The behind-the-scenes documentary on Netflix’s most controversial site is as exciting as it is terrifying

What is it about?

Through interviews with actors, activists and former employees, this documentary offers a deep dive into the heart of Pornhub’s successes and scandals.

Behind the scenes of Pornhub

It is the second most popular porn video hosting site on the Internet: Pornhub is the subject of a documentary called Pornhub: Close-up on a Sexual Giant, available on Netflix. The film about 1h30 offers a dive behind the scenes of this company, with its successes but also scandals.

Rather than an investigation into one of the biggest players in the Internet pornography industry, this documentary is more about the excesses of the tech giant and the limits of the Internet, a world where nothing ever goes away and everything can change.

Netflix could consider other documentaries of this type on Facebook, Twitter or even TikTok, the issues would remain essentially the same.

Like Facebook, Pornhub comes from the imagination of students, in this particular case three students at Concordia University in Canada in 2007. What was only a joke was eventually sold three years later to businessman Fabian Tillman, who turned it into an empire. Thanks to the prowess of Google SEO as part of the Manwin conglomerate, now known as the MindGeek company.

Since linking up with MindGeek, the adult platform has revolutionized the way pornography is produced and distributed by “normalizing” free access to content for Internet users, as ThePirateBay did for movies and LimeWire for music in their time.

If the industry players were initially on the floor, they were eventually able to take advantage of PornHub’s system by creating erotic content to reach a mass audience, allowing them to generate their own profits, but also earn billions. dollars for the community.

Thus, the documentary reveals the benefits and successes of the platform for sex workers, while returning to the unknown history of the site.

But the film also sheds light on the scandals that have plagued PornHub since allegations of non-consensual sex and sex-trafficking images surfaced. A few victims were lucky enough to find that their intimate videos or images of rape had been posted and then uploaded to a site that made money off of them.

That’s why Pornhub had to do a lot of cleaning – of late! – Strengthen access security in its hosted videos and prevent non-members and unverified persons from posting videos on the site.

The documentary also speaks to associations and organizations that fight against sex trafficking, but leads to another trend, the censorship that targets consenting adult actors who make a living from their work as sex workers and who are too often exploited.

And this is the whole heart of the documentary, which is enriched by several testimonies that deserved a deeper study, because the topics discussed are gruesome and deserve to be discussed.

Pornohub: A close-up of a sex giant depicts a bitter and sad reality: the money is growing and the store is running until you poke your nose into the company manager’s problems and justice is restored. Mix it up so that high-level people don’t care about the well-being of humanity.

The documentary Pornhub: Close-up on a sexual giant is available on Netflix.