There was a time, a few decades ago, when the men who owned the world\u2019s biggest pornography businesses were happy to be famous. They paraded a lifestyle they hoped looked glamorous, appearing in public dressed in silk pyjamas or with a woman in swimwear on each arm. Porn moguls like Hustler\u2019s Larry Flynt or Playboy\u2019s Hugh Hefner were household names.<\/p>\n
\u201cSay what you want about these old perverts, who once set the tone of our sexual culture, but at least you knew who they were and what they were selling,\u201d Patricia Nilsson writes in her new book, Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet<\/a>, the Economy, and Everything Else. \u201cThese days, the men calling the shots are nowhere to be seen.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not that they simply feel shy about posing alongside the women who generate their income, or are wary of giving interviews. The owners of the industry\u2019s biggest companies are so anxious to remain anonymous that we often don\u2019t even know their names. They have understood that it is wiser to live in total obscurity.<\/p>\n So Nilsson\u2019s decision to start investigating pornography for the Financial Times will no doubt have come as a very unwelcome development for these mostly invisible leaders of a sector that has been under-scrutinised for decades. For five years, she subjected the industry to the same deep analysis that a journalist would give to the oil and gas markets. She wondered why, unlike most businesses of a similar scale, pornography companies rarely made the headlines. \u201cI started wondering: why is there so much porn everywhere? Why is the online world so saturated with images of people paid to have sex?\u201d Nilsson says. She asks at the start of Guilty Pleasure: \u201cWe live in a world where as many people have instantaneous access to free porn as to clear water. Why aren\u2019t we more curious about the growing role of pornography in our lives?\u201d<\/p>\n Old-school \u2026 Playboy\u2019s Hugh Hefner with his onetime girlfriends, Kendra Wilkinson and Holly Madison. Photograph: Mike Guastella\/WireImage<\/p>\n Nilsson, 34, says she belongs to \u201cthe first generation that came of age on the internet, and to whom oceans of free porn was a normal part of life\u201d. This perspective has shaped her calmly pragmatic approach to the subject. \u201cOf course there are parts of the industry I\u2019m critical of,\u201d she says. \u201cMy argument is not that we should be neutral towards porn, but that we need to accept and understand it as a real industry, and ask what its growth and popularity says about the state of our economy and the world of work.\u201d Nilsson is in London when we meet \u2013 she has British and Swedish citizenship but Polish roots and lives in Frankfurt, where she is approaching the end of maternity leave (she finished writing her book in the exhausting first weeks after giving birth).<\/p>\n Her investigations led to the discovery that the industry\u2019s owners were now tech nerds and bankers, with no particular interest in pornography itself. \u201cI started realising: this industry isn\u2019t really about porn any more. I would go to these porn conferences and I couldn\u2019t find anyone who actually worked with porn. I couldn\u2019t find anyone who even knew someone who worked with porn, because all these people were working in [web] traffic or payment processing,\u201d she says. I\u2019ve attended a couple of these conferences and have been equally struck by the quantities of men in zipped tech-bro gilets who want to talk about impenetrably dry notions like affiliate marketing, barely acknowledging that they work in the world of explicit adult content.<\/p>\n Nilsson was determined to bring the sector\u2019s leaders out of the shadows in part because she wanted to reveal who was getting rich through porn and how they were doing it. But she also disliked the hypocrisy of these men, some of whom had become billionaires. \u201cOnline sex workers literally have to bare it all; once you put your image out there on the internet, even if technically you control the IP, it can be very difficult to ever get it down. So it\u2019s terrible if the people profiting from the industry then have the gall to say: \u2018I want to protect my anonymity and I don\u2019t really want to be associated with sex work,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to put their names out there, they don\u2019t want to put their faces out there.\u201d<\/p>\n She was the first person to track down Bernd Bergmair, the mysterious figure who, from 2013 to 2023, owned MindGeek \u2013 then the world\u2019s largest pornography company and the conglomerate operating Pornhub. It turned out he was an Austrian former Goldman Sachs investment banker, described as an \u201cuncle type\u201d in expensive clothes, who had been so determined to stay hidden that others in the pornography world described him as a ghost and doubted his existence. Bergmair had written his undergraduate thesis on \u201cfinancing strategies for corporate acquisitions\u201d, and knew so little about pornography that, early on, he took his competitors out for lunch to pick their brains on how the business functioned.<\/p>\n A banker who had worked in Frankfurt, London, New York and Hong Kong, Bergmair \u201cseemed entirely uninterested in the sex [work] that underpinned the empire he was buying\u201d, Nilsson notes. \u201cHe knew it was a highly profitable business and he just cared about ensuring that the structure was safe enough so that he could keep taking his dividends out.\u201d In 2020, Pornhub removed<\/a> millions of unverified videos, some of which may have contained nonconsensual pornography, rape, child sexual abuse, violent sexual abuse of women and other abusive content.<\/p>\n Later, she travelled to Prague in search of the elusive owners of WebGroup Czech Republic (WGCZ), a company based in nondescript, unsignposted offices, given a deliberately unremarkable name to mask its true nature: the pornographic empire behind Penthouse, distributing content watched by hundreds of millions. St\u00e9phane and Malorie Pacaud, the French twins in their 40s who own the company, eluded her; they occasionally appear on lists of France\u2019s wealthiest individuals but have otherwise succeeded in staying under the radar.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the reasons it\u2019s still so hard today to regulate pornography is because you crack down on one site, and suddenly there are 15 other copycat sites coming from different jurisdictions,\u201d Nilsson says. \u201cYou can launch a website from wherever in the world, and it can be so hard to know who\u2019s behind them or where they are. You don\u2019t know who\u2019s pulling the strings.\u201d<\/p>\n This matters because it means the owners of businesses that are recalibrating our sexual culture cannot be obliged to attend public hearings to explain how their business models operate, Nilsson says. Bergmair never answered regulators\u2019 questions and now it is too late. In 2023, MindGeek was acquired by a Canadian private equity firm, Ethical Capital Partners (\u201cyou can\u2019t make this up\u201d, Nilsson says) and renamed Aylo. The company has a complex ownership structure, leaving uncertainty about \u201cwho controls the one-way mirror that is watching, learning from and reshaping our sexuality\u201d.<\/p>\n A pedestrian walks past an adult DVD store in Times Square, NYC, in 2017. Photograph: Spencer Platt\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Nilsson began her investigations thinking she would be looking into something transgressive and remote from her own life \u2013 but she quickly realised that the logic governing how online pornography businesses worked had spilled into the mainstream. Regardless of whether or not we are consuming explicit content, the technological advances the industry pioneered now shape the experience of being online for the rest of us. She argues that the story of the online porn industry is actually the story of the internet today and \u201cwhy it makes us feel so weird\u201d.<\/p>\n We\u2019re already familiar with the way pornography companies drove early improvements in the power of the internet from the 1990s onwards, to enable large quantities of video to be distributed to the maximum number of people at maximum speed. But Nilsson lists half a dozen other ways that pornography has dictated the way we navigate the internet. We can also thank pornography businesses for developing reliable, high-quality video streaming, honed by the need for glitch-free camming, where models broadcast live video feeds of themselves to customers and chat to them. And long before influencers started working out what they needed to do to grow and maintain a lucrative social media following, webcam models were deciding how best to curate online personas to keep audiences\u2019 attention, and elicit generous tips.<\/p>\n Nilsson says her own virtual world is usually full of cheerful sourdough recipes or restaurants that she wants to check out on her next trip to Sicily, but she realises now that the way \u201call this lovely, worthwhile content\u201d is transmitted to her phone, and the way she consumes it, is closely based on a model developed by online pornography tech developers. Companies such as MindGeek trade on desire, so they became expert early on at spotting what people browsing the internet are genuinely interested in.<\/p>\n