Money Shot: The Pornhub Story
マネーショット: Pornhubは語る
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
The platform, the performers who depend on it and the campaigners who want it gone; nobody is fully right.
Money Shot: The Pornhub Story tells the history of the world's best-known pornography site mostly through people who make porn for a living. There is no narrator. It opens with its subjects remembering the first porn they saw, then follows two performers at work: Gwen Adora, who shoots, edits and markets her own videos, and Siri Dahl. Modelhub, a programme Pornhub launched in 2018, had let them earn from their own work there.
The film then sets out who owns it. Pornhub began as a free site full of pirated videos, started by three students at Concordia University and sold in 2010 to Fabian Thylmann. After his conviction for tax evasion the company, later MindGeek and now Aylo, passed to Feras Antoon, David Tassillo and Bernd Bergmair. Its money came from search traffic, data and advertising. Noelle Perdue, who spent three years writing, producing and recruiting for it, recalls a chief executive who had never heard of FOSTA-SESTA, the 2018 American law that had made sex workers' lives more dangerous.
Then the scandal. Anyone could upload anything, and videos of rape and of child sexual abuse had been posted. In December 2020 Nicholas Kristof's New York Times column 'The Children of Pornhub' landed alongside #Traffickinghub, a campaign led by the Christian group Exodus Cry. Mastercard and Visa cut the site off, and Pornhub barred uploads from unverified users. Canada's parliament questioned its executives and heard that moderators had been expected to review at least 700 flagged videos a day. The performers back Kristof's proposals (verification, no downloads, more moderators) but say campaigners such as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation want all sex work gone, and that the card ban hurt performers far more than the company. Its last stretch turns to censorship spreading across the internet. A speaker calls porn the canary in the coal mine of free speech, and the final scenes follow Siri Dahl on a shoot.
Starring
Siri DahlHerself
An adult performer filmed at work, who calls Kristof's proposed safeguards 'insanely reasonable' and describes being shadow-banned online.
Gwen AdoraHerself
An independent performer who shoots, edits and markets her own videos, and whose income became precarious as platforms turned against explicit work.
Noelle PerdueHerself
A former Pornhub writer, producer and recruiter who also worked on the film as archivist and fact-checker, and criticises her old employer from the inside.
Nicholas KristofHimself
The New York Times columnist whose December 2020 column 'The Children of Pornhub' set the crackdown in motion.
Dani PinterHerself
Senior legal counsel at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly Morality in Media, who makes the campaigners' case against the site.
Michael StabileHimself
Director of public affairs at the Free Speech Coalition, who argues that the card ban hurt performers far more than Pornhub, which lived on advertising.
Why it matters
Money Shot sets two harms side by side and refuses to trade one for the other. Videos of rape and of abused children were posted on a site that earned from traffic and checked far too little of what it carried; that is the scandal, and the performers in the film call the fixes Kristof proposed insanely reasonable. But the remedy that came, a payment ban pushed partly by groups the performers say want all sex work abolished, fell hardest on adults who had consented to their work and were paid for it. Underneath lies a question every platform now faces: who decides what the internet may carry, and who pays when it is decided badly. Critics split over whether the film is even-handed or on the performers' side. What it does do is let sex workers talk about consent, money and risk at length, in their own words.