Pornhub needs zero introduction at this point, it’s basically synonymous with the whole idea of free porn online, but the actual story behind it is more interesting than most people realize. Three students out of Concordia University in Montreal started it back in 2007, and it grew fast enough that by 2010 a German entrepreneur named Fabian Thylmann bought it through his company Manwin, which went on to gobble up YouPorn, RedTube, and a huge chunk of the rest of the industry along the way. That company eventually became MindGeek, and more recently rebranded to Aylo after a 2023 sale to a Canadian private equity firm called Ethical Capital Partners.
The rougher chapter here happened in December 2020. A New York Times piece accused the platform of hosting rape videos and other illegal content mixed in with everything else, and within days both Visa and Mastercard cut off payment processing entirely. Pornhub responded by purging something like 80 percent of its user-uploaded library, dropping from roughly 13.5 million videos down to under 3 million almost overnight, and locking uploads to verified accounts only going forward. Say what you want about how it got there, but the moderation now is genuinely tighter than it used to be.
Beyond the history, it’s still what it’s always been, an absolutely massive free library covering basically every category you can think of, a premium tier for HD and ad-free viewing, and the Model Program that lets performers actually monetize their own uploads instead of just getting scraped content stolen and reposted. Alaina Fox has built a real following here, and Mia Khalifa famously became the site’s most-viewed performer within weeks of her first upload, which tells you exactly how fast something can blow up on this platform.