Pornhub No Longer Convinces The Big Brands

Pornhub is one of the most visited pornographic porn sites in the world, but this high traffic is no longer enough to convince major brands to advertise, fearing to be associated with contents of dubious legality.

The group, physically based in Montreal, Canada and fiscally in Luxembourg, and whose goal is to trivialize porn, has benefited from a greater tolerance for pornography to attract advertisers.

But this trust capital seems to erode following revelations in the British newspaper The Sunday Times, which claims to have found on the platform illegal content, including videos of child pornography.

Approximately 47 cases of sexual content involving children have been found on Pornhub since January 2019 by the British NGO Internet Watch Foundation. In two years, pedo-pornographic videos exploded 62% on the platform, according to the IWF, which alerted the site to remove these contents.

These revelations prompted large groups, who were surfing the “cool porn” wave, to distance themselves.

Food groups Unilever and Kraft Heinz, with iconic brands, who had bought advertising space on Pornhub this year, were afraid of being splashed by a scandal.

“We will make sure that none of our brands will still broadcast an ad on Pornhub or any porn site,” told AFP a spokesman for Unilever.

Kraft Heinz had played on the concept of ” food porn “, a phenomenon of posting food photos on social media, to promote Devour, his American brand of frozen products on Pornhub.

“The brand was talking explicitly about” food porn “, which had become a cultural phenomenon on Instagram,” said a spokeswoman.

Impossible to regulate

While it is not forbidden or illegal to run ads on porn sites, many companies do not want their products, especially those intended for the general public, to be associated with equivocal content.

Companies are also questioning the control of sexual content freely available online by Internet users, who could violate the new US FOSTA / SESTA laws to close websites that facilitate prostitution and sex trafficking.

One of Pornhub’s most alarming activities is the private “chains” owned by actresses or actors, the ” Model Program “.

PayPal, the US financial payment services group, decided last week to no longer act as an intermediary to pay these actors, who produce different sexual content pay.

The company considers impossible to ensure that they are adults or that they are not victims of human trafficking or procuring networks, told AFP sources close to the case.

“It’s impossible to regulate online content” under the Model program, said one source on condition of anonymity.

Contacted by AFP, the major US banks have for the most part announced that they did not intend to replace PayPal despite the 33.5 billion hits claimed by Pornhub in 2018, with an average duration of 10 minutes and 13 minutes. seconds, mostly by men.

“It’s really hard to tell the difference between legal porn and illegal porn, and for a bank like ours that is very regulated, you can not afford not to control money movements regularly,” says a bank.

“There are too many risks,” says another.

fantasies

“Anti-porn groups like to say that most sex workers are victims of networks. It’s a myth, “said Corey Price, vice president of Pornhub, adding that the platform works with the authorities” to monitor and report any illegal activity. ”

He says that all the actors and actresses of his Model program, which counts more than 100,000 people, are at least 18 years old.

“We ask them to hold a photo, with a sign with their username next to their face, and we only accept their application after submitting, for verification, a piece of government ID with a photo showing that they are 18 and over,” he explains.

But, “Regarding age, it is even more difficult to check on the side of cam girls than on the side of free videos,” especially in the United States where it is easy to obtain a false identity card, Judge Laureen Ortiz, journalist and author of a book on this industry, Porn Valley .

“Prostitution networks around the world can get along without worry,” she adds.