Partner / Co-owner, Ethical Capital Partners (parent owner of Aylo/Pornhub), Aylo (formerly MindGeek) — operator of Pornhub
PornHub Owner Solomon Friedman GRILLED on Content Approval Process
Patrick Bet-David asks Solomon Friedman about PornHub’s business model and content moderation processes. Friedman explains the platform’s ad-supported revenue model, content verification protocols, and the differences between PornHub and subscription-based services like Brazzers. They discuss the challenges of maintaining safety and compliance in the adult content industry.
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Transcript (37 segments)
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Patrick Bet-David0:00
What is the business model of Pornhub? I don't know what the business model of... How do you guys make money? It's an
S
Solomon Friedman0:05
Ad-supported platform primarily, so it's not a membership. It's ad-supported. That's right. So Aylo as a company, we have Pornhub that's ad-supported, and then we have subscription-based sites like Brazzers.
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Patrick Bet-David0:15
So you guys are going to do roughly 500 to 550 this year, give or take? We can't disclose, it's a private company. So I mean, that's the number I saw online. So if it's... you can disclose it? I get it. Half a billion is a real number that is plastered all over the place.
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Solomon Friedman0:30
Let's say somewhere on that number. And that's advertisers. So outside of advertisers, there is no membership, there's nothing else. There's no membership specifically for Pornhub specifically, but the company has other brands which are subscription-based.
P
Patrick Bet-David0:46
And is it porn? Or it's... it's studio-produced content? Yes. So the ones that are membership-based, how different is that than Pornhub? So it's...
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Solomon Friedman0:55
Those are scenes. So we're talking about the flagship brand for that would be Brazzers. Um, so that's studio-produced, professional-grade content.
P
Patrick Bet-David1:01
See, for that to me, that's something where it's like, hey, here's professionally done. This is the age. So Pornhub is... is it like the YouTube for porn? To kind of... Yeah, so...
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Solomon Friedman1:12
Basically, what's happening right now is that exactly the process that you just described, that's pretty much what happens on a porn set on the Brazzers site, on a professional set. But now, because so much content is being produced at home, we're seeing a time where this is becoming the norm. And this is exactly the methodology that we've adopted on Pornhub, which is why we require all of these checks. We require IDs, we require...
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Patrick Bet-David1:38
Able to do it though? I'm sorry, there's no way you're able to do it. There is no technology to be able to tell if...
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Solomon Friedman1:42
Somebody was under the age of 18 or not. There is no way you can 100% guarantee, verify at the time of the video being shot the person was under 18. But the point is, you set this impossible standard that applies only to... Tell me, based on you, tell me 100% that you can do it based on technology. What you need to do is you need to have a reasonable level of assurance that this is legal, consensual, informed consent content. Okay? So we start, you start with having the age ID consent of every single person who appears in content. Like, that's wild. When I tell you that we do that, no other adult platform or mainstream platform comes close to that. Like, think about that for a moment. You upload a video, has three people, has four people in it. It cannot go live on the site until we on the trust and safety side have verified the age ID consent of everyone appearing in there. Now you raised this other scenario, like, well, what if you have all that but one of the people have lied to you about when the content was actually shot? We're like, okay, but we have already guaranteed more than anybody else in terms of the fact that this content is completely legal.
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Patrick Bet-David2:46
That doesn't mean anything. It's just lip service, right? And...
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Solomon Friedman2:48
If somebody... no, it's beyond lip service. It's a huge financial investment. If I'm...
P
Patrick Bet-David2:53
Play Devil's Advocate. What everything you do, I get... take it personally at all. What I'm saying to you is, this is an everyday... if you're friends with me or your family with me, my family and people who have been in business with me, they're like, this is how we have lunch every day. So it's just a conversation. So...
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Solomon Friedman3:05
Brazzers, okay, everything is shot professionally, everything goes through... I'm assuming, like, hey, you have to show me your HIV test that you just did, that you don't have any sexually transmitted... I'm assuming it's that level of professionalism, similar to Vivid or some of the other guys that do it. Yes, is that what Brazzers is? Correct. But what I'm trying to impart here is that this is the model that is being adopted because, like Saul said, the creator-at-home industry has collided with the professional, and we're seeing this across the board, right, across all types of entertainment systems, right, where you could say arguably that people that are creating YouTube programming at home, very similar to someone that's watching a morning show, right?
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Patrick Bet-David3:45
Show, right? There's a big difference though. I mean, that's different though, because YouTube programming at home, I'm not showing penetration and I'm not getting out there and saying, hey, you know, we're going to do this, you know? No, I'm sitting there giving my opinion on something. And then if it's... oh, I hear what you're saying, but there's a big difference between the two. There is.
S
Solomon Friedman4:08
But because this is an industry that you know is under a lot of scrutiny, understandably so for the reasons that exactly that you mentioned, these are protocols that people are adopting at home as well. When they're like, these are not... um, I think it's really important to get away from the idea that it's just someone with like a webcam that wants to, you know, throw something.
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Patrick Bet-David4:24
You know, throw something. What the process for me to upload a porn video on Pornhub? What's the pro... what's the step-by-step process? We'll start with you.
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Solomon Friedman4:31
Need to verify your age and ID as the uploader. So how do you do that? Okay, so we use first a third-party provider, then we verify it with a moderator. So that involves three things. Number one, a scan of real government ID from your country of origin that's verified. Can't be a screenshot, can't be whatever. Compliance measures like you're used by banks, insurance companies, governments around the world. Got it. Then a biometric scan of the face that requires movement to create what's called a photogrammetric measure to make sure you're a real 3D human being and not a picture. Okay. Then a comparison between those two done by the software compares the face that's been verified as being real with the government ID, and then a match between the two. That gets you level one. If you pass all of that, you then get handed off to our in-house moderation. So we don't, unlike most social media companies, we don't outsource any moderation. We have a full-time staff working verifying identities and moderating content. That moderator has to review that, ensure that you haven't been previously banned, which we would know because we hold ID obviously, ensure that you are who you say you are, that you're not from a country that raises flags, that all of this has been verified. Now you are eligible to attempt to upload content, not to upload.
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Patrick Bet-David5:44
Content not to upload. Okay, how long is that process to get approved? It takes...
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Solomon Friedman5:50
Between 24 to 72 hours. So I could have a video up within 24 hours? We're not there yet. We're just talking about to get approved.
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Patrick Bet-David5:56
So you're at a status where you're even able to upload. How long can I... depends on...
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Solomon Friedman6:01
The content. So the next thing you do, once we've verified the identity, you can then submit content for review, not upload. There is no auto upload, cannot happen. Okay. That content, so let's say you submit a video. First of all, if it's more than just you in it, we need the same age ID consent for everybody appearing in the video. Okay. Then we run it through automated processes. So we use, I think now about 13 automated tools. We work with any organization, government who will give us a list of content that they have flagged as being problematic, so we can scan all the content against it. We have our own in-house tools. Another reason we made this acquisition was because of the tools that the company's developed of content fingerprinting, identification, and tagging. Very interesting area that we wanted to be part of. If it passes all of those checks, it then goes to a human moderator for review, a real-life person who is trained to review content not just for age ID consent, but we have many, many rules. 100% of the videos is watched by somebody.
P
Patrick Bet-David7:00
100% of the videos watch? How many people work at Pornhub right now full-time? Uh...
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Solomon Friedman7:05
About 1500 employees. 1500 employees. Got it.
P
Patrick Bet-David7:08
And how many videos are uploaded daily on Pornhub? Submitted for upload? No, no, I'm talking get to the point that somebody has to watch for upload. It's a...
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Solomon Friedman7:17
A couple thousand. Couple thousand. Yeah. And the average video is how long? It varies, but you know, but I see where you're trying to go.
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Patrick Bet-David7:24
Trying to go? No, no, it's a good... why are you worried though? No, not worried. So how long does it... if it's 2,000 videos that somebody has to watch, what is the average length of a video on Pornhub? Say between 5, 10 minutes. Okay, let's say 10 minutes. Let's do some math. So if we do 2,000 times 10 is 20,000, right? Minutes. Yeah, I did 2,000 videos times 10 minutes. Yep.
Okay, how big is a department that monitors this? So it varies but hundreds.
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Solomon Friedman8:00
So it varies, but hundreds.
P
Patrick Bet-David8:03
Okay, right. Obviously one of the things we change depending on how many videos are in a queue, what our needs are, right. And you guys watch 100% of the video? 100% of the video? Now just be very... inition to an AI transcript of the audio that's happening in the video. So the...
S
Solomon Friedman8:19
Important thing, and I that's why I kind of was preemptive as far as... guy, I'm just trying to do the math fair. But the thing is, it doesn't matter if there's a million videos or five videos. The important thing to sort of take away from this is that a video will not go live until it has been reviewed by a human. So that means if that video has to sit in a queue, you know, we're not just trying to crank it out there to make people happy. We keep it in the queue until it has been reviewed. So that means, of course, we go through periods where there's backlogs, and sometimes creators get frustrated with us because they say, you know, I put all this work into a video, it's been 3, 4 days, why isn't it live? And we understand that frustration, but we don't make exceptions. We have to wait until it has the chance to be human moderated.
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Patrick Bet-David9:03
Moderated. What's the fastest somebody uploads a video that'll upload it?
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Solomon Friedman9:08
There's no like... I can't really give a number on that because it really can happen same day, very rarely, very rarely. But also depends. Like if it's a 25-second clip, just you know one individual showing themselves and what they're up to, that's an easy one, right? Like that's if there's and it's one person and there's not co-performers. See, that's the thing, it's like we need the paperwork and the IDs and consent for everybody. So I think, and where your mind goes, which is where my mind went when I learned about this, is this is an enormous scale, right. So one of the reasons, you want to talk about, you go back to your first question, why do we acquire this company? Okay, because they have developed processes both on the human side but also on the software that we think the rest of the internet is going to need. Yeah, that we are three years ahead of where social media has to be, and we are looking forward to not just setting example.
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Patrick Bet-David9:54
Just setting example? Is different than you though. That that's a very different... like an uh...
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Solomon Friedman10:00
It's not so different. The problems might be a little different, but whether it's threats to violence or incitement or hate speech, there are always going to be material that as a society we've decided are just unacceptable. So for example, if you go on a... can you type in the Wikipedia, you know, child pornography laws? Right. If you go on here, Supreme Court of the United States has found child pornography outside of the protections of the First Amendment of the United States. So child pornography is outside of US jurisdiction. Federal sentencing guidelines. Okay, US laws distinguishing with pornography and images of actual minors, realistic images that are not actually... non-realistic. The latter two categories. Child pornography first became illegal... strange to say this, the URI was born '78. I'm surprised it wasn't before that. With the enactment of the Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation of 1977. Before the law of 1978, child pornography was illegal in only two states. The 1978 law was subsequently strengthened in '84 with the passage of the Child Protection Act. It was a goal of the Reagan Administration to crack down on child pornography, with then President Reagan stating the following in '87: 'The administration is putting the purveyors of illegal obscenity in child pornography on notice. Your industry's days are numbered.'
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Patrick Bet-David11:20
Numbered. I got a big announcement to make. The property I'm on right now, we've been working on buying this property for the last 3 years. It's one of its last kind in America. Why? It's on 11 acres, it's got two hangars, it's on an airport. Upgrades of $7 million made here. That's going to be the new headquarters of V... tan man B David Consulting, the podcast, the whole nine. And what we wanted to do, we want to find a way to celebrate this as the new headquarters by inviting you to an event on November 5th, which is election night. A lot of different things people will be talking about. Business owners, what's going to happen if it goes this way, what's going to happen if it goes that way. So imagine 2,000 people be in here. Let me show you around. Some of you will have a private meeting with me, that's the elite, that's going to be a few of you. Some will get a private tour of the entire office from us. There's a hangar in the back. So you come up here, imagine there's going to be a couple major tents, 40 ft by 100 ft, where some of the people that are buying general tickets will be there. But over here, inside the hangar, is where the podcast will be held. This entire thing will be open like it is right now. Inside of it, myself, the PBD podcast crew, some of the super VIPs will be invited to go upstairs in a section that we have that's got a bar, a restaurant, food, you know, kitchen. You're eating, you're watching it from all the way up there while we're doing the podcast down here in the hangar. So imagine in this room there's a thousand people, right, while we're going through this whole thing. Conversation, it's going to be from 6:00 p.m. is when it starts, all the way up to 2:00 in the morning. Who knows, maybe we go 3, 4:00 in the morning because a lot of things that's going to be going on. By the way, do you know why we're not cutting this? We're on an airport, these are planes we have to hear because right here is the airport. And FYI, Miami Beach right there at that stadium right behind us. There's five ticket tiers here that you can purchase, each one's got more things to offer. But even locally, there's general tickets to buy for just $75. Bring your wife, bring your husband, bring your family, bring your friends. There's one caveat: after you buy the ticket, when you buy the ticket and you come on November 5th, you have to wear Future Looks Bright gear. I'm talking Future Looks Bright hat, a shirt, doesn't matter. You're going to have to show I got some kind of Future Looks Bright here because we want everybody here to spread the message and the energy of optimism around the world back to their states, wherever you're going to be. So November 5th, click on a link above or below, get registered. And if you're watching and saying, well Pat, I like to travel private, can I bring my private jet here? Five of you guys will be, after you buy your ticket, then you can ask us. And that's only available to the tickets at the highest level possible to bring your jet and park it here. So having said that, get your tickets and I cannot wait to see you November 5th, 6:00 p.m. at our new headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. Take care everybody, bye-bye.
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