Pornhub has changed ownership, with MindGeek sites moving to Ethical Capital Partners

Accused in the past of facilitating exploitation and even acts of revenge against the site’s protagonists, Pornhub lost popularity once the MindGeek administrator moved to take concrete steps to “clean up” the managed platforms of abusive content, including requiring identity validation for content creators.

Much of the videos on the platform disappeared almost overnight, with Pornhub becoming a kind of teaser section for creators selling their content on OnlyFans, turning down the less lucrative Pornhub Premium offering first.

Presumably in financial difficulties, the steward of Pornhub, YouPorn and other sites specializing in adult content was bought by a Canadian investment fund called, ironically, Ethical Capital Partners. Going forward, MindGeek will continue its operations under the new owner’s umbrella, although, the people in the management circle are not known, we learn from sources that the new board of directors brings together professions as diverse as lawyers to cannabis investors.

Owner of some of the most visited adult content sites, MindGeek lost out by putting profit before the interests of content creators, with persistent criticism of its lack of effective control against abuse reaching international media attention. From there, it was only a step before advertising partners and banking institutions (Visa and Mastercard) that intermediated payments made by users of the managed platforms withdrew their participation, leaving the company in a total business freeze. Inevitably, desperate measures to regain reputation led to the removal of most Pornhub videos. Subsequently, the imposition of a mandatory age verification system for actors and identity verification for creators who actually upload content to the platform inevitably led to a much less interesting content catalogue, collapsing the interest of users accustomed to a “certain” specific content.

Although MindGeek restored payment services to Pornhub, payment processors continued to deny access to the TrafficJunky ad network after a California court ruled that Visa could be held liable for helping MindGeek “monetize child pornography.”