Who Truly Profits from Porn?

200 Elgin Street in Ottawa, Canada, is a nondescript office building – the kind of place you’d expect to house accountants or consultants. But beneath its plain exterior lies the corporation that controls Aylo, a rebranded iteration of MindGeek, the company that sits behind the world’s biggest porn site: Pornhub. 

And this being porn even that is not what it seems. To complicate matters further, Aylo is owned by a company called Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), a private equity firm that claims to bring “principled ethical leadership” to industries requiring “transparency” and “accountability.” 

Let that settle in.

The world’s biggest online porn presence is owned by a company called Ethical Capital Partners. And that company boasts partners that include an Israeli-trained rabbi, a marijuana salesman and a woman who has won a national Canadian award for empowering women. 

But beneath their sanitised CVs, corporate jargon and legalese facades lies a much darker story.

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Pornhub’s dominance in the adult industry has been accompanied by controversies involving their hosting of exploitative material, including – in the past – non-consensual content, child sexual abuse material, and videos with deeply misogynistic and violent themes. These allegations, accused of and strongly denied by all the corporations mentioned in this article, nonetheless, reveal the foundations of the platform Pornhub.com that seemed to thrive on systemic exploitation and a lack of accountability long before its recent and supposed cleanup by ECP.

For, despite rebranding efforts and claims of reducing the commodification of online harm, what is clear is that the industry’s business model continues to rely on the profiting from videos rooted in misogyny, racism and harm to women.

These issues are coming more and more under scrutiny here in the UK, where Ofcom has mandated that all websites hosting pornographic content must implement robust age-verification measures by July, under the Online Safety Act. These new regulations, aimed at preventing children from accessing explicit material, require platforms to introduce stringent checks such as photo ID or credit card verification. It seems to be a needed move. Research has suggested that the average age at which UK children first encounter explicit material online is 13, with many exposed even earlier. 

While regulators argue this move is a long-overdue step toward protecting young audiences, it has not taken long for critics like ECP to warn it could drive users to less regulated, “darker corners” of the internet, exacerbating existing risks. This counter-claim is made without much in the way of evidence. After all, quantifying footfall from the ‘darker corners’ of the internet is notoriously hard, so it begs the question: how does ECP know? 

It is not surprising that PRs for the porn world rail against checks and balances. It’s a multi-billion pound industry and beyond Pornhub, the sector’s massive profits extend to other giants like OnlyFans (owned by a company called Fenix International) and WGCZ. 

OnlyFans, celebrated for its creator-focused model, generated $6.63 billion in gross site turnover in 2023. And, while that platform markets itself as empowering creators, stark inequalities persist. The top 1% of creators earn 33% of the platform’s income, while 80% earn less than $100 per month. Billionaire founder Leonid Radvinsky’s $472 million dividends in 2024 give a brief glimpse into the stark disparity between the platform’s few beneficiaries and the millions of creators struggling to make a living. And, despite their claims of robust content moderation, OnlyFans has also faced allegations of hosting non-consensual and illegal material. Meanwhile. WGCZ, the shadowy Czech company behind XVideos and XNXX, epitomises the opacity of the industry. While its platforms draw billions of monthly visits, its financial dealings remain almost entirely hidden.

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What is driving this profiteering?  Certainly the role of algorithms in shaping the industry’s profitable landscape cannot be overstated. Platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans use sophisticated data-driven systems to nudge users toward increasingly extreme content, creating a feedback loop that normalises harmful behaviours such as strangulation videos or clips showing incestuous relationships. 

Performers, in turn, face pressure to produce more outrageous acts to maintain visibility and engagement. Studies show the consequences: 88% of analysed pornographic scenes contain physical aggression, with women being the targets in 97% of cases. And nearly half of young people believe it fosters expectations of physical aggression in sexual relationships, a troubling reflection of the industry’s broader societal impact.

The case of Lily Phillips, a 23-year-old OnlyFans creator, illustrates the exploitative dynamics at play. Phillips made headlines in 2024 for filming herself having sex with 100 men in a single day. Framed by some as an act of empowerment, Byline’s analysis of the profits from her performance – detailed in this month’s paper – still flowed to male-dominated corporations, from OnlyFans’ billionaire owner to the executives of its supporting systems, such as OnlyFans’ legal and financial professional service providers. 

But it is, perhaps Phillips’ poignant admission – “I’m just good for one thing” – that truly highlights the commodification of performers within an industry prioritising profit over well-being. Its an industry that is exposed by the feminist Adrienne Rich’s comment that “the woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected”. A terrain where women in pornography are all too often spat on, throttled, gagged and whipped and treated as mere body parts.

In short, this is not cruel sex. Pornograpy has increasingly become the sexualisation of cruelty.

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This exploitation has wider consequences. Experts are increasingly warning that pornography’s pervasive influence is threatening to erode genuine intimacy, fostering harmful fantasies and fuelling the rise in domestic abuse.

In the preface to his book The Screwtape Letters, the British author C.S. Lewis wrote: “I live in the Managerial Age… The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” 

Given the rampant misogyny, the unresolved accusations of underage and non-consensual content, not to mention the opaque financial dealings of the industry’s biggest players, it seems clear that the profits of the pornographic industry at large are born from thoroughly nasty business concerns that thrive on exploitation and silence.  

They rather hide behind sanitised language, presenting themselves as legitimate corporate ventures even as they benefit from the darkest commodifications of human intimacy. Their wealth, measured in billions, contrasts starkly with the harm caused to those exploited within their systems – an unsettling disparity that raises fundamental questions about accountability and ethics. 

Companies like ECP, Fenix International, and WGCZ deny wrongdoing but what emerges in this four-part investigation by Byline Times in our print edition, is an industry that profits from the grey areas of consent, regulation, and human dignity. And the anodyne offices at 200 Elgin Street of ECP or the vague assurances of “empowerment” by OnlyFans cannot mask the black truths underpinning their revenue streams.