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Pornhub is a Canadian-owned Internet pornography video-sharing website, one of several owned by Sex industry conglomerate Aylo. , Pornhub is the 16th-most-visited website in the world and the most-visited adult website.
The site allows visitors to view Pornography from various categories, including professional and amateur pornography, and to upload and share their own videos. Content can be flagged if it violates the website's terms of service. The site also hosts the Pornhub Awards annually.
In December 2020, following a New York Times exposé of Revenge porn and sex trafficking, payment processors Mastercard and Visa cut their services to Pornhub. Pornhub then removed all videos uploaded by unverified users, reducing the total content from 13million to 4million videos. A 2023 documentary, , covers the opposition to Pornhub and the views of some pornographic performers.
In an effort to introduce Content curation to the site, the company launched a service called "Pornhub Select" in October 2013. Pornhub also launched a content curation website on 9 October 2013 called "PornIQ", which used an algorithm to create personalized video playlists for the viewer based on a number of factors, including their porn preferences, the time of day they are visiting the website, what part of the world they live in, and the amount of time the viewer has available. David Holmes of PandoDaily noted that Pornhub's data-intensive approach to playlists set it apart from previous attempts at user-generated playlists, and marked a new trend in the switch from content searching to passive curation among Web 2.0 websites.
By 2009, Aylo's three largest pornographic sites, RedTube, YouPorn and PornHub, collectively had 100 million unique visitors.
In June 2015, Pornhub announced that it was going to make a pornographic film featuring real-life sex in space, named Sexplorations. The site hoped to launch the mission and shoot the movie in 2016, covering the pre- and post-production costs itself, but sought $3.4 million from IndieGogo crowdfunders. If funded, the film would have been slated for a 2016 release, following six months of training for the two performers and six-person crew. First sex in space: Pornhub is going to make a porn film in space , independent.co.uk
On 1 February 2016, Pornhub launched an online casino powered by Betsoft, Endorphina, and 1x2gaming.
In October 2017, vice president Corey Price announced that Pornhub would use computer vision and artificial intelligence software to identify and tag videos on the website with information about the performers and sex acts. Price said the company planned to scan its entire library beginning early 2018.
On 17 April 2018, the site began accepting Verge cryptocurrency as a payment option.
In December 2020, following a column in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof that was critical of the company, payment processors Mastercard and Visa cut their services to Pornhub. Pornhub then removed all videos by unverified users.
Pornhub employs Vobile to search for uploads of banned videos to remove them from the site, and non-consensual content or personally identifiable information present on Pornhub can be reported to the company via an online form. Pornhub has been criticized for its response to non-consensual pornography and sex trafficking. Journalists at Vice commented that Pornhub profits from "content that's destroyed lives, and continues to do harm". Slate said that the move reflected a larger trend of Internet platforms using verification to classify sources.
In 2009, a 14-year-old girl was at knifepoint and the videos were uploaded to Pornhub. The girl stated that she emailed Pornhub repeatedly over a period of six months but received no reply. Eventually the videos were removed. Another case in October 2019 involved a man who faces charges of Statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl, videos of which were discovered on Pornhub, Modelhub, Periscope, and Snapchat that led to his arrest. In another incident of non-consensual pornography, the UK-based activist group NotYourPorn was founded by the friend of a woman whose iCloud storage had been hacked, leading to the hacker posting sexually explicit photos and videos on Pornhub alongside her full name. Pornhub removed the video when reported, but clones of the video using her full name replicated faster than the videos were removed. The woman found "the fractured communication system at Pornhub has meant this has become an increasingly excruciating process". The founder of Not Your Porn reported that fifty women contacted her over a six-month period about non-consensual online pornography featuring them, thirty of whom reported that the videos were uploaded to Pornhub.
On 10 October 2019, the two owners of GirlsDoPorn along with two employees were arrested on three counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion, after a civil lawsuit was filed in July. A week afterwards, the official verified GirlsDoPorn channel – the 20th-largest channel at the time – was removed from the site. The delayed response was criticized by journalists at Daily Dot and Motherboard. Additionally, the videos could still be found afterwards unofficially on Pornhub's website. In December 2020, MindGeek, Pornhub's parent company was sued in California for hosting non-consensual videos produced by GirlsDoPorn, which coerced women into appearing in their videos under false pretenses. In January 2021, a class action lawsuit making similar claims was launched in Montreal. The Canadian-proposed class action sought $600million for anyone who had intimate photos and videos, some of which may have been taken when they were underage, shared on MindGeek's sites without their consent, since 2007. In June 2021, 34 women sued MindGeek in a California federal court, alleging that the company had exploited them and hosted and promoted videos that depicted rape, revenge porn, and child sexual abuse.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) found 118 instances of child sexual abuse material on Pornhub between 2017 and 2019. Pornhub rapidly removed this content. An IWF spokesperson said that other social networks and communication tools posed more of an issue than Pornhub in regard to this type of content. In 2020, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported that over 20 million reports of child sexual abuse material related to content on Facebook, accounting for 95% of total reports, and that Pornhub and other MindGeek sites were the subject of only 13,000 reports.
In response to abusive content on the site, an online petition calling for the shutdown of Pornhub gained over one million signatures throughout 2020. The petition was started by Laila Mickelwait, Director of Abolition at Exodus Cry, a Christian anti-trafficking and anti- sex-work non-profit. Her petition was addressed to the executives of MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub. It noted numerous instances of non-consensual and child abuse material on the website, including a child trafficking victim who was made a "verified model" by the site. In response to the petition, Pornhub claimed they were committed to removing such material from the site.
In December 2020, Nicholas Kristof's opinion column in The New York Times described Pornhub as a company that "monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags". In response to the column, Pornhub announced it would prevent video uploads from unverified users and would disable video downloads. Visa and Mastercard also announced they would review their financial ties to Pornhub. On 10 December 2020, Mastercard and Visa blocked use of their cards on Pornhub. Pornhub told the New York Times that these claims were "irresponsible and flagrantly untrue". Performer Siri Dahl expressed criticism that Visa and Mastercard's actions victimized pornographic performers, while Pornhub continued to make most of its money through . Kristof, in a follow-up 2025 column, cited internal documents that allegedly showed Pornhub employees joking about child sexual abuse material available and that moderators were aware of 706,000 videos that were flagged for unlawful content in 2020.
On 14 December 2020, Pornhub announced that all videos posted by unverified users had been removed from public access "pending verification and review". This reduced the number of videos on the website from 13million to 4million. In Brazil, according to Clayton Nunes, CEO of Brasileirinhas, the result of this action showed that the people who upload non-consensual pornography to Pornhub are the same people who upload pirated pornography. Following their ban on unverified user posting videos, Pornhub released a blog post where they compared those opposed to them to who "same forces that have spent 50 years demonizing Playboy, the National Endowment for the Arts, sex education, LGBTQ rights, women's rights, and even the American Library Association.
In April 2021, Vice reported that individuals tied to far-right and Christian fundamentalist groups, which claim to be anti-trafficking and anti-pornography activists, disseminated disinformation and made death threats towards Pornhub's staff and sex workers.
A 2023 documentary, , covered the opposition to Pornhub and the views of pornographic performers. It featured interviews with Kristof, a lawyer representing women suing MindGeek and a spokesperson for the anti-sex-trafficking group National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
In 2023, a tool developed by Meta Platforms—Take It Down—was released. Participating platforms—including Pornhub—agree to remove non-consensual images or videos that users flag with the tool. Other participants include OnlyFans, Facebook, Yubo, and Instagram. The program relies on users uploading Hash function of images and cannot identify edited versions of the image.
In March 2020, Pornhub premiered Leilah Weinraub's documentary Shakedown, which chronicles a black lesbian strip club of the same name in Los Angeles. The film streamed on the service throughout March, before being released via Criterion Channel. Brand director Alex Klein stated that the film's premiere on Pornhub was part of "a larger general commitment Pornhub has to supporting the arts".
In July 2021, Pornhub launched Classic Nudes, an interactive guide of classic art from major institutions, as a means to help museums recover from the financial toll of the pandemic. However, Louvre, Uffizi, and Museo del Prado sued Pornhub for copyright infringement, claiming that the museums had never "granted authorizations for the operation or use of the art".
In 2017, security firm Proofpoint discovered malicious ads running on the site that had the potential to install override software on users' PCs. The ads had been promoted on the site for over a year without intervention from Pornhub.
In 2015, Pornhub announced a planned wearable device called the "Wankband"—a wristband that stores kinetic energy during male masturbation and can then be used to charge devices. Pornhub's website says that the product is in development.
For Arbour Day 2014, Pornhub launched a weeklong environmental campaign called "Pornhub Gives America Wood", which started on 25 April 2014 and ended on 2 May 2014.
Pornhub has also reported on traffic trends and their relation to large events. Traffic was below usual levels during the solar eclipse of 21 August 2017. During the 2018 Hawaii false missile alert, web traffic to Pornhub in Hawaii fell by 77% (from typical Saturday figures) at 8:23am, after the alert was sent, and increased 48% above typical levels at 9:01am, after notification that the alert was erroneous.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased searches for pornographic content on the Internet, with Pornhub being the most searched site. The study analyzed data from Google Trends and Pornhub Insights to understand the behavior of users during the pandemic. The results showed a peak of 24.4% more searches for pornographic audiovisual material in 2020 compared to 2019 across the same dates (1 March –30 April) internationally. The increase in pornography searches seems to be conditioned by the marketing campaign promoted by Pornhub to offer free Premium content to encourage citizens to stay home, consuming pornography. The study also found a correlation between the percentage increase in searches for pornography made by men and women during the pandemic, as well as by age.
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