The Impact of Financial Factors on the Porn Industry
Here's How Surprising Money Factors Impact the Porn You Watch
There’s a famous saying when it comes to figuring out who’s really responsible for things: Follow the money.
Financial power, the thinking goes, is the prime mover of things in the world, and when it comes to pornography, the same concept applies.
So if you’re curious as to why the porn you watch is the way it is, well, it’s much more than just the scriptwriters, actors and directors making decisions. The entire financial structure of the porn industry also comes into play.
Ever watch a faux-incest video? There’s a monetary aspect to that. Ever watch a pirated video for free on a major tube site like Pornhub? There’s a monetary aspect to that. Ever wonder why more genuine-seeming porn is harder to find? There’s a monetary aspect to that, too.
What does that mean? The short answer is that major financial powers like banks and credit cards don’t work with porn companies — so they have to figure out alternate modes of getting paid.
The long answer is a lot more complicated, but according to Cindy Gallop, sex-positive campaigner and the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, it impacts almost every aspect of contemporary porn.
“Every single bank that refuses to bank with a legal adult company, every payment processor that will not process payments from a legal adult company, every business entity that refuses to partner with a legal adult company; they are directly responsible for all the bad things that happen in the adult industry,” Gallop says.
Gallop says only the large porn providers can afford such higher fees, and because they mostly peddle narrowly targeted predilections and tired porn tropes like MILFs, stepdaughters and facials, that's the main type of adult content that can afford to exist — while smaller players trying to make alternative or ethical content struggle to survive.
And because big porn’s content is mostly tailored to the cis male gaze, many think it may play an outsize role in how men think about sex — everything from misrepresentations about what real sex looks like to female objectification and beyond.
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So are Gallop and those who agree with her right? If high charges by merchant providers mean only big porn brands can survive, and big porn’s algorithmically driven content gives us such a narrow view of what filmed sex looks like, does that mean we can blame the finance industry for society's skewed sexuality?
In order to better understand the tangled web of porn and money, AskMen spoke to a number of industry insiders. Here’s what they had to say:
The Current Porn Model
The story of porn is inextricable from that of technology, so it’s no surprise that the industry has evolved significantly over the course of the 21st century.
Pre-internet porn studios like Vivid and Wicked have been all-but eradicated by the internet and incredibly accessible cameras and microphones. Today, content creation is in the hands of anyone with a smartphone and a wi-fi connection.
And it’s led to some great independent porn with expansive ideas about eroticism that aren’t tied to the narrow view of sexuality big porn seems to peddle — sites like Gallop’s MakeLoveNotPorn and others like Cheex, Pink Label, Erika Lust, Lustery, Four Chambers, and Bellesa, to name but a few.
But those are small fish in a big pond. Today, the major porn site players are platforms like PornHub and OnlyFans, which host and distribute content, both from individual creators and the few professional studios still holding on.
In many ways, all roads lead to a company called Aylo. Previously known as Mindgeek, and before that Manwin, the Montreal-headquartered company owns almost every big name in content (Brazzers, Digital Playground, Reality Kings) and distribution (Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn).
Despite having its hands in these name-brand studios, Aylo makes a much larger slice of revenue from selling ad space, which means the platforms and the production are decoupled.
"OnlyFans isn't a studio, it's a platform,” says Kate Sinclaire. “Same goes for Pornhub. It's not a studio, it's a tech company.”
Having made porn since 2006, Sinclaire wrote on Twitter/X in 2023 that her payment processing system doubled her fees overnight, lamenting how the financial structures have kept independent producers like her from marketing themselves effectively and 'fed the monopolies and their algorithms'.
She says the business model today is “based on advertising to traffic that was built off of uploaded videos at zero cost to the company.” Which means that, as you may already know, piracy is a huge part of how contemporary porn functions.
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One porn producer, who spoke with AskMen on condition of anonymity, describes a constant battle of finding their scenes or movies on tube sites for free, sending a DMCA notice (the legal mechanism to make a website remove copyright material), and seeing it immediately reappear — with a different name and URL.
“Small adult companies have been bested, and we're stuck in this endless cycle of takedown notices, hoping we can promote the latest pieces that haven't been stolen to carve out our livelihood.”
Porn Payment System Complexities
When Gallop talks about what she sees as discrimination by merchant services against the adult industry, particularly fees that are far higher than the industry standard, it’s eyebrow-raising.
Why don’t these major financial companies play nice with porn companies? Is it some kind of moral objection to adult content? And if so, do they have a leg to stand on?
“Visa and Mastercard are cleaning up by collecting higher fees, all while morally opposing porn, which I think is pretty rich," Sinclaire says. Banks make money off fossil fuels and war, she notes, so to claim that sex is immoral feels, well, hypocritical.
And while higher fees impact everyone in porn from the big fish down to the indie studios, there’s more than just the scent of sex negativity at play. One crucial aspect here that makes things harder for smaller players in the porn world: the concept of the bulk discount, also known as economies of scale.
It’s a crucial mechanism in the world of money — bigger players get better rates in every industry across the planet. We don't know what percentages a platform like OnlyFans pays, but it's certainly lower than the small studios or creators, just like Walmart will pay a lot less than a mom-and-pop store, per unit, when they order 10 or 100 times more.
Few merchant services (the businesses that collect payments and charge them to credit cards, like Stripe, Paypal and Square) deal with adult content, and if you're in need of one for porn, just one name matters — CCBill, estimated to be 5-10 times the size of its nearest competitors, processing over $1 billion annually.
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Specializing in 'high risk' industries, CCBill charges porn providers between 10.8 and 14.5 percent, according to Sinclaire, compared to around 1 to 3 percent for mainstream businesses. You don’t need to be a savvy businessperson to know that when you’re getting charged 5 to 10 times more than other businesses, that makes a difference in how viable yours can be.
CCBill ignored multiple requests for comment, so we couldn't ask them what makes adult content high-risk, but the frequently cited reasons are factors like buyer's remorse (when customers regret buying and start disputes), porn being one of the most popular purchases made with stolen credit cards, and costs around age verification and anti money-laundering.
Noelle Perdue agrees higher rates make it harder for small players to break through. A writer and artist who talks about aspects of the industry, from content moderation to AI porn and everything in between, Perdue describes herself as a porn historian, and as a former Mindgeek employee, she featured prominently in Netflix's 2023 documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story.
“High rates make it so smaller creators have to rely on larger platforms like OnlyFans, Pornhub or ManyVids to host their content,” Perdue says. “It doesn't let creators or studios be fully independent and — in the case with OnlyFans — puts them at risk of deplatforming and in some cases losing their income entirely, if the company decides it no longer wants to host adult content,” as it threatened to several years ago.
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Like Sinclaire, Perdue sees no small measure of hypocrisy in the field.
“The people making the most money off the adult industry are the least likely to align themselves with it, choosing instead to posture with the tech industry and distance themselves from the more politicized realities of working in porn," she says.
So which is it? Do creators pay a premium to make the potential corporate embarrassment to credit card companies worth it, or are there really risks like higher-than-average chargebacks?
To Sinclaire, it's a pure and simple economic monopoly.
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“[Porn] is a captive market with limited labor and human rights access and a rotten public narrative that keeps us marginalized,” she says. “People can't use banks to start porn businesses ... so you need to rely on other ways of handling your money, and there are plenty of people with less than great intentions willing to do that for you.”
The Impact on Porn Content
So major banks won’t touch porn, and unscrupulous financial services, combined with economies of scale, mean smaller producers are all but squeezed out of the market when compared to sites run by Aylo.
What does that actually mean when it comes to the content itself?
In short, it’s hard to say exactly. But it’s unlikely that there’s zero impact — and it may be significant.
Since the vast majority of porn consumption is digital now, platforms like Pornhub have unbelievable amounts of data about what performs well — and individual creators can also get a sense of winning strategies based on the views on their videos.
So is contemporary porn just a case of the big platforms giving us what we want the most? The platforms have the technology behind the clicks down to a precision science, so aren't they just reflecting what we want back at us? Are the blondes, blowjobs and bukkake videos a pure representation of basic human sexuality?
Ultimately, it’s not that simple. There are a lot of variables at play, and a whole lot of debate.
“Generally speaking there's a specific type of mainstream porn consumer the industry caters to — specifically the cisheterosexual male — because they're the most likely to purchase porn,” Perdue says.
It’s a cyclical pattern, she notes: “The industry caters to them, so they buy porn, so the industry caters to them, etc., etc.”
If the front page of Pornhub expected something closer to a 50/50 gender split from its users (to say nothing of sexuality), what would the videos being served to users look like?
Porn screenwriter Maddy Barton agrees that as we watch content centered on certain styles or genres or kinks, it tells platforms' algorithms to make more of it. But that doesn’t mean it’s inherently democratic.
“I've heard themes like faux-incest were algorithmically driven by a smaller group of high-volume consumers,” she says. “It slowly pushed it to the front pages of tube sites, and because more casual porn viewers rely heavily on the front page, they began clicking it, creating a feedback loop that drove the trend.”
Everyone Barton knows in the industry has been 'over' incest tropes for a long time, but they keep performing algorithmically, so the industry continues making them. If you’re interested in making creative porn that explores new or unusual themes, well, good luck.
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“Data really drives the industry, and it's a shame because there are a lot of great artists in porn who are limited by the influence of the tech industry's obsession with it,” Barton says.
Creators aren’t just at the whims of the analytics — they also have to abide by certain rules to make sure their content doesn’t run afoul of the payment companies, either, not unlike the infamous Hayes code that used to dictate what could and couldn’t be shown in Hollywood movies.
“I have to make sure to be very clear that characters aren't actually related; that everyone’s over 18,” Barton says. “There's no strict list so every company is doing their best to avoid being 'cut off,' so to speak. For some studios I need to state the characters are only step-siblings twice, for another it's three times.”
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Like other forms of art, porn has always been a balance of business and art, but today, the balance is tilted pretty extremely away from the art portion. So if you feel like modern porn is, well, a little soulless — that’s why.
Is There a Better Way Forward?
As soon as she created MakeLoveNotPorn in 2009, the British-born Gallop found herself mired in the tangle of regulation and legislation around adult content payments.
“Fifteen years ago, I literally investigated starting my own bank," she says. "It’s bloody impossible here in the U.S., but if you'd told me back then I’d spend this much of my life talking to banks and payment processors, I wouldn't have believed you."
Now, she wants to create what she calls the 'Stripe of sextech'. Gallop calls Stripe the quickest, easiest, most efficient way to process payments, but they're just one of many providers that won't service online porn.
Her own system, called Blockfree, is currently in planning, and Gallop hopes there’s an opportunity for lots of different investors interested in processing payments for what she calls 'restricted business' — not just adult content, but also cannabis, psychedelics, crypto, etc.
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But in the ultimate vindication for sites that prioritize authentic and genuine emotion, desire and intimacy, providers actually experience fewer of the chargebacks higher merchant facility rates are imposed to combat. In her 2023 tweets, Sinclaire said the site she ran at the time had never attracted a single one.
Statistics about how much lower chargebacks are for smaller, more ethical porn production companies are very hard to come by, but conventional wisdom points to the way they adhere to processes that make them more trustworthy — transparent billing processes and detailed product information can prevent the misunderstandings or regret around buying that cause payment disputes.
Mainstream providers (along with many other consumer sectors), by contrast, are known more for vague payment practices and content that doesn't match the description, thumbnails or trailer.
All of which adds up to one thing: We live in a topsy-turvy world where platforms and websites that have sometimes been proven to be unscrupulous get the best merchant rates and flourish, while producers who want to make their content and run their businesses ethically are often left out in the cold.
But if those smaller, more sex-positive producers had a louder voice and more influential content in the industry, might it really show kids in their formative years that respect and desire is a worthier goal than the distorted power dynamics, hazy standards of consent and objectification?
We can’t yet know for sure, of course. But it is worth thinking about, particularly in a world where many young people have watched untold hours of internet porn before they ever have sex with another human being. .
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