Pornhub is the 10th most visited website in the world – more popular than Amazon. Every day nearly 15 terabytes of pornography is uploaded to it, the equivalent of half of Netflix’s entire content library. Its parent company, MindGeek, raked in almost $450m in revenue last year. Yet the majority owner, a mysterious Austrian called Bernd Bergmair, leaves almost no trace online, says Alexi Mostrous in Tortoise’s Slow Newscast podcast.
Accountability matters. A New York Times investigation last December alleged that Pornhub was “saturated with rape videos”, including child rape. The site has since removed 80% of its videos, but “extreme and upsetting pornography” is still easy to find there. And women who have contacted Pornhub repeatedly, asking it to remove explicit videos of them that were uploaded without their consent, say the site “would take for ever” to do so. MindGeek denies any wrongdoing and says it uses “industry-leading” technology and human moderation to prevent abusive content from appearing on its sites. It describes claims that it allows child-abuse videos to be posted as “flagrantly untrue”.
Starting with little more than a “single blurry photo” in a University of Chicago alumni publication, say Mostrous, we pieced together the rise of Bergmair, 52, the son of sugar-beet farmers. Co-ordinates attached to photos posted online by Bergmair’s wife, a Brazilian model, led us to a mansion on a smart street in London. One day we waited outside at 5.30am to put the accusations against Pornhub to him in person. When he left the house three hours later, he refused to say a word.
Listen to the podcast here.
Mrs Pornhub pleads for change
Since Tortoise’s investigation, Bergmair’s wife, Priscila, has told The Sunday Times she “really hopes” her husband will cut ties with the porn empire he helped to build. She also related how a photographer shared modelling photos of her online without her permission – a similar complaint has been made by many of Pornhub’s alleged victims. “Everyone wants the best to be done,” she said. “Because people have children. I have children now.”