The internet is a fairly lawless place—but among its central commandments is Rule 34, an adage dictating that, if something exists online, there is porn of it. And most of it, at least until recently, was hosted on Pornhub.

Among today’s most-trafficked websites, Pornhub is a household name—one that’s far more recognizable than the company behind it, the massive Canadian tech conglomerate MindGeek, which also operates a suite of other porn streaming sites such as Xtube, Redtube and YouPorn. Featuring interviews with sex workers, activists, and ex-employees of the company, Netflix’s new documentary Money Shot chronicles the way Pornhub effectively upended the adult film industry, creating a ripple effect that’s still being felt today—from its humble beginnings in the 1990s to its legal battle in the face of sex trafficking and censorship scandals.

The story goes something like this: On the early internet, people started selling erotic videos—among them, pioneers like JenniCam and other self-run sites where people could post explicit videos and monetize them through subscription services. Their relationship with their audience was direct and personal, unfettered by the third-party platforms that would later develop a chokehold on the adult industry. That is, until Fabian Thylmann, a teenager living in Brussels in the late-’90s, had an idea that would unleash a wave of explicit content across the internet: What if there was a platform where users could upload the porn they bought for other people to watch—for free?

Thylmann founded the company Manwin, which later became MindGreek, and began operating a large array of porn streaming sites under its umbrella—the most recognizable of which being Pornhub, which obtained massive amounts of traffic by hosting free, user-uploaded adult content, often to the detriment of its performers. In 2015, it launched ModelHub, recruiting sex workers from other sites with a liberatory promise: the opportunity to upload and sell their own clips, and benefit from Pornhub’s massive traffic, without having to work with mainstream porn middlemen like studios.

“Operating as a tech company first, and a porn company second, Pornhub built its fortune on the backs of vulnerable workers while continuing to turn a blind eye to the issues that affect them.”

First and foremost a technology company, MindGeek obtained its massive status by utilizing a highly technical approach to traffic growth. Unlike small, user-operated sites, it subjected its content to A/B testing and rigorous search engine optimization to maximize performance. It also created a user experience that was intentionally addictive, not only by offering jerk-off fodder for free, but also by collecting data about its users’ preferences, and customizing content to suit their interests—all in the hopes of keeping them browsing, and encountering “grow-your-dick” ads, for as long as possible.

“Mindgeek itself is basically a data-harvesting operation,” says porn industry advocate Mike Stabile in Money Shot. It’s a sentiment echoed by adult film director Erika Lust, who feels that Pornhub’s business model reflects a careless attitude not only toward producers of porn, but also its consumers. “I think we should all ask ourselves: If you’re using a service for free, why are you not paying for it?” Lust told Document in 2022. “With big porn, as with free social media platforms, it’s because you are the product.”

By “big porn,” she’s referring to the many-headed hydra of streaming services operated by MindGeek—which has also been compared to agricultural titans like Monsanto, and criticized for throwing sex workers and independent creators under the bus in their efforts to monopolize a highly-lucrative industry. And it’s true: Operating as a tech company first, and a porn company second, Pornhub built its fortune on the backs of vulnerable workers while continuing to turn a blind eye to the issues that affect them.

This laissez-faire approach extends not only to pirated porn videos, but also to non-consensual use of images in advertising. “My face has been used on Pornhub ads without my permission,” sex worker and activist Liara Roux tells Document, stating that, though they’ve repeatedly flagged the issue to Pornhub, nothing ever came of it. “It’s particularly offensive because the ads are like, Ugly girls in your neighborhood desperate to fuck—so not only is someone making money off of my stolen face, but to add insult to injury, they’re also calling me ugly!”

The same is true of victims of sex trafficking and revenge porn; though MindGeek employs thousands of workers, its content moderation team is understaffed and working at a frenetic pace, rapidly clicking through 700 videos a shift to detect child pornography and non-consensual content based on guesswork. Even when such content was reported and take-down requests were filed by its subjects, they allowed the same videos to be continuously uploaded, creating a Sisyphean battle for victims’ whose worst moments are being preserved and circulated online.

“With efforts to reform Section 230 currently underway, Pornhub’s meteoric rise and reputational downfall is just the latest entry in the clash between consent, cash, and censorship on the internet.”

The documentary explores how sex trafficking allegations were further amplified by the involvement of conservative organizations like the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), which positions itself as a defender against sexual exploitation, but in fact lobbies against all forms of sexual expression, including same-sex marriage, comprehensive sex education, and the decriminalization of consensual sex work. Their crusade against Pornhub brought about massive backlash toward the site, which was accused of profiting from user-uploaded content featuring child abuse and sex trafficking victims—a side effect of hosting porn from unverified sources.

For years, Pornhub seemed to consider this a cost of doing business—but, faced with massive reputational fallout, they removed 80 percent of unverified content in 2020, seemingly as a last resort. But for the consensual sex workers who relied on the site for revenue, it was too late—the bad press had already led credit card companies Visa and Mastercard to cut ties, which did little to curb the uploading of non-consensual content by users, but made it impossible for verified porn performers to sell their clips using popular payment processors on ModelHub.

As is often the case with efforts to crack down on the sex industry, individual sex workers were the ones to suffer from systemic changes intended to safeguard against exploitation—while the companies profiting off of it got away scot-free. This was also the case with the 2018 bill FOSTA-SESTA, a piece of legislation positioned as a bid to end child abuse—but which wound up making it harder to track and persecute sex trafficking online, resulting in increased liabilities for website, many of whom either shut down or effectively booted sex workers off their platforms. Alongside endangering the lives of precariously-employed workers, this incentivized social media platforms to further censor all forms of sexual content, for fear that they would be held liable for anything that slipped through the cracks.

The massive effort to expunge sex from the internet belies its formative role in the development of today’s most-used technologies, from the Playboy centerfold image software engineers used to develop formats like the JPEG, to Facebook’s origins as a “hot-or-not” rating site. With efforts to reform Section 230 currently underway, Pornhub’s meteoric rise and reputational downfall is just the latest entry in the clash between consent, cash, and censorship on the internet—showing that while tech companies may profit from sex workers’ labor, they’re the ones getting caught in the crosshairs.