Pornhub, the world’s number one online pornography company, has a new owner. Indeed, Mindgeek, the parent company of the site, was bought by a Canadian private equity firm. The new management is determined to restore the image of the X site, tarnished for years after several scandals.
While Pornhub risked losing its domain name due to a legal tussle at the start of the year, we have just learned that the world’s number 1 in online porn has a new owner.
Indeed, the parent company of the site X Mindgeek has just been bought by PCE Or Ethical Capital Partners, a Canadian private equity firm. As our colleagues from the Financial Times report, the amount of the transaction was not disclosed.
Pornhub acquired by a Canadian company
We find at the head of ECP a certain Rocco Meliambro, who has worked in particular in the Canadian cannabis industry, as well as Fady Mansour, criminal lawyer, and Derek Ogden, former director of the fight against drugs and against organized crime. within the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
It should be remembered that Mindgeek, despite its portfolio of high traffic sites and its 115 million monthly visitors, had been going through a difficult period for his last three years.
Indeed, the Cypriot company was singled out in 2020 for its inability to prevent users from uploading and viewing child pornography videos.
Mindgeek at the center of several scandals since 2020
These moderation problems reached a climax the same year, with the withdrawal of many business partners from the site. PayPal had in particular withdrawn its payment system from Pornhub, followed then by Visa and Mastercard, which in turn chose to block all payments to the adult site.
In response, Pornhub managed to remove most illegal videos from its platform and implement a mandatory age verification system for actors. But that was not enough, since payment service operators continued to deny access to the Traffic Junky ad network of Mindgeek following a court decision.
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Indeed, a California court found that Visa could be held liable for helping Mindgeek “fund child pornography”. This obviously reinforced the company in its choice to abandon any collaboration with Pornhub.
Currently, site X is still under several lawsuits, and for ECP, the first step will be to clear the name of the platform. According to ECP, the company intends to make Mindgeek “an Internet leader in the fight against illegal content online”.