Money Shot: The Pornhub Story

The documentary, which presents interview footage without narration, opens with subjects recounting their first memories of watching pornography. It interviews sex workers and individuals associated with the Canadian corporation Pornhub, including former employees, journalists, and legal figures. It also shows the filming, editing, and organization involved in the work of pornographic performers Gwen Adora and Siri Dahl. Pornhub began as a free tube site to watch pirated content, comparable to LimeWire for music or The Pirate Bay for movies. It was founded by three Concordia University students and sold to Fabian Thylmann of Aylo, a data company, in 2010. After Thylmann was convicted of tax evasion, Pornhub and Aylo came under the control of Feras Antoon and David Tassillo and investor Bernd Bergmair. Pornhub gained traction through search engine optimization (SEO) and turned a profit through advertisements and promotions. However, pornographic performers were unable to monetize their content on the website until the Modelhub feature in 2018. A civil lawsuit against Pornhub has 30 plaintiffs; it is led by lawyer Michael Bowe. The plaintiffs state that the company is complicit in non-consensual pornography that featured them, including revenge porn, videos of rape, and videos of child sexual abuse. Bowe accuses Pornhub of racketeering. On this subject, Dani Pinter, a representative of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), criticizes child sexual exploitation on Pornhub. The topic of child pornography victims is the subject of a 2020 article for The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof: "The Children of Pornhub". Around the same time, the Christian non-profit Exodus Cry led a campaign, '#Traffickinghub', that opposed sex trafficking content on Pornhub. Sex workers in the documentary characterize Exodus Cry as a far-right organization founded by an Evangelical preacher, whose mission is to end all sex work, and regard NCOSE, which was formerly called Morality in Media, in a smiliar light. Kristof's article and Exodus Cry's campaign led Mastercard and Visa to disallow payment processing with the company and caused Pornhub to ban uploads by unverified users. Kristof's article had suggested three changes to Pornhub: require user verification, prevent user download, and increase content moderation. Dahl said these were "insanely reasonable" measures that sex workers favored. However, according to Michael Stabile, most of Pornhub's income came from banner ads and so the credit card company boycotts primarily affected individual performers. A hearing of the Parliament of Canada investigates non-consensual content on Pornhub. Evidence is presented that, though Aylo cooperates with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to remove non-consensual content, content moderators have been expected to view at least 700 flagged videos per day—more than they can properly investigate. Stabile notes that, shortly after his location was mentioned in the Parliament of Canada, Aylo CEO Feras Antoon's mansion was burned down, although the culprit and motive are not known. Noelle Perdue criticizes Aylo, for whom she worked as a pornographic script writer, producer, and recruiter for three years. She says that not all Pornhub executives were aware of the U.S. bill FOSTA-SESTA (2018), which affected legal sex workers. Additionally, sex workers raise issues they face from other internet companies. For example, in October 2021, OnlyFans said that it would prohibit pornographic material. Adora says this left pornographic film actors like her in financially insecure positions. Dahl comments that website censorship is an issue for sex workers: their accounts on Instagram can be shadow banned even if no sexual material is posted, and sites like OnlyFans ban words associated with consensual sexual activity, such as "pegging". Allie Knox describes that changes to Craigslist increased danger to sex workers while making child traffickers harder to identify. ==Interviewees==

, New York Times columnist and author of "The Children of Pornhub" • Asa Akira, pornographic film actress and spokesperson for Pornhub • Bree Mills, pornographic director • Michael Bowe, legal representative for victims of non-consensual pornography on Pornhub • Whitney Burgoyne, ex-Pornhub employee • Siri Dahl, pornographic film actress • Gwen Adora, pornographic film actress • Cherie DeVille, pornographic film actress • Natassia Dreams, pornographic film actress and spokesperson for Pornhub • Wolf Hudson, pornographic film actor • Allie Knox, pornographic film actress • Noelle Perdue, ex-Aylo employee • Martin Patriquin, journalist for The Logic • Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times • Michael Stabile, spokesperson for the Free Speech Coalition • Dani Pinter, spokesperson for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation • Yiota Souras, spokesperson for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children ==Production==

The documentary was released on streaming platform Netflix on March 15, 2023, in around 65 countries. Hillinger described the central focus as "what sexuality and consent means when billion-dollar internet platforms thrive on user-generated content". According to Hillinger, NCOSE had "some questionable motives" but Pinter was knowledgeable, persuasive and did not refuse to answer difficult questions. Hillinger chose not to focus on the financial supporters of Exodus Cry or NCOSE, believing it would have distracted from larger themes of privacy, consent, and free speech. Hillinger wanted to center sex workers because she felt that they were underrepresented in Kristof's op-ed and media reporting. DeVille wrote in Rolling Stone that campaigns presenting as anti-sex-trafficking were right-wing, Christian, and anti-porn, and that Hillinger said the film would present this narrative. Though skeptical of being interviewed, DeVille agreed to participate, choosing to use soft colors and wear clothing that covered her skin to mitigate being portrayed as unintelligent or untruthful. Filming took place at a rented cottage outside Los Angeles over four hours. She said that she neither hated nor loved the film and did not regret her role in it. Adora's Instagram account was suspended on the day that Money Shot premiered and Hillinger's was suspended one week later. ==Reception==

Netflix stated that in its first week, Money Shot was streamed for 13million hours; it was the fourth-most-watched film on the platform. It reached the top ten in each country it was available in. It was rated 2.5 out of 5 stars by News24 and 2 stars by The Indian Express and The Guardian. In a review for Jezebel, however, Rich Juzwiak wrote that it "excels at teasing out the nuances" of the topic. Barry Hertz suggested in The Globe and Mail that it was too slow-paced. Noel Murray of Los Angeles Times thought its runtime was too short, but that it contained irrelevant sexually explicit content. However, reviewers largely found the tone unsalacious Various comments were made on the overall message of the documentary. The title is a pun, referring both to Pornhub's revenue streams and a cum shot in pornography. Bradshaw believed the documentary presented these workers as "creative entrepreneurs and heroes of consenting sensuality". Rife said that, in the context of a longstanding clash of feminist views on pornography, it centered the underrepresented views of sex workers. Gleiberman said that documentary gives "detached and sobering" analysis of the campaigners claims. Juzwiak opined that the documentary succeeds in showing that "anti-sex operatives" are capitalizing on a legitimate backlash to sexual exploitation with a "narratively compelling" reveal of NCOSE's political agenda, albeit one that "somewhat confuses the message". Similarly, it was conspicuous to Bradshaw that Exodus Cry's Laila Mickelwait was not interviewed. ==See also==