However, early that month a New York Times opinion piece put a spotlight on the presence of child sexual abuse, and other forms of non-consensually filmed or shared, materials on the site. But by December 2020, Pornhub hosted about 13.8 million videos. Much of this content was always ephemeral, as accounts were regularly abandoned, and countless videos were pruned after a few days or weeks in response to copyright infringement complaints, or any number of other content moderation flags. This free-for-all system generated over 6.8 million uploads in 2019 alone. Pornhub built its bottomless, diverse pit of content in part by allowing any and all users to make accounts and upload whatever they wanted to the site from the moment it launched in 2007. That includes potentially providing greater visibility for many creator-performers from beyond the Western world, long active but obscured within what MacDonald calls Pornhub's "relentless, bottomless pit of anything you wanted to see." The Clipocalypse student who studies digital pornography platforms, points out, the net effect was a serious flattening and narrowing of Pornhub's offerings, which has drawn underlying trends in porn production into sharp focus. But as Maggie MacDonald, a University of Toronto Ph.D. This was not a Thanos-style, across-the-board cull it targeted specific types of uploaders, and its effects on content volume and diversity varied wildly from one pornographic category to the next. Rather, these shifts are just a few notable apparent after-effects of Pornhub's decision to delete millions of videos back in December. Some users may not even notice them, given how aggressively the interplay between platform algorithms and search histories can affect what each individual sees on Pornhub. And they aren't ubiquitous across every category or tag on the site. These apparent trends don't reflect big, sudden shake-ups in the demographics of porn creators, what they make, or their approaches to putting content on Pornhub. "I'm a sucker for accents, even if I can’t understand what's being said."
"That international content is fun to watch," says the Australian creator-performer Charlie Forde.
Or you may catch other telltale signs of such a setting, either in the background of a shot, the title or description of a video, or the bio information of a creator. Instead, many of these results pages feature far more content produced and uploaded by independent creator-performers, most of whom are what Porbhub refers to as "verified amateurs."Īnd if you've watched a meaningful number of these uploads, you may have noticed that you hear a bit less English dialogue and background chatter than in the past - and more foreign accents and languages, especially from Central or Eastern Europe. Most notably, and universally across these categories, there are far fewer clips pulled from scenes shot by major, and predominantly American studios, either presented as is or collected into fan-made compilations like the infamous Cock Hero masturbation control challenge videos. If you live in America and have spent any meaningful amount of time on Pornhub this year, you may have noticed that its video search results for popular terms - like anal, blowjob, teen, or variations thereof - look significantly different than they did in prior years.
Welcome to Porn Week, Mashable's annual close up on the business and pleasure of porn.