This is why all your tube videos were deleted

[rawTOP]

In case you were wondering why all the videos you uploaded to [insert big tube site here] were deleted, here's what happened…

The History Behind What's Going On

Going back a ways, there are groups who are dedicated to getting rid of porn on the Internet (or at least as getting rid of as much of the porn as possible). Exodus Cry is one of the main groups trying to get rid of porn. A couple years ago they did a campaign to get state legislatures to declare porn a "public health crisis". A few states signed on, but overall it wasn't terribly successful. So now they've changed strategies and they took aim at PornHub saying that PornHub was being used to traffic underage girls. There was an article here and there with those claims but it didn't get traction. Then they got Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof at the NY Times to write an article on it. Apparently they spoon fed him information and he didn't really check the general validity of the claims before publishing his article. (Read more about it here.) But once that article was out things started happening.

The other piece of background that you should know is that PornHub is owned by a company called MindGeek. Today MindGeek is an an enormous company, but it has a very shady past. It started as Manwin back when tube sites were just coming out as a thing. Manwin operated out of countries that had no extradition treaties and they encouraged/enabled people to upload videos they didn't have rights to. So their tube sites were filled with illegal content (illegal for copyright infringement mostly). Those tube sites decimated the porn industry. Suddenly people didn't have to pay. Lots of producers went out of business. People like me who sent traffic to sites run by producers went out of business. Anyway, their business was so illegal that the owners would get indicted and around that time the business would be sold to someone else. They they would get indicted and the business would be sold again. Some of the owners later went to prison, others are still on the run or out of reach of the law. Anyway, about the 3rd or 4th time that happened the company was sold and renamed MindGeek. The owners of MindGeek decided to clean up their image. So they hired an army of lawyers and stayed (just barely in some cases) on the right side of the law.

Anyway, Manwin had bought up a lot of the big tube sites that they didn't already own. And MindGeek continued buying. Last I knew they owned 5 of the 8 top tube sites. Then as the producers who were having problems and were going out of business because of all the illegal content on MindGeek's tube sites started going out of business, MindGeek started buying them up. The producers were in a constant battle to get illegal copies of their videos off the tube sites, but once the same content was owned by MindGeek all that illegal content magically disappeared giving MindGeek a huge advantage – they didn't have to fight the big tube sites, because they were the big tube sites. These days MindGeek owns most of straight porn, and some really big names in gay porn. Men.com, Sean Cody, Reality Dudes – they all belong to MindGeek (and many many more).

The other thing to know is that there's what's legal, and then there's what MasterCard and Visa (and their shareholders) want to be associated with. The Visa/MC standard is stricter than what's "legal". By having a "premium membership" for PornHub, MindGeek was agreeing to be held to the higher Visa/MC standard. The problem was that when customers bought a PornHub Premium membership it allowed them ad-free access to PornHub. PornHubPremium.com is a "clean" site – MindGeek has vetted every person and company that's uploaded to the premium site. And those people are contractually obligated to have signed model releases and age verification documentation on file. But none of that is the case for PornHub.com – MindGeek has no clue who's behind the random email address the person provided. Yes, their terms of service probably say the person has to own (or have a license for) the video and everyone has to be 18+, but given that they don't really know who the uploader is, there's no way to enforce any of that. Because the premium membership included benefits on the non-premium site, what was going on on PornHub.com became Visa and MasterCard's business. If that hadn't been the case then it might have all blown over since the premium site was clean.

What's Happened In The Past Couple Weeks

The shit started hitting the fan when Kristof's article appeared in the NY Times. That got MasterCard and Visa to start investigations. Within a few days MasterCard terminated their relationship with PornHub, and Visa followed suit later the same day. Because of those investigations MindGeek is in crisis mode – they need the money they get from credit cards. Visa and MasterCard are continuing their investigations and they're looking at more than PornHub – they're looking at everything MindGeek owns. If Visa/MC isn't happy MindGeek could lose credit card processing for all their sites – including their paysites (Men.com, Sean Cody, Reality Dudes, etc.)

MindGeek has been working hard the last few years to change their image. They're now so large and have so much legal content that they don't need the illegal content that made them into a huge company. And that illegal content is what got them in trouble with Visa/Mastercard. Unfortunately they can't tell the difference between your personal video (that's legal), and the illegal video that someone else uploaded, so they just deleted everything that wasn't uploaded by someone who they've vetted. And because they had put all their tube sites under the umbrella of the "PornHub Network", this is also affecting PornMD, RedTube, XTube and YouPorn. Oh, and GayTube got shut down completely! All in all they deleted just under 80% of the videos on their sites(!!) It was a massive purge.

Final Thoughts – Putting Things In Context

1) For starters this all started because some people said that there was Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) on PornHub. And yes, mixed in among the millions of videos they had on their sites, there was a little bit of it. BUT we need to put that into context. The Internet Watch Foundation has documented the following number of cases on the various big internet platforms…

• Facebook – 84.1 million cases of CSAM
• Instagram – 4.45 million cases of CSAM
• Twitter – 1.47 million cases of CSAM
• PornHub – 118 cases of CSAM

In other words, the "big tech" social media platforms have a MUCH MUCH bigger problem with child porn than PornHub. But Exodus Cry didn't go after those platforms, they went after PornHub, because none of this is actually about child porn. Child porn is just the pretext to go after porn in general. The problem was the publicity got Visa/MC to re-examine the other (non-CSAM) illegal content on PornHub's sites (e.g. pirated porn). Once they were under a microscope for one thing, everything had to be cleaned up.

2) Another takeaway is that this wasn't about you. It wasn't about PornHub not liking a particular fetish, or whatever. This is about the commercialization of formerly free tube sites by a large corporation and what happens when you start using Visa/MC to sell memberships (or products) on your site. This is about Visa and MasterCard's rules.

3) Another thing to remember is that, while this may be painful for a time, ultimately it's really good that PornHub deleted all those videos. The big tube sites decimated the porn business. Lots of producers went out of business, and most of the people like me who got commissions by promoting sales on legal porn sites just went out of business and disappeared completely. 10 years ago there were three gay webmaster forum sites that were all really active with discussion. Today there's one and it's lucky if it gets 1 or 2 people posting comments in a day. By deleting all those videos the playing field is considerably more level.

So it sucks that your videos are gone, but ultimately this means a better, healthier porn industry.

[rawTOP]

I should mention that I'm sorta kicking myself that my social site and hookup sites aren't up and running with video uploads. But after all this I'll be doing video uploads differently than I had originally envisioned.

Unverified users will be limited to videos that are 2 1/2 minutes or less. They will need to identify the source of the video (the original website for promo clips from porn sites, or that it's a personal/amateur video that they have the legal right to upload).

To upload videos longer than 2 1/2 minutes the user will need to provide documentation on who they are, by submitting a scan of a government issued photo ID, plus some other form of identity.

So basically I'll be doing a combination of Twitter's approach (with short videos) and PornHub's new approach (with longer videos). The difference is that I'll only need to stick to what is legal, not the stricter Visa/Mastercard standards. I do plan on having a store, but just for things like t-shirt, sex toys, etc. and it will be on a completely different domain. All this drama just goes to show I can't sell memberships to sites with user generated content. (So no, you won't be able to pay to get more private messages.)

[HardOneLA]

Thanks very much for your info Sir, which is very informative.  Likewise, all of the vids I've posted to Pornhub and xTube over the years have been deleted.  I wrote them and received this reply:

"Thank you for contacting us.
Please be informed that we only accept content uploads from verified users."

That being said I'm not sure what a "verified user" is or how to achieve it, unless it's meaning that I have to pay for the site now in order to post.  Some of my vids were as lame as me hanging tit clamps and showing people how to work nips.  I'd hardly find that to be porn, but then again in today's world...

Thanks again.

[gwmxyz]

Interesting.

I got a similar message from Xtube when I enquired. My vids haven't been taken down, but one is "corrupt" - and not in an interesting way.  It seems I can't even upload to put it right.

And while I feel sorry for legal porn producers in the face of this crusade, the problem for me is I don't really like professional porn (too perfect, too well lit, compulsory beards etc).

Any views on an alternative for amateur vids? ThisVid?

[ErosWired]

On 12/16/2020 at 9:11 AM, HardOneLA said:

That being said I'm not sure what a "verified user" is or how to achieve it

What it means, at least up to this point, is registering your identity with XTube in the form of a Nonexclusive Amateur Model License Agreement. This involves signing and submitting a legal agreement containing your name, address, phone number, email address, and signature, as well as photos of your driver’s license or other qualifying photo ID.

 I signed one 10 years ago when I was thinking about possibly camming. I ended up just posting some old videos of myself I made when I was younger. My videos were still up as of last night.

If you don’t like the idea of a porn site’s corporate owners having your personally identifying information, you’re probably not going to become ‘verified’ under the existing system. And even if you do, under the agreement you’re still not allowed to upload video of anyone else with you unless they’re *also* verified amateur models, so unless you know such people, it’s going to be a lot of solo video. You can forget about seeing clips of guys getting anon bred.

Not that being a ‘Nonexclusive Amateur Model’ has ever done me any good - I’ve never been lucky enough to encounter Tops who wanted to film themselves fucking me... yet.

[HardOneLA]

32 minutes ago, ErosWired said:

What it means, at least up to this point, is registering your identity with XTube in the form of a Nonexclusive Amateur Model License Agreement. This involves signing and submitting a legal agreement containing your name, address, phone number, email address, and signature, as well as photos of your driver’s license or other qualifying photo ID.

 I signed one 10 years ago when I was thinking about possibly camming. I ended up just posting some old videos of myself I made when I was younger. My videos were still up as of last night.

If you don’t like the idea of a porn site’s corporate owners having your personally identifying information, you’re probably not going to become ‘verified’ under the existing system. And even if you do, under the agreement you’re still not allowed to upload video of anyone else with you unless they’re *also* verified amateur models, so unless you know such people, it’s going to be a lot of solo video. You can forget about seeing clips of guys getting anon bred.

Not that being a ‘Nonexclusive Amateur Model’ has ever done me any good - I’ve never been lucky enough to encounter Tops who wanted to film themselves fucking me... yet.

Thanks for this info bud!

[Cutedelicategay]

It means free jerking off and fantasy material is gone. One has to pay for pign and these paid memberships are a fortune. Better to go back to CDs and DVD from local adult stores at least they have dark rooms as a tip. 

[rawTOP]

22 hours ago, gwmxyz said:

And while I feel sorry for legal porn producers in the face of this crusade, the problem for me is I don't really like professional porn (too perfect, too well lit, compulsory beards etc).

Any views on an alternative for amateur vids? ThisVid?

The "fans" sites (OF, JFF, RFC) are filling the gap of legal porn with an amateur style.

The issue is that, as a site owner, you can't just let anyone upload anything. Section 230 protected site owners under a very specific set of circumstances (they couldn't "approve" uploads, but had to respond quickly to reports of problems). Well, both the Republicans and Democrats want to replace Section 230 because in different ways they don't like what's happening on Facebook and Twitter. (Trump is currently threatening to veto funding for the military if it's not abolished completely.) So there's no guarantee the Section 230 protections that allowed the big tubes to do what they did will even be in place in the next year.

What that means is that all the big tubes will probably have to dump the content uploaded by unverified users. So there's no point of recommending another site – because it'll just be a case of whack-a-mole.

Even when you shoot a video in your bedroom with a fuck buddy the legality of uploading that to a site is a bit complicated. You should have proof of his age. You should have a signed model agreement that gives you the right to uploads. Otherwise legally it's just for private use. Because it was shot in a place where there was the expectation of privacy, he owns the video just as much as you do and you can't violate his rights. Even if it's shot outdoors in a park where there's no expectation of privacy, because it's sexually explicit you could come up against revenge porn laws if you post it.

Things are much clearer when it's a group of OF/JFF/RFC models shooting a scene together and then uploading it to their fans pages. Clearly there's an expectation that it will be used publicly for commercial purposes. Which is why I say the fans stuff is what will dominate the "amateur porn" market going forward.

[Movietheaterslut2]

I appreciate all the info listed here. Thanks!!

[AirmaxUK]

This is all really interesting: Being based in the UK, I am curious how this plays out internationally... Given the global nature of the internet, is there a reason why one of the big porn tube companies wouldn't incorporate or setup and host from a more liberal country where lobby groups like Exodus Cry are less of an issue? In the early days of the net, there were companies in Europe (Netherlands and Germany) that were more friendly to fetish and gay content - I think xs4all and GMX were ones I remember seeing. A lot's changed since then, but I'm curious what benefits/problems going offshore brings...? 

Could this also mean that alt-currency payments become popular in lieu of Mastercard/Visa? I've always been a bit wary of sharing card/personal details with certain sites - hence I have a prepay card I use for that kind of thing. 

[rawTOP]

1 minute ago, AirmaxAndy said:

This is all really interesting: Being based in the UK, I am curious how this plays out internationally... Given the global nature of the internet, is there a reason why one of the big porn tube companies wouldn't incorporate or setup and host from a more liberal country where lobby groups like Exodus Cry are less of an issue? In the early days of the net, there were companies in Europe (Netherlands and Germany) that were more friendly to fetish and gay content - I think xs4all and GMX were ones I remember seeing. A lot's changed since then, but I'm curious what benefits/problems going offshore brings...? 

Could this also mean that alt-currency payments become popular in lieu of Mastercard/Visa? I've always been a bit wary of sharing card/personal details with certain sites - hence I have a prepay card I use for that kind of thing. 

The issue is that Visa/Mastercard is global and they have pretty much the same rules around the world. Because they're stricter than most laws, it's their rules that have to be followed. In some ways this is good because it means complying with one set of rules rather than hundreds of national and state laws.

Oh, and the UK is not a "liberal country" when it comes to porn. The UK is actually very conservative. Russia is way more liberal than the UK (at least for straight porn – they're not particularly fond of anything gay).

Crypto is a porn webmaster's wet dream because there are no chargebacks. BUT any crypto service with a Visa/MC gateway (and in some cases funds transfer to banks) will terminate your account if they know you're using it to buy/sell porn. Why? Because of Visa/MC rules (or bank rules). Yes, if you jump through a whole bunch of hoops you could use crypto, but the average porn buyer will never go to that much hassle.

[AirmaxUK]

1 minute ago, rawTOP said:

Oh, and the UK is not a "liberal country" when it comes to porn. The UK is actually very conservative. Russia is way more liberal than the UK (at least for straight porn – they're not particularly fond of anything gay).

Oh, I didn't mean the UK was liberal! No way... We have the BBFC and our own decency laws to contend with here. That's why back in the day when we used to have our own personal websites (dial up era!) we used to use hosting companies in mainland Europe that were a bit more friendly to gay/fetish content. 

[abm0011]

We are witnessing the end of the "Napster" phase of the porn world.

Let's face it, this is probably overedue. We are so used to getting pro porn off free sites that we simply assume it will continue. I have used Pornhub for years, although i never paid for it.

Several reasons that this state was affairs was kept so long:

1. Stigma of sex work and porn in general makes it hard for producers to pursue civil remedies.

2. The negative blowback from the record industry's experience (bulk anonymous pursuit of settlements by IP address, ruining people's lives over one uploaded song, etc.) makes civil action even more undesirable (Although some have tried, like Corbin Fisher's Marc "I am a nazi lawyer now" Randazza and Pendra Law) If a jury who are unsympathetic to porn producers are seated in a trial, "the porn producer" might not get a win.

3. When one site comes down, another pops up. Pornhub has been around for a long time so to speak, and X tube too. But for every site that goes down, another one would show up.

4. Anti-sex advocates are cheering now, but considering that these sites are also most popular in the most conservative states and regions, new alternatives would arrive.

I just read that Visa is also pulling from all Mindgeek properties, including legit sites like Men.com and Sean Cody. This is purely a kneejerk reaction from a large company that would rather cut off revenue then ruin its reputation. MG would probably "sell" the amatuer sites to a new offshore shell corp to clean up their end . But the era of easily accessible free porn might be coming to an end.

Edited December 18, 2020 by abm0011

[120DaysofSodom]

On 12/16/2020 at 9:36 AM, rawTOP said:

I should mention that I'm sorta kicking myself that my social site and hookup sites aren't up and running with video uploads. But after all this I'll be doing video uploads differently than I had originally envisioned.

Unverified users will be limited to videos that are 2 1/2 minutes or less. They will need to identify the source of the video (the original website for promo clips from porn sites, or that it's a personal/amateur video that they have the legal right to upload).

To upload videos longer than 2 1/2 minutes the user will need to provide documentation on who they are, by submitting a scan of a government issued photo ID, plus some other form of identity.

So basically I'll be doing a combination of Twitter's approach (with short videos) and PornHub's new approach (with longer videos). The difference is that I'll only need to stick to what is legal, not the stricter Visa/Mastercard standards. I do plan on having a store, but just for things like t-shirt, sex toys, etc. and it will be on a completely different domain. All this drama just goes to show I can't sell memberships to sites with user generated content. (So no, you won't be able to pay to get more private messages.)

You should def make some BZ memorabilia to sell.

[gwmxyz]

Thanks to RawTOP for that - interesting and helpful.  

Quote

Even when you shoot a video in your bedroom with a fuck buddy the legality of uploading that to a site is a bit complicated. You should have proof of his age.

I get the expectation of privacy point.  I'd be surprised though if anyone had too many age worries about me or 49 year old Thai friend (alas).