#PornhubPause Questons and Answers
When I read the news that Pornhub would introduce their Tier program, including demonetizing models accounts that don’t upload a 7+ minute video twice a year, I knew many online creators would be as angry as I was about it. However, I also knew that a large number either wouldn’t care or even push back against the #PornhubPause campaign. I’ll admit that ever since the major credit cards stopped servicing Pornhub, subsequently preventing Pornhub from allowing clip sales, subscriptions, and tips, the ad revenue gains are just a trickle of my sex work income. That doesn’t mean Pornhub’s changes won’t negatively affect me or other models.
Question: “Why should I care about boycotting Pornhub since I mostly just want to use it to funnel people to my OnlyFans?”
Answer: Lots of creators are in bad financial positions, and even an extra $100 here and there can mean the difference between comfort and survival. Just because you don’t depend on Pornhub for income doesn’t mean that others are the same.
Question: “It’s not hard to upload a 7+minute video twice a year. Why don’t you just do what they ask?”
Answer: People seem to have not read or cared about when I wrote about retirees in my original #PornhubPause post. In sex work (or life in general), preparing for retirement is good financial planning, and that includes figuring out how selling clips, ad revenue, and other means of passive income will support us during and after our careers. People who have already retired from sex work now have to decide whether to come back from retirement to be compensated again for ad revenue off of their videos, or forgo it and forget about their past efforts into making Pornhub a viable revenue stream.
As for active models, it throws a wrench into our retirement plans. Personally, I’m wondering if I can ever truly retire from sex work. Even though I make my content with longevity in mind, will the quality of my promotional content dip because I know I will only be receiving short-term gains? When I create content, whether freely available or for purchase, I consider its lifetime value. Pornhub’s new rules make it so the LTV of promotional videos decreases.
It’s not just retirement that affects models’ careers and time commitments, but living with disability or neurodivergency, or events like becoming a parent or medical obstacles can have severe impacts.
Unlike lots of other social media, Pornhub is directly profiting off of our videos, not just on the pages. If our accounts are demonetized, for not uploading the minimum requirement of 7+ minute videos, they take all of the profits off of our existing videos when we performed the bulk of the labor. Not to mention that many models sell 5-minute videos on other platforms for $5-$50 yet Pornhub expects us to give them even longer content in exchange for pennies. It’s an all around unfair system.
Finally, to add…
I emailed Pornhub asking about how much percentage of ad revenue payout goes to models, since Pornhub previously published that models earned 80%. Instead of a direct answer, I received a canned response about how there is no static RPM (ad revenue per thousand impressions), and that earnings are adjusted for which Tier you are in and geographical location. I sent another email trying to clarify my question, yet I was given an even shorter email reply basically repeating what was told to me previously, but with this tidbit: “As you climb up the Tier ranks, you receive a higher percentage of ad share.” That means, for all we know, the top-ranked models could only be making 60% of the ad revenue earned on their content. They are purposefully keeping us in the dark about our potential for earnings.
Let’s add a fifth ask: We want transparency about the percentage of earnings a model can make with each Tier, and how geographical location plays a role.
