How Pornhub Changed the World of Pornography

Although Pornhub wasn’t the first tube site, it still remains on top 15 years after its launch. The site was a good partner to studios and creators and helped to promote their content. It changed the way people entered and worked in the industry and even laid the groundwork for other sites such as OnlyFans. Anna Iovine, reporter at Mashable, joins Oscar Ramirez for how Pornhub changed the world.

 

Next, social media influencers are being given free or discounted beauty procedures in exchange for promotional posts and some of them are starting to regret it.  Surgeons, clinics and med spas cannot advertise through official channels on platforms like TikTok, but they are able to make deals with influencers to make posts advertising their products.  For the influencers themselves, they say that some of these procedures can be addictive, beginning with lip fillers and botox, and then moving on to facial surgeries, all to look good for their social media followers.  Kat Tenbarge, tech and culture reporter at NBC News, joins Oscar Ramirez for more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Thursday, September. I'm producer Victor right in Los Angeles
and this is the Daily Dive. Although porn Hub wasn't
the first tube site, it still remains on top fifteen
years after its launch. The site was a good partner

(00:20):
to studios and creators and helped to promote their content.
It changed the way people entered and worked in the industry,
and evenly the groundworked for other sites such as Only Fans.
Anna Iovine, reporter at mash Double, joins Oscar Mirrors for
how porn Hub changed the world next. Social media influencers

(00:40):
are being given free or discounted beauty procedures in exchange
for promotional posts, but now some of them are starting
to regret it. Surgeons, clinics and med spas cannot advertise
through official channels on platforms like TikTok, but they are
able to make deals with the influencers to make posts
advertising their products and services for the influencers themselves. They

(01:05):
say that some of these procedures can be addictive, beginning
with lip fillers and botox and then moving on to
facial surgeries, all to look good for their social media followers.
Cat ten Bars Tech and Culture reporter NBC News joins
Oscar Mirrors for more It's news without the noise. Let's
dive in and what independent creators might find is if

(01:28):
they're trying to do something different than that, like you know,
an arts twelve minute video, it might not get the
views and thus might not sell as much as these
other videos that pop off on Pornhub. Joining us now
is Anna Iovine, reporter at Matchable. Thanks for joining us, Anna,
Thanks for having me. Well, let's talk about an interesting topic,
porn Hub and how it changed the world, or at

(01:49):
least the world of porn. You know, it's been around
for fifteen years, so I guess a milestone for them,
but really just kind of really emerged in what was
called tube sites and just soften you know a lot
of the times it was a pirated content at the beginning,
but these things have kind of become the mainstream of
the porn world now and it's just, guys, an interesting history.

(02:10):
Uh and like I said, the impact and content that
this particular site has had, so and help us walk
through some of it. Yes, you're absolutely right. Porn Hub
is a tube site which is a website where users upload,
often pioted content for others to stream, and before two
tho five, which was when YouTube was founded, that was
pretty much impossible. Not only was it very hard for

(02:32):
non tech experts to upload content to the Internet, but
it was also just the technology wasn't there to stream content.
So in terms of porn, people often watched through dp
d s or they downloaded videos. But when YouTube started,
it wasn't It didn't take along for the adult industry
to start using that technology as well. So tube site
started popping up in two thousand and six with the

(02:53):
Red Tube and you Porn, and then porn Hub came
onto the scene in two thousand seven. It was actually
founded by the unders of Browsers, which is a porn studio,
So they were sort of using similar content for their
own websites, right, and at that point they kind of knew, uh,
the industry, and with the emerging technology, they were kind

(03:14):
of able to marry it perfectly for their purposes. And
you know, just just an interesting side note kind of
on stories I've heard about how porn it gets involved
in technology. There's this kind of famous story of how
at one point the industry, the DVD industry was going
to either HD DVD or blue Rays, and because the
porn industry picked Blu Ray, that became the dominant medium

(03:36):
at that point. So just you know, they've always kind
of been at the forefront of these things. And you
mentioned in the article, Uh, they're the eighth most trafficked
website in the world, right in between Reddit and Walmart.
So I mean, you know, lots and lots of traffic
going through the site. And then just to continue on
all of this, you know a reason, you know, because
something comes up like this, right, there was tension in

(03:58):
the beginning where content creators all that we're having a
problem with these tube sites. But porn hub really became
a good partner, so to speak, in the business. Right,
they were giving a lot of people traffic to studios
and whatnot. In the partnership is really what propelled pornhub
to be one of the top tier sites. What's fascinating
about that is Pornhubb's parent company is called mine Geek,

(04:21):
and mine Geek purchased porn Hub in two thousand and ten,
and at the same time they purchased a slew of
other tube sites like the predecessors of porn Hub, as
well as studios like Digital Playground Reality King Shawn Cody.
So porn Hub is definitely a traffic partner for the studios.
But both porn Hub and many of the studios are
owned by the same parent company. And so what do

(04:41):
we make now of how creators can cash in by
using the website right now? Obviously, one of the other
big competitors we hear about a lot about right now
is only fans, and that's kind of that direct pipeline,
so to speak for content creators and their fans. Right
you can read the content, put it out there, p
will subscribe and buy stuff. How did it work for

(05:02):
porn Hub, at least on this front, So one of
the experts I spoke to said that porn have actually
laid the groundwork for only fans with products like model Hub.
The model Hub works similarly and that it allows individual
models who aren't attached to studio to upload and sell
content and subscriptions. So now only Fans has a very
similar model. So porn Hub is sort of thought of

(05:23):
to be the inception of this independent creator boom. We're
seeing the other part of this too. That's super interesting,
right we're talking about the impact that a website in
this industry has. You know, it's definitely had an impact
even on the content that people take in. Right. You
go through go through like the popular page, right, and
you see a number of different things. But even when

(05:45):
it comes down to the timing how long a video
could be, what you're shown in the video, it's kind
of reflected and impacted content everywhere else on only fans
and and other and other sites. On porn hub, what's
really successful is and it's that are a few minutes long,
like five to seven minutes, and doesn't involve just one
act but several and goes one after the other after

(06:06):
the other, and shots that are well lit and you
can hear the audio really crisply. And what independent creators
might find is if they're trying to do something different
than that, like you know, an arts twelve minute video,
it might not get the views and thus might not
sell as much as these other videos that pop off
on porn Hub. Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting thing, right,
We're talking about this because this website now is fifteen

(06:29):
years old, and it's done a lot for the industry.
It's done a lot for itself obviously as as a
as a company and website but you know, just the
impacts that it's having pretty interesting. And one of the
people you spoke to said, you know, this has really
normalized conversations about the business of porn. There's still a
lot of stigma associated with the industry, but this site
has almost become synonymous with it. Right. It's kind of

(06:49):
like when you say xerox or Kleenex. You know, pornhub
is kind of like the shorthand for talking about the
tube sites. And that's Shure said that we talked about
porn Hub in a sort of sanitized way that we
talk about other tech companies like Amazon and Facebook. We
don't really talk about the people behind porn how we
just talked about, as you said, porn hub success and
how how you die it is for this industry. Well,

(07:11):
we'll keep an eye. We'll see how this, uh the
industry develops, how this website develops, and you know what
new emergent technology takes it into the next realm, right
meta versus coming up? Who knows what happens there, but
we'llt's keep it out for all of that. Annah Iovine,
reporter at match Double, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you again. My bas has forever change. I actually

(07:41):
at the time was getting flooded with dems, with companies
like reaching out and saying, hey, we would love to
have you come into a video whatever it was, to
help promote their business, and it was like a collaboration.
I mean, why would you say no to freelits or
free nos joining us now as Cat ten Bard, Tech
and Culture reporter at NBC News. Thanks for joining us, Cat,
thanks for having Let's talk about an interesting story about

(08:05):
social media influencers. You know, obviously it can be very
lucrative for young people looking to make brands of themselves
and for companies it's a good partnership a lot of
times when they need to get the word out about
their products. So there's a lot of that's kind of
how this economy works, Right, I'll post something on social media,
I'll give a shout out or you know, specifically state
this is an ad for so and so company or

(08:26):
so and so product, and the hits come and everybody
is happy. You know. A lot of this is tied
to the beauty industry, and now we're hearing about young
influencers that are being offered you know, either free or
discounted procedures such as boatox, breast augmentations, other things like that,
and they're saying that it can be kind of addictive.
They're saying that a lot of them regret it. So

(08:48):
CAT tell us a little bit more about this. So
over the past several years, obviously, beauty and aesthetics have
always been a huge focus of celebrity, whether that's in
the online world or in the real world. But as
these trends sort of take place on social media, we
began noticing this phenomenon where a lot of really young
influencers were becoming more transparent about the different types of

(09:12):
procedures that they were having done, some as early as
in their late teens and early twenties. And so I
started to dig deeper, and I spoke to around a
dozen influencers with anywhere from under a hundred thousand followers
to over twelve million. And what those people told me
is that, regardless of their followers size, they had all
been offered free or discounted cosmetic procedures in exchange for

(09:35):
posting about them online. So they sort of shadowy advertising
system kind of came to light, and what I was
able to find out was that it's actually not allowed
to go through TikTok's official channels, and some of these
other social media platforms have similar guidelines. Uh, So they
can't advertise the cosmetic procedures through TikTok itself, but they
can work with these influencers to kind of disguise vlogs

(09:59):
or before and after shoots as what it actually are,
actually in essence, advertisements. Who is paying for these, It's
gonna be surgeons, clinics, and med spaws, which is an
interesting subset of all of this. So all of these
industries have experienced a lot of growth, but med spaws
in particular have exploded. And this sort of explosion was

(10:21):
occurring before the pandemic, but even now, I feel like
I'm seeing more and ever more than ever just walking
down the street. Med spats are popping up, and the
concept of a med spot is really attractive to the
younger generation because it combines sort of the ease and
the availability of a day spa with the idea of
getting a procedure like lip filler or botox. And what

(10:43):
data is showing is that a lot of these med
spaws don't have the right people, people with actual medical
qualifications running them and actually doing these procedures on a
day to day basis. Okay, so this is an important
part of this because there is regulation when it comes
to a medical presure J's, breast augmentation, all this stuff,
they need to be done by licensed physicians, professionals, doctors,

(11:05):
all that. When it comes to the med spaws, it's differently.
They can be unlicensed people administering the stuff as long
as it's overseen by a physician. But I think you
had a stat in the story where it said, you know,
sometimes fifty of the times those physicians might not even
be on site exactly a lot of times you'll go
into a med spat and you might have your consultation

(11:27):
with the person who has the license that takes place
over face time. They may not physically be in the office.
They might work states away or cities away, and they
might manage multiple med spats at once. Yeah. Not so
not to say that, you know, people are doing nefarious
things in these places, but it just kind of proves
the point the ease of access. I mean, it's so
much easier to go into one of these places, get

(11:48):
the boatox, the fillers, all that stuff, and you know,
it's really not very difficult. So let's get back to
the influencers. Now, give me a couple of examples of
things that they're doing. One that you had in the story,
there was an influencer I guess she got two hundred
dollars off a six hundred dollar lip procedure. Yes, and
that procedure is really interesting because it's targeted toward individuals

(12:11):
who have already had lip filler. So the lip filler
procedure really rose in popularity after Kylie Jenner of the
iconic Kardashian family revealed that she had gotten them at
a really young age age fifteen to be exact. And
almost every influencer who I spoke to has had some
sort of lip filler procedure, and almost all of them
cited Kylie Jenner as their inspiration. So the lip blush

(12:34):
procedure that's now being advertised is for when you've had
so much lip filler that your lips have started to
lose their natural pigment. So what we're seeing is the
industry is not only serving a larger clientele of younger people,
but they're coming up with new procedures. Yeah. No, and
that's interesting because you know, you can see the lip
blush procedure. What you're talking about is kind of puts

(12:55):
like almost like a little tattoo type pigment on the lips.
As they mentioned that way they can keep that older.
But I did I didn't know that you start losing
some of that pigmentation with the increased amounts of lip fillers.
So definitely that's an interesting one. And then the feedback
loop starts. Right you get the discount there, you make
a TikTok post in exchange for that discount. In this
example that you had, they got six million views on

(13:17):
their account, which is great. At that point, you're getting
that free publicity. Now for whoever did the procedure, the
TikTok star could be making money on that part of
it as well, and you start creating more and more
and more. At that point exactly, you spoke to number
of people that you know, they said, you know, it
changed my face, It completely changed my structure. And you

(13:37):
spoke to a young man too, specifically where man you
can see the change in videos when he was younger
to the present day. His face does look completely different.
It's the jaws, more chisel, everything looks different. Yeah, it's
really extreme kind of the length that these influencers are
able to go to using material like filler, which wasn't

(13:58):
originally intent did to enhance job bones or cheap bones
in the way that it's being used now. But in
that case, that influencer went to a celebrity plastic surgeon
and you know, asked for this extreme modification and he
was able to afford it at that time. It raises
another interesting question of how do you up keep a

(14:19):
type of procedure like this. He pointed out that at
the time when he got the work done, he was
making much more money than he is right now, and
he no longer can afford to keep getting that same
procedure over and over and over again. So now he's
looking at having more permanent, reconstructive work done. And he's
still less than twenty five years old. To think that
you're making all this money as a youngster, you're going

(14:40):
to keep making that money and now you can't afford,
which you kind of started really the snowball effect of that.
Let's get back to a little bit about how the
ads work, because, as you mentioned, these people that are
doing the procedures, the clinics, the mets balls, all that
they can't officially advertise through TikTok channels through through the
official ad mechanism, And there's a difference between this organic

(15:00):
advertising and branded advertising. These ads, these partnerships that they
do with influencers don't really fall under the same rules.
And you know, I guess the FTC has got suggestions
that you should be marking things when you know hashtag
add but I think one of the influencers you spoke
to said she didn't do that. She positioned it as

(15:20):
a shout out to whoever did the procedures for her. Yes,
And in that case, the provider requested that the influencer
tagged them rather than use that ad hashtag, which is
interesting because with the FTC guidelines that exist, influencers should
not only use that hashtag, but should also make it
clear at the beginning, middle, and end of their video

(15:41):
that what they're doing is in fact a sponsored video.
In this case, she didn't do any of that. And
while it could be something that could be a violation
of the FTC Act, the FTC really has not cracked
down on influences in this way yet, and I feel
like it's difficult to judge the scale of how this
is operating app. But I imagine that it's quite large. Yeah, definitely. Okay,

(16:02):
So now responses from from major players in this. Let's
start with the American med Spas Association, Right, this is
a big player in this, representing these medical spas. How
do they feel about this and when stories like this
pop up? Because you know, there's some good statistics in
the article, Right, the young people in the early twenties

(16:23):
and teens really still a small portion of the overall
UH industry here plastic surgery and so forth, but it's
a growing part of the industry, and they've set acknowledged it.
They said they're younger people are coming in asking for
more extreme types of procedures. Yes. When I consulted with
professionals and certified plastic surgeons as well as people who

(16:46):
operate med spas, the common refrain that I heard was, yes,
they are noticing that the patients are getting younger. Yes,
they are seeing the effect that social media is having
on those young people, and it creates a sort of
ethical and moral gray area where it's basically up to
each provider to determine how they're going to service this
young population or if they're going to service them. At all.

(17:09):
I think with some plastic surgeons they focus on older
patients because older patients typically have more work that they
want to get done. There's more an underlying reason for
them to get that type of reconstructive work done. But
then with younger people, you have an opportunity to apply
these social media advertising techniques and potentially bring in a
much bigger population of people as well as people who

(17:32):
may start young and start with perhaps minimally or less
invasive procedures, but at the age you know, that's a
population that's going to continue coming back and continuing to
get these procedures. So it really opens the door two people,
you know, being able to profit off of this population
starting younger and younger totally. I mean, when you look

(17:52):
at growth potential for a business, right you have your
set core, right, these would be older people, let's say,
and you need to grow somewhere else, you start targeting
them younger. As you mentioned, they'll start small and keep
going bigger. TikTok. What do they say about all this?
Because you know, the social media platforms obviously always get
rolled into this, whether it's a Twitter, Instagram, whatever it is,

(18:13):
a lot of this is taking place on TikTok because
it is a primarily video platform. What do they say
about this? So TikTok is also aware that you know,
the span and the size of these hashtags is enormous.
And when it comes to advertising on TikTok's platform, there
are two different types. There's branded and organic. TikTok doesn't

(18:34):
seem to moderate organic advertisements as much as it does
branded because when you're electing to do a branded advertisement,
you have to go through TikTok itself and they can
approve or disapprove of whatever ads you want to sell
through their platform, And TikTok actually doesn't allow any cosmetic
providers to advertise any of those services through branded ads.

(18:56):
All of those people, however, are continuing to advertise by
just making the ads organically rather than paying TikTok to
show this in the for you page. They're going to
an influencer who's then making the video and then organically
going viral on their own. Cat ten Bard, Tech and
Culture reporter at NBC News, Thank you very much for
joining us. Thanks so much. All right, that's it for today.

(19:24):
Join us on social media at Daily Dive Pod on
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Follow us on our Heart Radio, or subscribe wherever you
get your podcasts. This episode that Daily Dive was produced
by Yours Truly, Victor Wright, engineered by Tony Sorrentino, and
hosted by Oscar Emiris. I'm producer Victor Wright, and this

(19:49):
was your Daily Dive