family "Mafia Row" gather - although it is gathered, it is not densely populated, which is one of the reasons why Antuen chose this place, because it is "remote and quiet".
In this arson case that occurred last year, there is still no explanation, and public opinion suspects that "the gangsters are doing the way for Skywalker", and some people suspect that the "anti-pornographic crusaders", the "extreme pornography prohibitionists", are "targeting".
But the end result was mixed.
It wasn't until Jan. 18, when Antunes gave his first media interview in more than a decade, that his interview with Vanity Fair made the mystery behind the scenes a little more real.
"There is no doubt that extreme pornographic injunctivists are encouraging or committing acts of arson."
Pornhub was already the world's largest adult website long before the pandemic, and with 170 million visits per day, it is one of the top ten websites in the world – and outperforms Twitter, Netflix and INS.
But the arrival of the new crown pandemic has undoubtedly made Station P "like a tiger", and it and its shareholders have become the "rich people who benefited from the epidemic" in Oxfam's report.
Due to the early stages of the epidemic in 2020, many countries have adopted lockdown measures, coupled with the ubiquity of P station in popular culture, more often appearing in the gimmicks of late-night comedy shows and business pages - which has increased P station traffic by 41.5% in the first month of lockdown in the United States alone.
Although P station is popular in the world and is even "loved" by young people, this website is indeed saddled with "original sin".
P station is by no means the world or even the United States, the first "adult website", the time of establishment can even be said to be very late - in 2007, this company was founded.
The reason why in just over a decade, from a small company, to now surpass Twitter, INS and other super websites, with the help of "everyone can become an adult content blogger", open content storage, not only let adult film stars rejoice, but also let countless "despicable people" and even criminals, incomparably "excited".
Here, many "ex-boyfriends" upload "intimate videos" to the P station in order to launch "pornographic revenge" to their past lovers, which not only allows this group of despicable people to obtain the pleasure of revenge, but more importantly, in the secret creation of "slut humiliation".
While victims should not be harmed by the public, the colored vision and the discussion behind them are still unavoidable so far.
The most important thing is that the Avengers can also use these intimate videos to get advertising shares based on traffic.
It's not a small sum of money.
In 2020, MindGeek generated approximately $500 million in net revenue through ad sales, affiliate marketing, and premium subscriptions.
And this makes more and more criminals realize that this is a "way to get money".
In 2020, Rose Kalemba, 25, stepped forward, revealing in a blog post her tragic experience and the huge difficulty of getting Station P to delete illegal videos — she was 14 years old, walking next to her home in Ohio, and was hijacked by two men and raped for a full 12 hours.
Since then, this rape video has appeared on the P station under the name of "user-made adult film video".
The tragedy of Rouss is not isolated on a global scale, but she is fortunate to be the lucky one who has received the attention of the media and public opinion.
On the P station, there have been countless videos that have been true or false in the past.
The "true and false victims" in it are men and women, old and young, and even children.
So much so that people suspect that the "drama" here - especially southeast Asian countries, such as Thailand, the Philippines and other countries, the reason why they have become the "sex travel destinations" of "old white men" is because the people are relatively poor, and the law also has "loopholes to drill".
There was even a "white male criminal who specializes in making pedophilic videos" like Peter Slicka — he used two local "girlfriends" to lure the daughters of poor families in the name of charity, and when they were abducted, they were asked to make adult films.
And how many local people in Southeast Asia, engaged in such a dark industry, no one knows.
But for the media, the investigation of criminal cases in foreign countries is undoubtedly beyond the scope of the media's authority and responsibility, which is also what The P Station relied on in the past - with the convenience of globalization, it has attracted content providers from all over the world.
Although the United States is known as the world's policeman, how can it really have the ability to investigate the inside story for every suspect video in the P station?
But this does not mean that justice is helpless.
In 2020, the New York Times exposed the P station's "custodial sexual exploitation of children video", triggering a huge wave of public opinion against the P station around the world, and then Trump's former lawyer Michael Bowe became 34 lawyers who sued the P station.
Suddenly, Station P achieved a rare achievement in the past seven years that "American liberals and conservatives" want to get rid of.
And countless "extreme pornography injunctivists" have threatened to set fires on P stations on the Internet, and even personally threatened employees of P stations.
But even if the mansion that was jokingly called "P Palace" was burned down, even if the New York Times set off a crusade, class actions came to the door, and even if the major online payment tools refused to cooperate with P station, Antuen emphasized on the one hand that MindGeek is a responsible company, and P station will have better supervision, but still stressed: "These lawsuits will not destroy P station, we are not worried." ”
"I'm proud to have developed a product that is visited by 170 million people every day."
Even such products are built on countless victims of "pornographic revenge" and "sexual violence".
No one knows whether the extremists set fire to the "P Palace" or the Italian gangsters "taking the place of Skywalker", but the "P Palace" was listed for sale last year.
Antunes said "the property was sold because the property focused too much attention" and denied "any relationship with the Italian gangsters".
But what is certain is that dozens of victims collectively sued for infringement against Station P, and the victims won a big victory, each receiving at least a million us dollars in damages.
And countless "pornographic assault videos" have been completely removed from the P station.
The "harm" caused by the P station in the past decade or so cannot be counted, and the soil that allows the P station to be formed is also because of the overly broad management of the adult industry and the pornography industry in the United States.
But this is truly "American" – the United States is a typical bottom-up country.
From individuals to companies, communities and states and cities, "autonomy" is its essence, and the law is the bottom of everything.
Although the P station caused a huge negative impact, it eventually paid a huge price under the sanctions of the law, and the victims of the United States received enough compensation for a lifetime of food and clothing.
But it also highlights the problem that P-Station's past success was built on "global content" providers, but in the end, only American victims were compensated.
Although the United States does not prohibit victims from other countries from going to the United States to sue Station P, there is no doubt that cross-ocean transnational lawsuits, evidence collection, and investigation are very difficult, and victims have no such material strength, and American lawyers may not be willing to wade through muddy waters after weighing the pros and cons.
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