Greg Behr
Greg Behr

Despite these past weeks of constant election turmoil and raging pandemic coverage, you may have spotted a headline regarding PornHub, the industry leader in user-generated erotica.

You’ll be forgiven if you thought perhaps it was just a piece of salacious clickbait, but if you dug in you’d realize the story represents a possible bellwether moment for an entire industry.

The story first began when NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff reported that the very value proposition of PornHub—a YouTube for erotica with user-generated content making up the bulk of its vast library—allowed videos of sexually criminal activity into its library for viewing.

The fallout from the report led Visa and Mastercard to launch investigations into their relationship with the company owned by MindGeek.

The result? PornHub did the unthinkable for any B2C company. They enacted a scorched earth policy and deleted two-thirds of their entire library--essentially, any video regardless of its content uploaded from an “unverified” user.

They closed the gates, kicked out the criminals along with the commoners, and put a new army of guards on the tower.

In a media landscape where the consumption of user-generated content includes 500 million hours of YouTube videos watched each day, and more video content is uploaded in 30 days than the major television networks have created in 30 years, the idea that content is going to once again flow through a gatekeeper (or producer) is a staggering concept. And as anyone who has studied media knows, pornography typically drives tech trends more than any other industry sector.

While the future of the entire media landscape is an important topic to debate, for us PR professionals, there are a couple of lessons from PornHub’s recent strife that are clear and likely policies we’ve raised to our clients.

Always raise the worst-case scenario

We can all imagine ourselves in the boardroom at PornHub, where illegal content must be a constant topic. Many of us have worked for tech companies that right or wrong have the innovative mindset made famous by Mark Zuckerberg: Stay focused and keep shipping. For PornHub, that likely meant a constant game of Whack-a-mole where to keep the users and ad revenue/subscriptions coming, there had to be a constant stream of new content unencumbered by too stringent of a gatekeeper.

The problem with that strategy vs. what many others face: when what some bad actors are uploading is the most abhorrent and criminal content imaginable, you lose the ability to seek a mea culpa after the fact because you are enabling its creation and distribution.

While it is hard for us to dictate the core business strategy, we should always voice the potential worst-case scenario. I wonder if anyone at PornHub ever envisioned an outcome to a crisis where deleting 2/3 of its content overnight would be the solution.

Quickly shift to an offense.

Because of the egregiously illegal content uploaded to its site, PornHub has undoubtedly lost the positioning they may have once had as acting as another spoke in the gig economy.

After all, the value they offer legal and consenting models to take control of their content and free themselves of the exploitation of the incumbent industry makes a compelling case.

After the recent content purge, PornHub went on the offensive. They accepted the faults illustrated by Kristoff and investigated by their partners at Visa and Mastercard. Yes, they say they long planned to institute changes to eliminate non-consensual and other criminal content, which may or may not be true.

After the removal of any content that could be damaging, they pulled the defense from the court. They shifted to a strategy that called into question the motives of some of the other critics who had piled on: namely, porn abolitionists.

As a company with its house in order, they changed the conversation to illustrate the merits of legal creators controlling their content and careers in the industry.

Like every industry leader from Facebook to BP whose core business model has yielded criminal or disastrous outcomes, they’ve shifted to focusing on fixing the problem expediently.

It took 12 days from the release of the original article to the nuclear option of deleting two thirds of their catalog. We know time is a factor in a crisis. The faster we can turn the ship, the faster we can get through it and out of the headlines.

Yes, they’ll need to rebuild their library to encourage users to continue coming back. They’ll get there and likely with the ability to operate a business without as much vulnerability for unbiased criticism.

Hopefully, other sites will follow their lead, and the market for non-consensual and illegal content will be closer to final eradication.

***

Greg Behr is a founder of GBW Strategies in Raleigh.