In 2014 Serena Fleites was 13 years old when a boy she had a crush on pressured her to make a naked video of herself and send it to him. According to reporting from Evie Magazine, “At that point in her life, she hadn’t even kissed a boy yet. She obliged to his request. And when he asked for more naked videos, she felt flattered and sent more. Serena says that’s when she ‘started getting strange looks in school.'” Fleites’ first video ended up on Pornhub, garnering 400,000 views by the time she discovered it.” Pornhub’s parent company is now Aylo Holdings S.A.R.L. (formerly MindGeek S.A.R.L.).
Ashamed to tell her mother about the upload, Fleites resorted to impersonating her mom to inform MindGeek that her video “qualified as child pornography.” Nevertheless, it took weeks for MindGeek to remove her video. While the video was active, users downloaded and reuploaded it countless times.
Fleites Lawsuit Adds Defendants
Fleites filed a lawsuit against MindGeek, Visa, and others in June 2021. Redwood Capital Management and Colbeck Capital Management were added as defendants to the lawsuit in a second amended complaint on Thursday.
According to the lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court, “Redwood and Colbeck provided hundreds of millions of dollars in financing to the individuals who acquired and built MindGeek. Before providing that financing, the funds performed several rounds of due diligence during which the risks of “illegal material” involving “minors” were raised, Fleites alleges.”
It is Often Difficult to Get Content Removed
According to the filing, Fleites received many messages from strangers with hyperlinks to her video “in the years following the original posting.” When the video was reposted, Fleites asked MindGeek to remove it. However, she was required to supply “photographic proof that she was the child depicted in the video.” In the meantime, MindGeek made bank on her video from ad revenue that “appeared alongside the video.”
Fleites alleges “Visa knew MindGeek’s sites contained a substantial amount of child porn and that MindGeek did not properly police its sites for such content.” Nevertheless, Visa and its agent banks continued to process transactions without restrictions on all MindGeek sites. Visa merely required Pornhub to prove it “had the technology and processes in place to prevent such content.”
It took a 2020 New York Times exposè to make Visa take action. Even then their response was temporary. Visa suspended business temporarily pending investigation. MindGeek responded by taking down “80 percent of its content.” However, Visa eventually “restored services for MindGeek’s paid premium sites and for advertising on all of its sites.” Fleites is suing Visa because it “knowingly provided the means through which MindGeek monetizes child porn once such content is already produced and purchased.”
Owners of MindGeek (Aylo) Operate in the Shadows
Pornhub profits from monetizing the trafficking and sexual abuse of minors. MindGeek (now Aylo), owns Pornhub and also operates several other sites, Peeperz, YouPorn, and Brazzers. According to the lawsuit, “MindGeek is the most dominant online pornography company in the world.” It is “likely the largest non-regulatory repository of child pornography in North America and well beyond.”
Little known to the public, Montreal-based Mindgeek (now Aylo) CEO Feras Antoon and Austro-British financier Berg Bergmair spend their days operating in the shadows. According to the lawsuit, Antoon and Bergmair, “[scrub] as much of their online fingerprint as possible, and insist on extreme secrecy and security measures in MindGeek’s business dealings even with respect to other MindGeek employees.”
The truth is their enterprise houses massive amounts of online content related to child pornography, rape, and human trafficking. As the lawsuit states, “content is king.” In the end, algorithms are built upon the accumulation of content that will drive optimized search results.
This is About Child Abuse and Sex Trafficking, Not Pornography
A great deal of the content on Pornhub is non-consensual. Pornhub features “child pornography, rape videos, trafficked videos, and every other form of non-consensual content.” Moreover, there is very little monitoring of the site to remove exploitative and illegal content. As a result, content like Fleites’ video can be uploaded without the subject’s knowledge.
“These individuals built the MindGeek empire by knowingly and intentionally adopting an unrestricted content business model under which they would solicit and monetize all pornographic content without restriction, including child pornography and other nonconsensual content,” the suit reads.
Content is King: Target Audiences and Ad Space
Ad space is a key for revenue and targeting audiences online. As websites go, Pornhub is no different. Aylo sells ad space through its advertising platform called “TrafficJunky.” TrafficJunky ad revenue accounts for more than 50 percent of Aylo’s revenue.
Advertisers make money on Pornhub by targeting certain audiences. Certain targets drive more revenue and the sad truth is that child porn drives web traffic. Keywords like “13yearoldteen,” “not18” and even keywords like “teenrape” in Japanese attract views. The greater the traffic, the pricier the ad space.
In addition, MindGeek (Aylo) allows third parties to upload content, making it more difficult to monitor content. Furthermore, according to the lawsuit, “MindGeek employed a barebones team of ‘as few as 6 but never more than about 30’ untrained, minimum wage contractors to monitor millions of daily uploads.” According to the lawsuit, contractors are ‘perversely incentivized,’ —paid bonuses based on the videos they approve for upload. In other words, contractors profit from upload volume, not how meticulously they moderate the content.
While Pornhub might want you to believe otherwise, the site promotes unimaginably horrifying content. As illustrated in the lawsuit, some of the site’s content features toddlers or prepubescent girls being sexually abused. Sadly, even when that content is removed, the “‘title, tags, views, and URL’ [may be] kept live to continue driving traffic to the site.
Fleites’ Life Spiraled Out of Control After Video Upload
The fallout from the Pornhub post was devastating for Fleites. Per the lawsuit, her “life spiraled out of control. She was harassed and bullied in school to such a degree that she started skipping school and finally unenrolled to attend courses online.”
As with many 14-year-olds, Fleites was afraid to tell her mother about the video. As a result, her mother didn’t understand why Fleites began to skip classes. Ultimately, Fleites left her mother’s home and moved in with her sister. Then when Fleites returned home, she attempted to hang herself. She also attempted suicide several other times in the years after.
Fleites also became a heroin addict. To fund her addiction, she created sexually explicit videos at the behest of the older man who introduced heroin to her. He then sold her videos on Craiglist and those videos, in turn, were uploaded to Pornhub. To make matters worse, MindGeek uploaded the videos to its other pornographic websites.
Tragically, one mistake turned her life upside down. At age 19, Fleites was “intermittently homeless, or living in her car, addicted to heroin, depressed and suicidal, and without the support of her family.”
MindGeek Monetizes Sexual Exploitation of Children: Huge Market for Child Trafficking
Pornhub and sites like it become traffickers of innocent children like Fleites. Aylo “knowingly” monetizes and benefits financially from child porn, child sexual abuse, and child trafficking. Monetizing the sexual exploitation of children perpetuates the abuse of children. In essence, there is little intrinsic motivation on the part of Aylo to shut down its sites.
DOJ Announces Deferred Prosecution Agreement with Aylo
As recently as December 2023, Aylo Holdings (formerly MindGeek) “was arraigned on a charge of engaging in unlawful monetary transactions involving sex trafficking proceeds,” per a DOJ press release. Aylo agreed to be monitored for three years in a deferred prosecution agreement. Aylo also agreed to “make payments to the United States and to individuals affected by the underlying sex trafficking.” Aylo has agreed to pay $1,844,952.83 to the United States.
From the DOJ Press Release:
“This deferred prosecution agreement holds the parent company of Pornhub.com accountable for its role in hosting videos and accepting payments from criminal actors who coerced young women into engaging in sexual acts on videos that were posted without their consent,” stated United States Attorney Peace. “This Office is committed to ensuring internet safety and protecting people from online sexual exploitation. It is our hope that this resolution, which includes certain agreed payments to the women whose images were posted on the company’s platforms and an independent monitorship brings some measure of closure to those negatively affected. This resolution will not only provide oversight over one of the largest online content distributors in the world and ensure the company’s lawful behavior, but it will also develop industry-wide standards for safety and compliance.”
“Motivated by profit, Aylo Holdings knowingly enriched itself by turning a blind eye to the concerns of victims who communicated to the company that they were deceived and coerced into participating in illicit sexual activity” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Smith. “Make no mistake, any entity that engages in sexual exploitation will be held to account for the mental anguish and terror imposed on victims. I hope today’s proceedings bring a sense of justice to the victims in this case as they move forward in their lives.”
Pornhub Averages Over 100 Million Daily Visits: U.S. Drives Most Traffic
According to Pornhub’s press releases, the site “averages over 100 billion video views a year. That is about 12.5 porn videos per person on Earth. There are over 100 million daily visits to Pornhub and over 36 billion visits per year. There are 20 million registered Pornhub users. The site advertises ways to make money with its Pornhub Amateur Program. Goodness knows how many underage children lie about their age to participate.
The United States is by far the top country driving daily traffic to Pornhub, according to PornHub Insights. A distant second place goes to the Philippines. “In 2022,” according to statista.com, “The adult online content market in the United States was estimated to have a value of almost 977 million U.S. dollars. In 2023, the pornographic website market in the U.S. is projected to surpass one billion U.S. dollars in value, with an annualized market growth of 12.6 percent.”
Users are spending more and more time on Pornhub, according to Pornhub Insights. The average time on the site has increased by 15 seconds, making the “average duration on the site 10 minutes and 9 seconds.” Maryland is the top state for the most time spent on the site, with an average of 11 minutes and 31 seconds in 2022. Louisiana is at the bottom, averaging 8 minutes and 58 seconds. The average age of Pornhub visitors was 37 years old in 2022, fairly stable over the past few years. Most viewers are between the ages of 18 and 34.
Internet pornography usage hurts teens. According to Webroot’s Internet Pornography by the Numbers, online porn increases the odds of teenage pregnancy, hinders sexual development, and raises the risk of depression. Engaging in internet pornography creates distorted expectations which, in turn, hinders healthy development. The amount of sexually graphic material on the web is staggering, as shown in the graphic below:
Parents concerned about their teens should monitor online activity. It is important to be aware of the various ways the internet can be accessed at home. Keep computers and other technology in public areas of the home to help monitor online content. Parents should make every effort to communicate openly with their children.
FreedomForever.us partners with a number of organizations such as Protect Young Eyes, Covenant Eyes, VidAngel, Troomi, The Mama Bear Effect, and others to help protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation.
Freedom Forever is an all-volunteer organization that focuses its energy and time on preserving the innocence and safety of children. Freedom Forever is now also offering crisis support for survivors and families. Please call the Crisis Resource Line at 615.307.0152 or email our resource specialist at Starr@FreedomForever.us.
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