Pornhub Finally Fixed Its Biggest Problem
By: Emma Austin
Tags: Social Media, Culture, Pornography, Digital Life, Sex

I’m the kind of lady who pays for her porn, but I’m still a huge fan of Pornhub and have been for a long time.

There are so many things to love about the site.

The most obvious one is that it’s a massive treasure trove filled with almost any kind of porn imaginable and almost all of it can be accessed completely free of charge (with the exception of content behind the Pornhub Premium paywall or videos that models offer for purchase).

No matter how you feel about the big picture effects of free porn, making entertainment and titillation available to more people without any barrier to access is a good thing. It’s one of the reasons I love YouTube so much even though it arguably created unfair competition for the television market.

And even though it took the questionable approach of fucking shit up for profit by creating a space where stolen content can flourish, it’s actually done some good once the dust settled.

Porn studios owned by MindGeek (Pornhub’s parent company) have reportedly established working conditions that are better than the industry standard before they came on the scene.

The company’s Model Partner Program also created an ad-supported way for creators to generate revenues for their content. It’s similar to YouTube’s Partner Program, where a portion of the earnings the company makes from running ads on videos is redistributed to the creators of those videos based on how many views they can get.

Both of those programs gave original and engaging creators an opportunity to earn a living from their talents and hard work. It took production and distribution of content out of the studio system while still making it lucrative for those who become popular enough, especially on Pornhub where views are more profitable than they are on YouTube.

It also meant that people with niche aesthetics or elaborate creative visions didn’t have to be stifled or weeded out by mainstream studios, and as a porn consumer that’s been a fantastic development.

Better Amateur Porn

When I look back at the kind of amateur porn that was produced when I started consuming it heavily ten years ago, there are massive improvements in variety and quality.

Most of the old amateur content felt like it was churned out. Some of it was genuinely homemade content that looked grainy and awkwardly shot. The rest was pro-amateur porn that all looked more or less the same — just a bunch of gonzo scenes with unfamiliar girls doing some very familiar things.

It was fine and it did the job. You could masturbate to it or watch it with your partner as part of your foreplay. But it was rarely impressive. It didn’t usually make you stop and look up who created it because you wanted more of that exact kind of content.

Pornhub carved out space for a third type of amateur porn. Creators and performers could express themselves aesthetically and create hot and gorgeous scenes that looked nothing like the ones you could buy on DVDs.

It made room for older women, women with abundant stomachs and wide hips, women with quirks and flair to find an admiring audience and succeed instead of being passed over.

It gave us Ryan Creamer and embraced his silliness.

It gave us porn with personality before OnlyFans managed to stumble backwards into making that its whole thing.

Platform Problems

Pornhub is a porn platform, not a porn studio. That’s part of the reason it’s so successful and appealing, but it’s also the reason for all the problems with the site.

As a platform, it allows users to upload content with minimal oversight and vetting. That means more access and a smoother experience for creators. As someone who uploads things on different platforms for a living, I know that this can make a massive difference. My work is far better than it would be if I had to sit around waiting for a moderator to comb through my Instagram posts or for someone to rubber stamp my podcast show notes before an episode goes live.

But platforms always come with problems. The very fact that they’re more open means that they will all sooner or later become hosts to some highly questionable content.

Because it’s a platform, YouTube has become a comfortable home (and a source of income) for the alt-right and white supremacists.

Twitter has its fair share of extremely vocal trolls, misogynists, and transphobes.

Instagram has its scammers and Multi Level Marketing hustlers. And I’ve received enough sexual harassment and unsolicited dick pics through my Instagram DMs that I had to close them.

And we might not have heard much from anti-vaxxers if Facebook didn’t give them a space to flourish, network, and spread.

For Pornhub, the ease of uploading content has meant that the site is still full of pirated porn clips. And because just about anyone can upload just about anything to the site, there have been reports of illegal and abusive content making its way to it — so-called revenge porn, videos featuring minors, and content depicting real sexual assault.

Pornhub has claimed to keep a close oversight on what gets uploaded, but there’s a constant debate about whether the company does enough or is barely doing the minimum.

But there’s one thing that no one has really been debating. For a while now, everyone from the creators who make a living on the site to the critics who claim it’s a hotbed of sexual exploitation, have called for them to implement a simple measure. If the site only allowed verified users to upload content, it would create enough of a barrier to weed out most of the people who want to upload questionable content.

Joining Pornhub’s model program and becoming a verified user isn’t hard. I’ve gone through the steps and it didn’t take much time or effort. But it would be enough to prevent anyone from being able to anonymously throw up videos on the site.

That would fix the platform’s biggest problems overnight.

And now, they’ve finally done it.

A Better Space for Porn

Last night, in a blog post titled “Our Commitment to Trust and Safety,” Pornhub announced that they were taking new steps “to further protect against images of nonconsensual activity and abuse on our site.”

The seven steps they detail include some promising changes like expanded moderation and a Trusted Flagger Program that will make them more responsive to organizations concerned with “internet and child safety.”

But the one that caught my attention was the first item on the list:

“1. Verified Uploaders Only

Effective immediately, only content partners and people within the Model Program will be able to upload content to Pornhub. In the new year, we will implement a verification process so that any user can upload content upon successful completion of identification protocol.”

That simple change that everyone has been calling for, the one that will make Pornhub not only less sketchy but just plain better, is finally being implemented.

I was filled with excitement when I read that announcement. I don’t use Pornhub to make money, but I do use it to get off, so I’m happy to see them finally doing the right thing.

I’m not under any illusions that they did this purely through altruism or to benefit the verified models who upload to the site. Given the timing, it’s likely that they updated their terms because they’ve come under extra scrutiny.

Pornhub already had its share of critics, but they’ve been emboldened by a recent New York Time op-ed by Nicholas Kristof titled “The Children of Pornhub.”

That, in turn, led to Visa and Mastercard conducting investigations to determine whether they will stop processing Pornhub payments (American Express and Paypal already have policies against working with the site).

But even if the change to their uploading terms is a defensive move, it’s a highly welcome one.

Restricting uploads to verified models and channels means that Pornhub will be giving us more of the content that makes the site great. And more importantly, it will remove the one thing that makes using the site ethically questionable (though there were already ways to keep your consumption above board).

Pornhub is one of my favorite porn sites and it’s most people’s go-to source for porn. They’ve finally made it better, and that’s worth celebrating.