Front Burner - Front Burner Presents: The Pornhub Empire

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

How did a handful of competitive foosball players in Montreal create the world’s largest online porn site? And what do a picturesque Dutch cabin, thousands of pornographic VHS tapes, and the subprime mortgage crisis have to do with it?This is episode 1 of The Pornhub Empire: Understood. Hosted by Samantha Cole.More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/Dey46feN

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi everyone. So today we have something different for you. It's the first episode of the new season of Understood, a podcast feed we started to feature short-run miniseries. This one is about Pornhub.

As you may know, it is one of the most frequented sites on the internet. And it actually got its start in Montreal. If you like what you hear, the second episode is already available. Just look up The Pornhub Empire Understood wherever you get your podcasts, and you can follow for future seasons too. Colin Roundtree makes pornography. We were sharing a lot in Montreal. We've got a femdom up there who's worked with us for 20 years at this point. We would go up usually every other month or so. And over the course of his three decades

in the business, he's seen some good times. I can't really get into specifics, but we own two very nice, large country homes that we paid for in cash, if that shows you anything. We would fly to the weekend to Paris just for fun. You can kind of do the math. These were really good days.

It was during this boom around 2006 that Colin caught a sense of the turbulence ahead, both for himself and for the whole porn world. And this happened at a small industry event in Montreal. I was at a show that's still kind of going. It's a little tiny show. It's called Quebec Expo. And at that show, probably sitting there at happy hour at 4 p.m. networking, having a scotch and soda or something like that. And somebody says, hey, you want to go meet these guys?

They got an idea. They look kind of cool. I somebody says, hey, you want to go meet these guys? They got an idea. They look kind of cool. I was like, yeah, let's get a cab. So we went and there we walk into a dingy old bar with foosball tables. They were like bros. I mean, yeah, we're going to do some shots now. Yeah.

And let's make some money. Yeah. Make some money. That's who they were. They were bros. These bros didn't seem all that special to Colin. I mean, they were just guys.

You know, I've seen so many come and go. I think we just played foosball and drank beer. And I told him what I did. And I said, well, that's cool. You're doing porn. Yeah, we're looking at

putting together this thing kind of like YouTube. I said, really? I said, that's cool. And're doing porn. Yeah, we're looking at putting together this thing kind of like YouTube. I said, really? I said, that's cool. And that was it. I mean, it was just a, you know, 45 minutes drinking beer with these guys. The interaction was short, even unremarkable. But Collins still remembers it to this day because the YouTube knockoff they were describing over foosball and beer would go on to become a little website called Pornhub. I'm going to guess you don't actually need me to tell you what Pornhub is, but just in case. It's one of the busiest porn sites in the world. Actually, with about 100 million visits a day, it's one of

the busiest websites in the world. This site you only access on your browser's incognito mode, it gets way more hits than Netflix. I'm a journalist, and I've been covering the adult industry for seven years now. And there's no avoiding this site or the company that owns it. It's an absolute behemoth. But because of the stigma around porn, it's treated as if it's fringe instead of what it really is, one of Canada's biggest cultural exports. One of the things I love about my job is reporting on how people are using technology in new and horny ways. Porn has given us some major innovations. Webcams, online payment systems, social media, and online shopping were all popularized by porn.

My earliest experiences on the internet involved hours of chatting with people around the world about gender, religion, and yeah, sex. As a homeschooled evangelical kid, being able to share those things with people online, across distances, anonymously, was a revelation and freeing. So sex on the internet is a powerful force, but it's not always such a positive one. In 2019, I started reporting on sexual abuse material posted to Pornhub. By 2020, this issue became a major scandal,

one that disturbed the public, shook the industry, and even led to calls for Pornhub to be shut down entirely. But Pornhub is still going today, and its impact and influence reaches beyond the scandals. So how did a site started by a few foosball-loving bros in Montreal transform the way we view porn? I'm Samantha Cole, and this is Episode 1, Free Porn for Everyone. I suppose it's a bit ironic that a company built on other people stripping down has a history of revealing very little about itself. But the truth is, not much is known about how Pornhub got its start. Most of what we do know comes from two sources. A 2011 profile in New York Magazine written from the AVNs, basically the Oscars of porn. And a more recent piece in Vanity Fair that came out after the now former CEO's Montreal mansion was torched in an unsolved arson

attack. Here are the bones of the origins story. Stefan Manos and Wissam Youssef met at Concordia University. They started dabbling in the online porn world, experimenting with these thumbnail galleries of pictures called TGPs. In 2004, they launched a site called Brazzers. They met Matt Kieser through the world of competitive foosball. Apparently, these guys were like really into foosball. And in 2007, they created the YouTube-inspired Pornhub. While this site would come to define porn's future, the story goes that Kieser bought the Pornhub domain from someone he met at the Playboy Mansion, this symbol of porn's past.

By 2010, the three were out, having sold their porn assets to a German tech guy. The German sold those assets a few years after that to two of his Montreal managers, plus one reclusive Austrian. But I think it's worth stepping back for a bit now. Let's talk about what the online porn world looked like before Pornhub came on the scene to get a better sense of how it changed the game. Angie, do you want to do the creation story or you want me to? Well, we have slightly different. Let me go first and then Angie can. Oh, I've just to go first. But I've got such a good one. Okay. Go ahead. When we first started,

there literally were... There was nobody. I mean, we didn't know how to connect with people. There were a few other websites out there floating around. There weren't any pay sites yet. Colin stumbled into the world

of online porn almost by accident. His wife, Angie, had a mail-order catalog where she sold new-agey trinkets and like Celtic jewelry. In the 90s, they put that catalog online. One day, they're at a trade show type event for the catalog and Colin wanders by a booth called Babylon Leather,

which sold BDSM accessories. I said to the guy, I said, you know, do you have some photos of this sort of stuff that I could sort of mail out a catalog on that and you could be our supplier? He said, absolutely. So he gave me like, I don't know, maybe 18 or 20, you know, very nice photos of pretty girls in leather with their boobs half out and collars and cuffs and things like that. And I had a friend, because we had to somehow digitize them. This was before anybody ever had a scanner.

So I had a friend who worked at a mental institution in Massachusetts as an attendant. And he said, oh, I can scan those for you. I can sneak into the office and do it. His buddy scans the photos. The photos go in the online mail order catalog. And, you know, mail order catalog never really did very well. But people were going there and looking at the pictures because we were paying an arm and a leg in bandwidth fees. So we're getting bombarded with, you know, people, you know, going to the website to look at the pictures of the 18 pretty girls.

So I said, you know, I said, how do you think maybe we should maybe charge people to look at these pictures? And she says, well, that'd be, yeah, that'd be nice. But who's, who's going to do that? I said, well, let's try it. So, you know, we put up a thing, you know, 10 bucks, 10 bucks to look at all the, look at everything. We lost it like on a Thursday afternoon with a way to get ahold of us by fax and by phone and by email. And the next morning we woke up to like $360 worth of $10 sales. It was amazing. I was like, whoa, I think we just been onto something. So literally that's how Wasteland.com was born.

He got it actually pretty close. Good job, honey. Wasteland was one of the very first so-called pay sites, where you could go and pay to look at porn online. This was 1994. By 1997, enough of an industry had started to crop up that online pornographers and webmasters had their own little trade show. Kind of like the fateful one where Angie and Colin came across the leather booth, but for internet porn. The first show,

we went down to Secaucus, New Jersey, and it looked like it was, oh, it's at a Hilton. That's cool. But we get there, and the place still had the Hilton sign on it, but it had gone bankrupt

some years before and was owned privately, but not maintained. Oh, that's horrible. So we go in, and the place is basically kind of a dump. There were no screens in the windows. There was one big room that like 50 or 60 of us all met every day for these group talks and presentations and people giving little workshops.

And then we went back up to the room after the first night, and the room was completely filled with these massive mayflies that came out of the Secaucus swamp, filled the entire room. So we're smacking bugs and trying to figure out how to get the window closed. So I think that was one of the, I think that may have been the first show we went to. These industry events wouldn't stay swampy for long. The online porn business continued to grow. Angie starts her own site, specifically catering to women, called Shush.com.

And by the early aughts, life was good for the couple. 2005, 2006 were those were really, really good years. You know, basically the big ramp up and, you know, when money rained down from the sky started around 2001 through like 2005.

Audiences would gladly pay to see what Angie and Colin had up on their sites, which by this point had evolved beyond scanned photos of women in leather corsets to hardcore videos. Imagine what an exciting time this must have been for the poor and curious. For years, the only real way to get your hands on any adult material would have been to face a clerk at a corner store and buy a raunchy magazine or duck into the curtained back room of a video rental shop.

Now you could type in your credit card information from the privacy of your own home. So it wasn't just Colin and Angie who were doing well. The whole online porn industry was thriving. But Angie saw trouble on the horizon. I can remember one of the trade shows. Somebody said, I've got a great idea. I put together a meeting. It was like the original seven or eight site owners, right? And we have a proposal for you. So we go into this back room at this hotel and they're talking to us about TGPs, thumbnail galleries.

And they're saying, this is the new big thing. And we were all squawking going, no, no, no. We're not gonna give away free content. And that was just pictures. And they said, well, you don't have to give away anything explicit. It's just kind of the lead up and they don't have to be really big.

And then we have a link over to your site and then people can go see the rest of it. And we were squawking at that. And I think everybody knew if we started with the pictures, how long would it be until it was video? And we all knew where it was going to go. We all knew where it was going to lead. where it was going to go. We all knew where it was going to lead. YouTube went online in 2005. And the Pornhub bros in Montreal weren't the only ones thinking,

what if we did YouTube, but for porn? Another guy got there first. He was looking at the early success of YouTube. And I don't know how he didn't get sued for it and lose the domain, but he went out and he registered the domain YouPorn. And he hired this lovely older couple, Randy and Richie, and said, okay, I want you to go and live in Holland. And all you're going to do is take all of these VHS tapes. We want you to

review every single one of them. And they were there for six months in this little, in the guy's mother-in-law's little cottage surrounded by tulips, basically reviewing the original 7,000 movies that were cut into short clips for YouPorn. And that's what they did. We called Richie. He's 77 now and lives in a retirement community with his wife, Randy. The couple really did get hired to buy and review thousands of European porn videos to help fill up YouPorn's site in its early days. And they really did do the work from an idyllic Dutch cottage. But Richie says it took nine weeks, not six months. The cottage wasn't his mother-in-law's.

It was his European porn broker's late grandmother's. And it wasn't surrounded by tulips, but there was a view of a windmill. U-Porn went live in 2006, mimicking not just YouTube's name, but its logo and layout. It's absolutely startling because what the mistake was, was that just like YouTube, that he basically, you know, basically cloned the entire concept. It wasn't just putting up your curated content that you got legitimately. He allowed users to set up their own account

and upload things. User-generated content. That was a death blow for the adult industry right there was allowing, you know, guy at home living in mom's basement in his underwear to go and rip a DVD or rip a VHS tape and upload it. Like we're not talking about a two minute clip. We're talking about a 30 minute clip, 60 minutes of it and putting it up on their you porn account. And at that point they were just doing it almost like for an ego thing. I mean, the guys that were the consumers that were on there, they were basically going for what we would call today likes and status. They would put it up and they wanted to get a lot of comments to make them feel really good about themselves for having a really good library on there. You know, it's all very much it was a hobby. And a lot of them at that point, they didn't even know that they were stealing.

It didn't take long for others to launch their own versions of these kinds of sites. The year the world basically ended was 2007. That's when Pornhub, Xvideos, all the Eastern European ones came along. That was the same year that, do you remember the mortgage crisis and the subprime crisis and the world economy's collapsing? And That was the same year that, do you remember the mortgage crisis and the subprime crisis

and the world economy's collapsing? And right in the middle of that was the tubes, giving away free stuff. When, you know, Joe Blow had no money and his mortgage was due, but he still wanted

to watch some porn, it was a perfect storm. You know, the world economic crisis, the subprime mortgage, the whole thing that fell apart, and the troops all hit. And it literally decimated the adult industry of what it was before then. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization.

Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income?

That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. YouPorn, RedTube, Xvideos, and of course Pornhub were all what you would call tubes. Massive collections of video clips uploaded by producers, users, amateurs, whomever, arranged in grids of seemingly endless choice.

In these early days, there was no real requirement to prove that the content you were uploading for everyone else to see, for free, was actually yours to share. So, piracy became rampant. Long clips, even entire movies, were ripped and posted on tubes like Pornhub. The same thing was happening in other creative industries too. like Pornhub. The same thing was happening in other creative industries too. Remember Napster? LimeWire? The you-wouldn't-steal-a-car ad that played on DVDs? In the early 2000s, people were getting comfortable with the idea that if it made its way online, it was free for the taking. With rampant piracy came plummeting profits for music, movies, and especially porn. There were reports of some porn studios losing as much as 80% of their revenue in this period.

This led to panic among producers and performers, who tried to push back, even creating totally PG public service announcements starring big names in the industry. Thousands of people that work behind the scenes in the adult industry are hurt by content theft. Many of us have families that we support with our income. We pay taxes and contribute to local economies. And while the performers, artists, producers, and retailers are losing money, the guys that run the illegal tube and torrent sites are making money. By exploiting material that doesn't belong to them.

And they do not care about the consumer either. Tubes like Pornhub weren't just causing anxiety within the adult industry. They were also causing anger. Who wants to feel like their work, their time, their sweat, is worthless? When I talked to performer Tasha Rain about it, she sounded genuinely pissed off. And let me just state the obvious here. People who work in the adult industry don't usually go by their legal names publicly. When you're a performer, an artist, and you see your work that was supposed to be behind a paywall,

just free online for everybody, it's fucking disgusting. It makes the art devalued to zero, and it makes you feel like that is just what, you know, people feel about you. As an artist, it's a horrible feeling. Despite the industry's efforts to push back, with PSAs, even lawsuits suing the Tubes, audiences very quickly formed new expectations that they could access virtually unlimited free porn of any type or genre imaginable on their web browser.

And not just that. The Tubes offered a way to watch it without handing over any identifying information. No logging in, no credit card number. It became that much easier for even the most casually curious consumer to check out porn. the most casually curious consumer to check out porn. In 2014, at a press junket for the Marvel hit Captain America Winter Soldier, a reporter asks the cast which pop culture invention of the last 50 years they'd recommend to the superhero. Chris Evans answers blandly, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin

Scarlett Johansson gets a bit more creative saying cake pops and Samuel L. Jackson deadpans Red Tube Red Tube, yet another tube site being breezily picked by a Hollywood legend as one of the most significant inventions of the last half century. But Colin had already seen the writing on the wall.

Because everybody was screaming bloody murder about, oh my God, the tubes, the tubes, the tubes. Oh my God, oh my God, we need to fight these tubes. We need to take those tubes down. And I know human nature and I know business and I know Machiavellian economics. And I knew these goddamn things weren't going to go away. So I got a hold of all the guys. So instead of fighting him, Colin joined him. While others left the porn world, no longer making the good money they used to,

Wasteland became what's called a content partner. He'd give Pornhub some material, they'd link back to his pay site, and Colin hands over a cut of whatever revenue Pornhub sends his way. He and Angie still have a comfortable life in the porn business all these years later. But when he thinks back to that encounter

in the Montreal bar 20 years ago... If I could go back to that moment in time right now, knowing what would come, I would have said, here's $200,000. I would like you to invest in what you're doing. Here, I'm going to own 20% of your company. That's what I would do. I've mentioned a number of tube sites in this episode. Pornhub, of course. YouPorn, widely considered the first. RedTube, Samuel L. Jackson's favorite.

They all attracted legions of viewers. But Pornhub would become the most popular of the bunch. The former CEO credited their advantage to the use of search engine optimization. He once bragged that their SEO was by far the best in the world. And claimed Pornhub was the top result for people searching the terms porn and sex. But here's the thing. It probably didn't matter too much to Pornhub if they were more popular than RedTube or YouPorn, because by 2013, Pornhub owned them both.

Pornhub's parent company, which has had several owners and gone by several names, from ManWin to MindGeek to now ALO, was consolidating power. They were snapping up rival tube sites and major pay sites and studios too. They owned browsers and mofos and bought Reality Kings and Digital Playground and more.

I don't expect you to have heard of all of these, but trust me when I say they are all major players in the porn industry. And now they were all under one umbrella. So regardless of how Pornhub offended the industry with their cavalier approach to copyright, they weren't going anywhere. Performer Tasha Rain. Really, and they were able to build their brand on stealing adult content that was made as Pirates Online, which everybody already knows, not questioned. But they were able to then, you know, kind of come back and present themselves in a way to the adult industry that was like, hey, we're here to stay. If you don't get on the ship, you can't really be in the adult industry. So a lot of people got on board, but I'm not here to blame anybody. I just have never been a huge fan of them. And now,

you know, they're an integral part of the porn industry. On this season of Understood, the Pornhub Empire. How this Montreal-founded company came to dominate the adult industry, making Pornhub synonymous with online porn itself, only to have its reputation obliterated in a massive scandal and where it's left standing today. On the next episode... They would throw incredibly lavish parties around the holidays and I remember they had like Cirque du Soleil-style performers

that would come down on a ribbon to refill your champagne glass. Pornhub is the company that's getting mentioned on late night talk shows. Pornhub is the company that's collaborating with mainstream celebrities. I think that there was a general attitude of we're too big to fail. You've been listening to The Pornhub Empire, Understood. This series is produced by CBC Podcasts and CBC News. The show was written by producer Imogen Burchard, with me, Samantha Cole. Associate producer, Sam Connert.

Sound design by Julia Whitman and Sam Connert. Sarah Clayton is our digital coordinating producer. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez, Chris Oak, and Nick McCabe-Locos. Okay, there's a second episode of the Pornhub Empire available. You can just search the Pornhub Empire wherever you get your podcasts and follow the feed. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you on Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.