June 6, 2022 • 32 mins
Stoya is a porn star who saw first-hand how a firehose of free porn online transformed the adult industry.
She sends hosts Alex Barker and Patricia Nilsson a quest: Find out who is in charge, and get to the bottom of how the business of porn really works.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Okay, we're going to start with a warning. This
series is full of adult themes and has some graphic
sex talk. Now, you know, let's get into it. How
did it feel to you to be taken over by
a company that no one knew anything about. Well, the
(00:38):
deeper I got into it, the more concerned I became
about just the general level of secrecy around the company.
The money has to move, sometimes from a personal account,
sometimes from a business account. That sounded a bit sketchy
to me. If you play that fast and loose in
that environment, I have to assume that you're playing that
fast and loose in every environment. That environment she's talking about,
(01:03):
it's pornography. Kelly Holland would know. She's been a fixture
of the porn industry since the nineties. She even ran
one of its most famous brands, Penthouse that has until
she lost it to a mystery investor. And for the
industry at large, does it matter that you have these
conglomerates that are buying loads of the industry and we
(01:26):
don't really know who ownest these companies. I don't think
it's healthy. I think it's very problematic. It's healthy for
somebody's bottom line and it's healthy for shareholders, but I
don't think it's healthy for clients, consumers and the general climate.
You know, you can make a choice in business to
be friendly competitors, which is the healthiest way to go
(01:48):
and the most profitable way to go, or you can
be enemies. I'm Patrician Neilson and I'm a reporter for
the Financial Times. I write about business. Some days it's
a fashion chain, on others it's tobacco or cannabis startup.
But recently my job has mainly involved porn. I started
(02:13):
writing about the industry about three years ago, but I
have to admit this last year it's become an obsession.
Business papers don't usually write about the porn industry, even
though it basically owns a big corner of the Internet.
That in itself made me curious. Why wouldn't we write
about porn just like we do with any other legal industry.
(02:34):
And I think it's because no one really likes to
talk about porn. We're embarrassed to even though most of
us have watched it at some point. It's taboo. And
so I started where any business reporter would. This is
(02:54):
just an industry with companies, right I can normally figure
out who the arnests are, how much money they make,
how they're regulated, but porn it turned out that porn
was whirled apart. The whole industry depends some performers to
literally bear it all, but basic information about the businesses
who run the industry are kept like a state secret.
(03:17):
I kept finding names that weren't names, and companies that
weren't companies. It often felt like I was wandering around
a maze, you know, that strange sense of never knowing
where you're heading or how anything's connected. Turns that lead
to unexpected places, like those murky transactions that Kelly Holland
talked about. What were they for? What were they hiding?
(03:41):
Who or what is behind the business of porn? And
you know what, the Financial Times we qual it the ft.
They encouraged me to keep going to report this out,
and my boss he got sucked into. That's me, Alex Barker.
I manage Patricia's team of business reporters, but my main
(04:04):
job is writing about the media industry, the Murdocks, Netflix,
that kind of thing. When Patricia asked to look into pawn,
I knew it wasn't exactly the FT's cup of tea.
But it was different and intriguing and only career threatening
if we really botched it up. So I said, sure,
see what you can find, and bit by bit, this
(04:27):
story of the power behind pawn drew me into It
started with a routine email from Patricia, a little update
on her reporting, with a bombshell buried halfway down. She said,
I think I found the secret owner of the world's
biggest pawn company, and she had, but it was just
(04:48):
the first turn in that maze. Once we started following
the leads, we soon realized we weren't just tracking one
man or one company, but power. And that's when I
really got hooked. Because this industry has outsized influence, truly enormous,
over our culture, over the way my kids learn about sex,
(05:10):
over almost eight percent of all Internet traffic. So as journalists,
we decided to give the subject a time it deserves.
We'd report on the business of porn and the kind
of way the ft would report on any other industry.
We wanted to work out who made online porn what
it is today, understand who the real decision makers are,
(05:33):
what's driving their choices. Basically, to work out who rules porn.
We spent months roving around. We interviewed bankers, porn stars,
bankers who became porn stars, even a New York billionaire
(05:56):
who helped change the industry with one text message. And
after all that, we found some answers away out of
a great maze of porn land to a place we
definitely didn't expect to an up. This is Hot Money,
a show about power and finance from Pushkin Industries and
The Financial Times. Act one story's story. We started by
(06:53):
setting up a chat with one of the smartest people
in porn. I'm a career pornographer. I'm an artist. What's
completely normal and an average Tuesday to me is completely
fascinating to like the whole rest of the world. This
(07:15):
is Jessica. You might know her from her stage name Stayer.
We wanted to talk to a Stayer because she's been
there for all the big changes that were interested in.
Stayers won the equivalent of an adult Oscar. She's been
a headline star and a bit of an alternative porn icon.
She's written a book, run literary book clubs, and her
columns have appeared in The New York Times and Slate.
(07:37):
Her fans all over the world have bought thousands of
sex toys molded on her vagina. This is my first
proper interview with a porn star. I wasn't exactly in
my comfort zone, so I started with a softball question
just to warm things up. Can you tell me a
bit about you know, where you grew up and school family. No,
(07:57):
I am here as a porn star, so we don't
talk about my life before I turned eighteen. I think
it's inappropriate. That's absolutely fine. I didn't realize that, so
I wouldn't have asked if I had no worries. But
there are some strange people in the world who will
fetishize those details and then message me about it, and
it makes me feel gross. So I just have a
(08:19):
blackout before I turned eighteen. Absolutely, Story is not afraid
to speak her mind or step on toes, whether they
belong to porn kingpin or a news reporter. At this stage,
what we really wanted to speak Story about were her
early years in the industry, a time when online video
streaming changed the porn industry forever. I started out. First,
(08:43):
I was go go dancing, Then I was posing for
alternative nude sites, and then I signed a contract to
be a performer in hardcore video with a studio called
Digital Playground. Hi, I'm Stoya. Now we're gonna very quietly
(09:08):
go to hell then have sex on came which sounds
like shooting a form, which is not anything I would ever,
this is a vacation travel now. Back then, in two
thousand and seven, this was a big thing on core
studios like Digital Playground shoot graphic sex, but much like
(09:29):
the old Hollywood studio system, they had contract stars. The
performers were literally paid not to work for anybody else.
The fact this happened at all was a sign of
the times. The Internet was bringing pawn into millions of homes,
but it was mainly images or grainy video, so consumers
still wanted the studio stuff. The online business co existed
(09:50):
with the old industry. Pawn DVDs were selling by the truckload.
Studios were producing lots of features and still largely calling
the shots. Everyone was busy and working hard. But Stayer's
work that took place in her physical body. I did
a lot of acting where the pages were being pushed
under the door, hot off the printer as I was
(10:12):
going through the enema process to be prepared to do
my actual sex scene. When you consider the working conditions
for the cast and crew, I'm actually quite impressed by
what we managed to do. Stoy even starred in one
of the most expensive studio porn movies ever made, Pirates
two Stignetti's Revenge. It took weeks to shoot on a
(10:35):
specially made pirate ship decked out with cannons, a crow's nest,
and some suspiciously comfy furniture in the galley. There were
dozens of cast and crew, and it reportedly cost millions
of dollars. It's not the name that brings a man infamy,
it's as infamous deeds that bring infamy to his name. Yes,
(10:55):
action much wisdom now, and if Hal's a woman, then right.
Stoya hit the height of her career, all of a
sudden everything changed. It was around two thousand and nine
and the Internet finally took the business model for porn
studios and smashed it to bits. There would be no
more pirate hip blockbusters for a simple reason. People were
(11:19):
no longer buying DVDs. They'd moved to watching porn online
for free on what we're called tube sites, basically hardcore
versions of streaming sites like YouTube. What's so interesting about
Stoya's early career is that the tube sites actually helped
make her a star. One of the employees of Digital
(11:39):
Playground had maybe one too many drinks at an award show,
and they came to me and expressed confusion as to
why my first film with them was selling so well.
They really, how do people know who you are? And
I'm like, well, you know, I've got my little MySpace
(12:00):
page with like a couple of thousand people, and there's
this video of me with my tampon string hanging out
destroying an enormous Teddy Bear while naked. It was called
Stoyer Kills the Bear, an early piece of viral pawn
that some random person had written from a DVD and
(12:23):
posted on a cheap site. That film was pirated, but
Stoya says, at that point the publicity was kind of welcome,
and people on these tube site things just like really
like that video. That was the first effect that the
tube sites had on my career, and it was positive.
(12:43):
This may be the only time that it was positive.
The negative side had a name, a company called Manwin.
In January twenty twelve, around five years into Storyer's career,
her studio boss decided to sell Digital Playground. He told
me that we had been purchased by man Win and
(13:05):
I was like, oh, I am now tied to a
company that is literally named man Win. This is awful.
I have a reputation for being pedantic and difficult in interviews.
Every interview, I'm like, yeah, man Win bought us. Yeah,
(13:27):
the people who owned porn Hub and browsers. Yeah, think
about that. What's happening. They're buying up all these properties.
It's weird. Tube sites had broken the old studio model
for porn and now the main owner of tube sites, Manwin,
was buying up everything that was left, like the conqueror
(13:47):
of a vanquished land. Did I mention they're called man Win?
Can someone explain this to me? Is it like a
German thing where the word is like completely different And
it just sounds ominous to me. And it's been a
long and complicated relationship since man Win owned free tube
sites like Pornhub it had bought Digital Playground. The deal
(14:08):
compared head to Disney buying Pixar. It even snaps up
digital rights to Playboy. And everyone knows that Brand Stayer,
the independently minded artist, was now working for a pawn conglomerate.
What she'd witnessed was the birth of the modern pawn industry,
back too the tubes that made pawn free. In the
(14:31):
words of the musical avenue Q, the Internet was made
for porn. Internet is really really great. Four porn got
a bus connection, and so I don't have to we
four porn. There's always some loose sight for porn. Eyebrows
all day and night. For porn, it's like I'm surfing
(14:53):
at the speed of light. The Internet brought more images
of sex to more people than ever before. Anyone with
an Internet connection could watch porn and the privacy of
their own home, with no need for any awkward visits
to the local sex shop, and it was free. The
(15:16):
old world of porn had been a close knit community
where everybody knew each other, but there was no sense
even in the industry of who was behind the tube sites,
or for that matter, how they were getting away with
becoming overnight millionaires with pirate who content to find out
who rules the porn industry today, we need to dig
in here at the moment when power of a porn
(15:39):
first changed hands, and that led us to Curtis Potech.
He was there running one of the first big porn
tube sites, pretty much by accident. Back in two thousand
and six, when Stoyers started her career, Curtis was working
as a strip club DJ. He needed a day job,
so he answered an ad to work on a support desk.
(16:00):
That was probably one of the most unique interviews of
my life. He threw down some terms in front of me,
some pretty vulgar sexual related terms, some racy terms, because
you can't control what people say, so you know, they
just wanted to prepare me. I guess for the worst.
The website turned out to be called x Tube. It
was part of Boom and these cool online platforms that
(16:23):
allowed people to upload stuff online and want to go viral.
But the tube sides, well, they were different from the
likes of YouTube because they allowed porn. It was user
generated content, all provided by webmasters. Are just nerral people
like you here myself. Curtis was one of many who
were swept up in the wild rise of the tube sites.
(16:44):
It was online anarchy. Nobody in the old porn industry
knew who was in charge. All Curtis knew was that
the shoestring operation at x tube was mainly funded by
a mysterious Chinese businessman. They called him mister X. The
early days of x tube were chaotic, but there was
a basic goal get as many people visiting the site
as possible and hope the advertising money followed. Curtis says
(17:09):
it started off slow, but eventually XTube found its niche
in gay porn, and his clips went viral and worked
their magic. Things took off once the word of mouth
got out there. We went from two hundred thousand users
over half a million users in about a week. XTube
took off at a crazy rate, but it wasn't problem free.
(17:31):
One of the founders left, leaving Curtis in charge of
the site, and he started to hear from people who
were less than happy. Producers were seeing their videos uploaded
to the site and XTube hadn't paid a penny for them.
I've got very used to hearing the words I'm going
to sue you. I was like the subpoena king of
the universe. I had a fax machine right beside me
at my desk and it was just pumping out subpoenas
(17:53):
at one point. So Curtis, the strip club DJ turned
tech bro, ended up becoming the subpoena king An. XTube
wasn't the only company winding up producers. Things were getting nasty,
almost godfather. Now, another popular tube site called upawn got
sent a bullet in the post, an actual bullet with
(18:15):
the word upawn etched into the side. XTube almost folded
when it had to pay half a million dollars to
a pawn producer who sued them for hosting pirated videos,
but it survived by two thousand and eight. They charged
a million dollars just for the ad slot across the
top of the site. Throughout all of this, Curtis was
(18:36):
the one in the firing line. Mister X and the
other owners they preferred a different approach, hiding why didn't
they want to be the face of xcube Because they
were older than smarter than I was. And some people
will put their face to a business, like an adult
business like that, but they won't put their name, their
real name, and I did. Both of those used my
(18:59):
real name, and I used my face. I was the
main profile that if you had any issues on the site,
there was my ugly mug plastered up in the corner.
I mean, I was starting to get depressed. I was
having a bit of issues with drugs, just to kind
of like cope with what was happening in my life.
Curtis was used to calls from people who hated him
(19:19):
and what he did, but every now and then he
would also hear from people who realized how much money
do it was to make on free porn, people who
realized there was value in all that traffic. He remembers
the last of those calls he evergot. The guy on
the phone was adamant. Just give me a number, he said.
So Curtis walked over to the desk of one of
(19:40):
the owners and asked him, if you're going to sell
xt you for whatever you wanted to, just give me
that number right now. And he goes, thirty five million.
He said, all right, And I walked back and I
picked up the phone. I said, he you're not gonna
like this, So I told him thirty five million. He goes, sure,
(20:02):
I'll be there next week. If there was a year'sy
right for the industry, this was probably it two thousand
and six, when a bunch of renegade tech guys like
Curtis started platforms where you could share stolen videos. They
were just the folks storming the bastile. What really mattered
was what came a few years later, when someone emerged
(20:25):
from all the chaos to seize control. When Curtis took
that call, he had no clue he'd witnessed the moment
that started to happen. Before long, the new owner of
x tube showed up in his office, a German software
engineer called Fabian Tilman. Fabian used to like lie on
the floor in front of my desk after it is
(20:46):
a very long flight. And what was Fabian's for all?
I believe they were just setting up the Basically the
takeover of the nut industry. X Tube was just an
appetizer for Fabian. Remember that name, Fabian Tilman, because there
aren't many that are more important in the history of
(21:08):
online porn. Act three Stoyer. In a change landscape, there
was a merciless side to tube sites like x tube, uporn,
and porn Hub. Consumers love them for the obvious reasons,
(21:28):
but all the free porn was tearing apart the business
model of the old porn studios that were making all
the videos in the first place. Hollywood and the music
industry were also under attack from piracy, but they were
well funded and powerful and could hit back with lawsuits
and lobbying with porn well, who was going to stick
up for porn producers and performance Like Stoya, they were
(21:51):
even more vulnerable. How would you break down the negative
consequences that the arrival of chief sites like porn hub
and upawn had. They gave the general porn watching public
an immense sense of titlement, and when there are more
(22:13):
hours of free pornography available than one person could ever
watch in their lifetime, it becomes much more difficult to
get them to pay for pornographic work. The next thing
was that when you have people who have stolen your
(22:34):
content and illegally uploaded it to a tube site, you
can imagine what the descriptions sound like. They're not very nice,
creepy things. I am simultaneously too fat and concerningly anorexic,
and I don't like having that kind of body shaming
(22:56):
posted on my work. So there was a personal toll
from giving away stolen poem. Two, How could cheap sites
get away with not policing what was upload The answer
is pretty ugly. We'll get into how in a later episode.
All you need to know for now is that tube
sites prospered using the same legal loophole as social media platforms.
(23:20):
For the most part, they're not responsible for what gets
uploaded to their sites. They just have to deal with
the complaints. Work was just being stolen and put on
the tube sites. And the tube sites we're putting their
hands in the air saying we just let users upload
things and if you want something taken down, you can
contact us. Around the same time, porn hub was going
(23:45):
to production companies and saying, hey, if you just like
work with us and send us trailers and then we'll
help you take down your content and we'll send you traffic,
which other people in the adult industry have described as
a gun to the head situation. Tube sites and porn
(24:07):
studios did be a kind of uneasy truth. Students would
buy ads or post short clips like you know, teasers.
This hypothetically would get people to click through and pay
to watch the rest of the video, but the problem
was the money was never as good. There is a
(24:27):
universal law of online porn visits. The tube sides last
an average of eight minutes, and there aren't that many
people who will feel the need to buy the whole
video after they finished their business. The other problem was
that in the end, these tube sides just didn't have
a good enough reason to police the content. That was
true for stolen movies, but it was also true for
(24:50):
other material, illegal abuse, or what's known as revenge porn.
Just think of it this way. If your video was
on one of the sides and you didn't want it there,
you had a problem, not the tube sides. The respect
in our time ay that I worked for years to
(25:11):
establish and is now completely out the window. I have
no idea who these people are. They look like a
large business. They're named man when and none of this
makes me happy, But still I had a job to do.
Over the course of your career, we've seen a lot
of the owners of these sites really recede into the background.
(25:35):
They do a lot to hide their identity. How does
that make you feel? You really want my feeling? So
I can't post a snapshot without a tabloid reporting on it.
Even in the COVID era where I'm wearing a mask,
(25:55):
people recognize me by my eyes and eyebrows. I am
so exposed. And the people who really own these tube
sites get to be inclusive and not publicly held to account.
That is so unfair. I don't like it. Supporters of
(26:18):
the owners might say they're just protecting themselves from the
stigma of being involved in the adult industry. Pornography made
by consenting adults is legal, so what's our business knowing
who the owners are. Stoyer was not impressed, but the
argument it's not fair at all. It's not fair at all.
(26:38):
These people have come into sex work exploited as much
as possible the industry, and they don't want to deal
with the shame or the stigma, Like sorry, babe, that
comes with the package. So what are the questions that
(26:59):
you would want answered? So I'm personally very curious why
they're using all these like shell corporations in places that
shady people do business, and like, maybe that's because it's porn,
so that's all they have access to because porn is
(27:19):
largely shut out of normal business infrastructure. But I would
really like to know why. So they built these tube sites,
and whether they intended to or not, they devalued the
entire market and then they started buying up production studios.
(27:40):
And I've thought about this a lot, and I can't
figure out how giving everything away for free and acclimating
people to a porn is something you can have whenever
you want without paying for it results in a viable
business once the dust has settled. We ask plenty of
(28:02):
people this question, and it was because we were torn.
We met a lot of happy people in porn who
love their jobs. We also came across stories of exploitation.
Some of them are heartbreaking stories with real victims and
real villains. At the back of her mind was always
the question, shouldn't we be exposing all that the bad guys?
(28:25):
Talking to Stoya helped us realize that if you care
about porn, how even the most hardcore kind became free
to watch at the click of a button. How the
biggest platforms are not held accountable if bad things are
uploaded to their sides, things like revenge porn or child pornography.
How many sex workers are still denied a voice to
(28:46):
speak out if bad things happen to them. Then you
need to understand how this business works, who profits from it,
who calls the shots, who is really in control. So
if you try to make a podcast that's about all
of porn, it's going to be scattered and messy and
(29:09):
not make sense. You are the financial times, I suggest
you stay in your lane. You focus on the business aspect,
you focus on the finances. You focus on who got
what investment money, who's in how much debt, how much
profit is actually happening, and what the legal standing of
(29:34):
these free tube sites should be. So that's what we've done.
We stayed in our lane and followed the money. Patricia
and I were given six months off our normal day
jobs time to focus just on the world of pawn.
(29:58):
Over the course of eight episodes, we're going to tell
you what we found. We met pornographers, adult performers, and directors.
It was who's got the largest penis here? I'm a
thing and they hate each other. We lost have our followers,
which means we also lost half of our income. Tech
pioneers who almost accidentally shape today's Internet. The guy doesn't
(30:20):
give a shit about anything other than himself, hedge fund
guys and money men. What this spot on was discriminentary
policies within the banking system. I'll even tell you how
I uncovered the secret owner of the world's best known
porn sites. And let me tell you we were surprised
(30:41):
by who is really in charge. Next time on Hot Money,
Fabian Tilman, the guy who built man Win, A man
with more power than any pornographer before him. I guess
(31:02):
someone has to be the bad guy, right, because it
doesn't work without the bad guy in the end. Change
it doesn't. It was always a bad guy. Hot Money
is a production of The Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.
It was written and reported by Me, Patricia Neilson and
me Alex Barker. Peter Sale is our lead producer and
(31:24):
sound designer. Edith Russolo is our associate producer. Our editor
is Karen Shakerjie Amanda ka Wong is our engineer. Music
composition by Pascal Wise, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Kusado.
Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein. Special
(31:44):
thanks to Renee Kaplan and Ruler Kalov for The Financial
Times and Mia Lobel, lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton
and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Thank you to similar
Web for providing our web traffic data. If you liked
this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content
(32:05):
and ad free listening across our network for four dollars
ninety nine in a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus
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you want more from the FT, try our new app
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(32:29):
it's ninety nine cents a month for six months after that.
Pushkin. Okay, we're going to start with a warning. This
series is full of adult themes and has some graphic
sex talk. Now, you know, let's get into it. How
did it feel to you to be taken over by
a company that no one knew anything about. Well, the
(00:38):
deeper I got into it, the more concerned I became
about just the general level of secrecy around the company.
The money has to move, sometimes from a personal account,
sometimes from a business account. That sounded a bit sketchy
to me. If you play that fast and loose in
that environment, I have to assume that you're playing that
fast and loose in every environment. That environment she's talking about,
(01:03):
it's pornography. Kelly Holland would know. She's been a fixture
of the porn industry since the nineties. She even ran
one of its most famous brands, Penthouse that has until
she lost it to a mystery investor. And for the
industry at large, does it matter that you have these
conglomerates that are buying loads of the industry and we
(01:26):
don't really know who ownest these companies. I don't think
it's healthy. I think it's very problematic. It's healthy for
somebody's bottom line and it's healthy for shareholders, but I
don't think it's healthy for clients, consumers and the general climate.
You know, you can make a choice in business to
be friendly competitors, which is the healthiest way to go
(01:48):
and the most profitable way to go, or you can
be enemies. I'm Patrician Neilson and I'm a reporter for
the Financial Times. I write about business. Some days it's
a fashion chain, on others it's tobacco or cannabis startup.
But recently my job has mainly involved porn. I started
(02:13):
writing about the industry about three years ago, but I
have to admit this last year it's become an obsession.
Business papers don't usually write about the porn industry, even
though it basically owns a big corner of the Internet.
That in itself made me curious. Why wouldn't we write
about porn just like we do with any other legal industry.
(02:34):
And I think it's because no one really likes to
talk about porn. We're embarrassed to even though most of
us have watched it at some point. It's taboo. And
so I started where any business reporter would. This is
(02:54):
just an industry with companies, right I can normally figure
out who the arnests are, how much money they make,
how they're regulated, but porn it turned out that porn
was whirled apart. The whole industry depends some performers to
literally bear it all, but basic information about the businesses
who run the industry are kept like a state secret.
(03:17):
I kept finding names that weren't names, and companies that
weren't companies. It often felt like I was wandering around
a maze, you know, that strange sense of never knowing
where you're heading or how anything's connected. Turns that lead
to unexpected places, like those murky transactions that Kelly Holland
talked about. What were they for? What were they hiding?
(03:41):
Who or what is behind the business of porn? And
you know what, the Financial Times we qual it the ft.
They encouraged me to keep going to report this out,
and my boss he got sucked into. That's me, Alex Barker.
I manage Patricia's team of business reporters, but my main
(04:04):
job is writing about the media industry, the Murdocks, Netflix,
that kind of thing. When Patricia asked to look into pawn,
I knew it wasn't exactly the FT's cup of tea.
But it was different and intriguing and only career threatening
if we really botched it up. So I said, sure,
see what you can find, and bit by bit, this
(04:27):
story of the power behind pawn drew me into It
started with a routine email from Patricia, a little update
on her reporting, with a bombshell buried halfway down. She said,
I think I found the secret owner of the world's
biggest pawn company, and she had, but it was just
(04:48):
the first turn in that maze. Once we started following
the leads, we soon realized we weren't just tracking one
man or one company, but power. And that's when I
really got hooked. Because this industry has outsized influence, truly enormous,
over our culture, over the way my kids learn about sex,
(05:10):
over almost eight percent of all Internet traffic. So as journalists,
we decided to give the subject a time it deserves.
We'd report on the business of porn and the kind
of way the ft would report on any other industry.
We wanted to work out who made online porn what
it is today, understand who the real decision makers are,
(05:33):
what's driving their choices. Basically, to work out who rules porn.
We spent months roving around. We interviewed bankers, porn stars,
bankers who became porn stars, even a New York billionaire
(05:56):
who helped change the industry with one text message. And
after all that, we found some answers away out of
a great maze of porn land to a place we
definitely didn't expect to an up. This is Hot Money,
a show about power and finance from Pushkin Industries and
The Financial Times. Act one story's story. We started by
(06:53):
setting up a chat with one of the smartest people
in porn. I'm a career pornographer. I'm an artist. What's
completely normal and an average Tuesday to me is completely
fascinating to like the whole rest of the world. This
(07:15):
is Jessica. You might know her from her stage name Stayer.
We wanted to talk to a Stayer because she's been
there for all the big changes that were interested in.
Stayers won the equivalent of an adult Oscar. She's been
a headline star and a bit of an alternative porn icon.
She's written a book, run literary book clubs, and her
columns have appeared in The New York Times and Slate.
(07:37):
Her fans all over the world have bought thousands of
sex toys molded on her vagina. This is my first
proper interview with a porn star. I wasn't exactly in
my comfort zone, so I started with a softball question
just to warm things up. Can you tell me a
bit about you know, where you grew up and school family. No,
(07:57):
I am here as a porn star, so we don't
talk about my life before I turned eighteen. I think
it's inappropriate. That's absolutely fine. I didn't realize that, so
I wouldn't have asked if I had no worries. But
there are some strange people in the world who will
fetishize those details and then message me about it, and
it makes me feel gross. So I just have a
(08:19):
blackout before I turned eighteen. Absolutely, Story is not afraid
to speak her mind or step on toes, whether they
belong to porn kingpin or a news reporter. At this stage,
what we really wanted to speak Story about were her
early years in the industry, a time when online video
streaming changed the porn industry forever. I started out. First,
(08:43):
I was go go dancing, Then I was posing for
alternative nude sites, and then I signed a contract to
be a performer in hardcore video with a studio called
Digital Playground. Hi, I'm Stoya. Now we're gonna very quietly
(09:08):
go to hell then have sex on came which sounds
like shooting a form, which is not anything I would ever,
this is a vacation travel now. Back then, in two
thousand and seven, this was a big thing on core
studios like Digital Playground shoot graphic sex, but much like
(09:29):
the old Hollywood studio system, they had contract stars. The
performers were literally paid not to work for anybody else.
The fact this happened at all was a sign of
the times. The Internet was bringing pawn into millions of homes,
but it was mainly images or grainy video, so consumers
still wanted the studio stuff. The online business co existed
(09:50):
with the old industry. Pawn DVDs were selling by the truckload.
Studios were producing lots of features and still largely calling
the shots. Everyone was busy and working hard. But Stayer's
work that took place in her physical body. I did
a lot of acting where the pages were being pushed
under the door, hot off the printer as I was
(10:12):
going through the enema process to be prepared to do
my actual sex scene. When you consider the working conditions
for the cast and crew, I'm actually quite impressed by
what we managed to do. Stoy even starred in one
of the most expensive studio porn movies ever made, Pirates
two Stignetti's Revenge. It took weeks to shoot on a
(10:35):
specially made pirate ship decked out with cannons, a crow's nest,
and some suspiciously comfy furniture in the galley. There were
dozens of cast and crew, and it reportedly cost millions
of dollars. It's not the name that brings a man infamy,
it's as infamous deeds that bring infamy to his name. Yes,
(10:55):
action much wisdom now, and if Hal's a woman, then right.
Stoya hit the height of her career, all of a
sudden everything changed. It was around two thousand and nine
and the Internet finally took the business model for porn
studios and smashed it to bits. There would be no
more pirate hip blockbusters for a simple reason. People were
(11:19):
no longer buying DVDs. They'd moved to watching porn online
for free on what we're called tube sites, basically hardcore
versions of streaming sites like YouTube. What's so interesting about
Stoya's early career is that the tube sites actually helped
make her a star. One of the employees of Digital
(11:39):
Playground had maybe one too many drinks at an award show,
and they came to me and expressed confusion as to
why my first film with them was selling so well.
They really, how do people know who you are? And
I'm like, well, you know, I've got my little MySpace
(12:00):
page with like a couple of thousand people, and there's
this video of me with my tampon string hanging out
destroying an enormous Teddy Bear while naked. It was called
Stoyer Kills the Bear, an early piece of viral pawn
that some random person had written from a DVD and
(12:23):
posted on a cheap site. That film was pirated, but
Stoya says, at that point the publicity was kind of welcome,
and people on these tube site things just like really
like that video. That was the first effect that the
tube sites had on my career, and it was positive.
(12:43):
This may be the only time that it was positive.
The negative side had a name, a company called Manwin.
In January twenty twelve, around five years into Storyer's career,
her studio boss decided to sell Digital Playground. He told
me that we had been purchased by man Win and
(13:05):
I was like, oh, I am now tied to a
company that is literally named man Win. This is awful.
I have a reputation for being pedantic and difficult in interviews.
Every interview, I'm like, yeah, man Win bought us. Yeah,
(13:27):
the people who owned porn Hub and browsers. Yeah, think
about that. What's happening. They're buying up all these properties.
It's weird. Tube sites had broken the old studio model
for porn and now the main owner of tube sites, Manwin,
was buying up everything that was left, like the conqueror
(13:47):
of a vanquished land. Did I mention they're called man Win?
Can someone explain this to me? Is it like a
German thing where the word is like completely different And
it just sounds ominous to me. And it's been a
long and complicated relationship since man Win owned free tube
sites like Pornhub it had bought Digital Playground. The deal
(14:08):
compared head to Disney buying Pixar. It even snaps up
digital rights to Playboy. And everyone knows that Brand Stayer,
the independently minded artist, was now working for a pawn conglomerate.
What she'd witnessed was the birth of the modern pawn industry,
back too the tubes that made pawn free. In the
(14:31):
words of the musical avenue Q, the Internet was made
for porn. Internet is really really great. Four porn got
a bus connection, and so I don't have to we
four porn. There's always some loose sight for porn. Eyebrows
all day and night. For porn, it's like I'm surfing
(14:53):
at the speed of light. The Internet brought more images
of sex to more people than ever before. Anyone with
an Internet connection could watch porn and the privacy of
their own home, with no need for any awkward visits
to the local sex shop, and it was free. The
(15:16):
old world of porn had been a close knit community
where everybody knew each other, but there was no sense
even in the industry of who was behind the tube sites,
or for that matter, how they were getting away with
becoming overnight millionaires with pirate who content to find out
who rules the porn industry today, we need to dig
in here at the moment when power of a porn
(15:39):
first changed hands, and that led us to Curtis Potech.
He was there running one of the first big porn
tube sites, pretty much by accident. Back in two thousand
and six, when Stoyers started her career, Curtis was working
as a strip club DJ. He needed a day job,
so he answered an ad to work on a support desk.
(16:00):
That was probably one of the most unique interviews of
my life. He threw down some terms in front of me,
some pretty vulgar sexual related terms, some racy terms, because
you can't control what people say, so you know, they
just wanted to prepare me. I guess for the worst.
The website turned out to be called x Tube. It
was part of Boom and these cool online platforms that
(16:23):
allowed people to upload stuff online and want to go viral.
But the tube sides, well, they were different from the
likes of YouTube because they allowed porn. It was user
generated content, all provided by webmasters. Are just nerral people
like you here myself. Curtis was one of many who
were swept up in the wild rise of the tube sites.
(16:44):
It was online anarchy. Nobody in the old porn industry
knew who was in charge. All Curtis knew was that
the shoestring operation at x tube was mainly funded by
a mysterious Chinese businessman. They called him mister X. The
early days of x tube were chaotic, but there was
a basic goal get as many people visiting the site
as possible and hope the advertising money followed. Curtis says
(17:09):
it started off slow, but eventually XTube found its niche
in gay porn, and his clips went viral and worked
their magic. Things took off once the word of mouth
got out there. We went from two hundred thousand users
over half a million users in about a week. XTube
took off at a crazy rate, but it wasn't problem free.
(17:31):
One of the founders left, leaving Curtis in charge of
the site, and he started to hear from people who
were less than happy. Producers were seeing their videos uploaded
to the site and XTube hadn't paid a penny for them.
I've got very used to hearing the words I'm going
to sue you. I was like the subpoena king of
the universe. I had a fax machine right beside me
at my desk and it was just pumping out subpoenas
(17:53):
at one point. So Curtis, the strip club DJ turned
tech bro, ended up becoming the subpoena king An. XTube
wasn't the only company winding up producers. Things were getting nasty,
almost godfather. Now, another popular tube site called upawn got
sent a bullet in the post, an actual bullet with
(18:15):
the word upawn etched into the side. XTube almost folded
when it had to pay half a million dollars to
a pawn producer who sued them for hosting pirated videos,
but it survived by two thousand and eight. They charged
a million dollars just for the ad slot across the
top of the site. Throughout all of this, Curtis was
(18:36):
the one in the firing line. Mister X and the
other owners they preferred a different approach, hiding why didn't
they want to be the face of xcube Because they
were older than smarter than I was. And some people
will put their face to a business, like an adult
business like that, but they won't put their name, their
real name, and I did. Both of those used my
(18:59):
real name, and I used my face. I was the
main profile that if you had any issues on the site,
there was my ugly mug plastered up in the corner.
I mean, I was starting to get depressed. I was
having a bit of issues with drugs, just to kind
of like cope with what was happening in my life.
Curtis was used to calls from people who hated him
(19:19):
and what he did, but every now and then he
would also hear from people who realized how much money
do it was to make on free porn, people who
realized there was value in all that traffic. He remembers
the last of those calls he evergot. The guy on
the phone was adamant. Just give me a number, he said.
So Curtis walked over to the desk of one of
(19:40):
the owners and asked him, if you're going to sell
xt you for whatever you wanted to, just give me
that number right now. And he goes, thirty five million.
He said, all right, And I walked back and I
picked up the phone. I said, he you're not gonna
like this, So I told him thirty five million. He goes, sure,
(20:02):
I'll be there next week. If there was a year'sy
right for the industry, this was probably it two thousand
and six, when a bunch of renegade tech guys like
Curtis started platforms where you could share stolen videos. They
were just the folks storming the bastile. What really mattered
was what came a few years later, when someone emerged
(20:25):
from all the chaos to seize control. When Curtis took
that call, he had no clue he'd witnessed the moment
that started to happen. Before long, the new owner of
x tube showed up in his office, a German software
engineer called Fabian Tilman. Fabian used to like lie on
the floor in front of my desk after it is
(20:46):
a very long flight. And what was Fabian's for all?
I believe they were just setting up the Basically the
takeover of the nut industry. X Tube was just an
appetizer for Fabian. Remember that name, Fabian Tilman, because there
aren't many that are more important in the history of
(21:08):
online porn. Act three Stoyer. In a change landscape, there
was a merciless side to tube sites like x tube, uporn,
and porn Hub. Consumers love them for the obvious reasons,
(21:28):
but all the free porn was tearing apart the business
model of the old porn studios that were making all
the videos in the first place. Hollywood and the music
industry were also under attack from piracy, but they were
well funded and powerful and could hit back with lawsuits
and lobbying with porn well, who was going to stick
up for porn producers and performance Like Stoya, they were
(21:51):
even more vulnerable. How would you break down the negative
consequences that the arrival of chief sites like porn hub
and upawn had. They gave the general porn watching public
an immense sense of titlement, and when there are more
(22:13):
hours of free pornography available than one person could ever
watch in their lifetime, it becomes much more difficult to
get them to pay for pornographic work. The next thing
was that when you have people who have stolen your
(22:34):
content and illegally uploaded it to a tube site, you
can imagine what the descriptions sound like. They're not very nice,
creepy things. I am simultaneously too fat and concerningly anorexic,
and I don't like having that kind of body shaming
(22:56):
posted on my work. So there was a personal toll
from giving away stolen poem. Two, How could cheap sites
get away with not policing what was upload The answer
is pretty ugly. We'll get into how in a later episode.
All you need to know for now is that tube
sites prospered using the same legal loophole as social media platforms.
(23:20):
For the most part, they're not responsible for what gets
uploaded to their sites. They just have to deal with
the complaints. Work was just being stolen and put on
the tube sites. And the tube sites we're putting their
hands in the air saying we just let users upload
things and if you want something taken down, you can
contact us. Around the same time, porn hub was going
(23:45):
to production companies and saying, hey, if you just like
work with us and send us trailers and then we'll
help you take down your content and we'll send you traffic,
which other people in the adult industry have described as
a gun to the head situation. Tube sites and porn
(24:07):
studios did be a kind of uneasy truth. Students would
buy ads or post short clips like you know, teasers.
This hypothetically would get people to click through and pay
to watch the rest of the video, but the problem
was the money was never as good. There is a
(24:27):
universal law of online porn visits. The tube sides last
an average of eight minutes, and there aren't that many
people who will feel the need to buy the whole
video after they finished their business. The other problem was
that in the end, these tube sides just didn't have
a good enough reason to police the content. That was
true for stolen movies, but it was also true for
(24:50):
other material, illegal abuse, or what's known as revenge porn.
Just think of it this way. If your video was
on one of the sides and you didn't want it there,
you had a problem, not the tube sides. The respect
in our time ay that I worked for years to
(25:11):
establish and is now completely out the window. I have
no idea who these people are. They look like a
large business. They're named man when and none of this
makes me happy, But still I had a job to do.
Over the course of your career, we've seen a lot
of the owners of these sites really recede into the background.
(25:35):
They do a lot to hide their identity. How does
that make you feel? You really want my feeling? So
I can't post a snapshot without a tabloid reporting on it.
Even in the COVID era where I'm wearing a mask,
(25:55):
people recognize me by my eyes and eyebrows. I am
so exposed. And the people who really own these tube
sites get to be inclusive and not publicly held to account.
That is so unfair. I don't like it. Supporters of
(26:18):
the owners might say they're just protecting themselves from the
stigma of being involved in the adult industry. Pornography made
by consenting adults is legal, so what's our business knowing
who the owners are. Stoyer was not impressed, but the
argument it's not fair at all. It's not fair at all.
(26:38):
These people have come into sex work exploited as much
as possible the industry, and they don't want to deal
with the shame or the stigma, Like sorry, babe, that
comes with the package. So what are the questions that
(26:59):
you would want answered? So I'm personally very curious why
they're using all these like shell corporations in places that
shady people do business, and like, maybe that's because it's porn,
so that's all they have access to because porn is
(27:19):
largely shut out of normal business infrastructure. But I would
really like to know why. So they built these tube sites,
and whether they intended to or not, they devalued the
entire market and then they started buying up production studios.
(27:40):
And I've thought about this a lot, and I can't
figure out how giving everything away for free and acclimating
people to a porn is something you can have whenever
you want without paying for it results in a viable
business once the dust has settled. We ask plenty of
(28:02):
people this question, and it was because we were torn.
We met a lot of happy people in porn who
love their jobs. We also came across stories of exploitation.
Some of them are heartbreaking stories with real victims and
real villains. At the back of her mind was always
the question, shouldn't we be exposing all that the bad guys?
(28:25):
Talking to Stoya helped us realize that if you care
about porn, how even the most hardcore kind became free
to watch at the click of a button. How the
biggest platforms are not held accountable if bad things are
uploaded to their sides, things like revenge porn or child pornography.
How many sex workers are still denied a voice to
(28:46):
speak out if bad things happen to them. Then you
need to understand how this business works, who profits from it,
who calls the shots, who is really in control. So
if you try to make a podcast that's about all
of porn, it's going to be scattered and messy and
(29:09):
not make sense. You are the financial times, I suggest
you stay in your lane. You focus on the business aspect,
you focus on the finances. You focus on who got
what investment money, who's in how much debt, how much
profit is actually happening, and what the legal standing of
(29:34):
these free tube sites should be. So that's what we've done.
We stayed in our lane and followed the money. Patricia
and I were given six months off our normal day
jobs time to focus just on the world of pawn.
(29:58):
Over the course of eight episodes, we're going to tell
you what we found. We met pornographers, adult performers, and directors.
It was who's got the largest penis here? I'm a
thing and they hate each other. We lost have our followers,
which means we also lost half of our income. Tech
pioneers who almost accidentally shape today's Internet. The guy doesn't
(30:20):
give a shit about anything other than himself, hedge fund
guys and money men. What this spot on was discriminentary
policies within the banking system. I'll even tell you how
I uncovered the secret owner of the world's best known
porn sites. And let me tell you we were surprised
(30:41):
by who is really in charge. Next time on Hot Money,
Fabian Tilman, the guy who built man Win, A man
with more power than any pornographer before him. I guess
(31:02):
someone has to be the bad guy, right, because it
doesn't work without the bad guy in the end. Change
it doesn't. It was always a bad guy. Hot Money
is a production of The Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.
It was written and reported by Me, Patricia Neilson and
me Alex Barker. Peter Sale is our lead producer and
(31:24):
sound designer. Edith Russolo is our associate producer. Our editor
is Karen Shakerjie Amanda ka Wong is our engineer. Music
composition by Pascal Wise, fact checking by Andrea Lopez Kusado.
Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein. Special
(31:44):
thanks to Renee Kaplan and Ruler Kalov for The Financial
Times and Mia Lobel, lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton
and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Thank you to similar
Web for providing our web traffic data. If you liked
this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content
(32:05):
and ad free listening across our network for four dollars
ninety nine in a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus
channel on Apple podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. If
you want more from the FT, try our new app
featuring eight essential stories every weekday. Search FT Edit in
the iPhone app store. Your first month is free, and
(32:29):
it's ninety nine cents a month for six months after that.
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