A Canadian non-public fairness agency has acquired MindGeek, the corporate behind Pornhub, YouPorn, and different main grownup media websites. Financial Times reported that newly shaped Moral Capital Companions acquired MindGeek for an undisclosed quantity and that it’s going to proceed to function below an unidentified group of present executives alongside an ECP administration workforce that features “attorneys and former hashish traders.” ECP also confirmed the news on its website.
MindGeek is an enormous however troubled model. The corporate owns among the highest-trafficked websites on the web, however it’s additionally confronted persistent criticism that it’s failed to forestall customers from importing or viewing unlawful movies, together with little one sexual abuse materials. Its long-standing moderation problems reached a tipping level in 2020 when Visa and Mastercard both cut off service to Pornhub, prompting it to remove most of its videos and construct out a compulsory age verification system for actors.
MindGeek’s issues reached a tipping level in 2020
Whereas MindGeek bought fee providers restored to Pornhub, the fee processors have continued to deny access to its advert community TrafficJunky, after a California courtroom mentioned Visa could potentially be held liable for serving to MindGeek “monetize little one porn.” Authorized challenges in opposition to the positioning stay ongoing, and it might face additional strain as US lawmakers push to weaken legal responsibility protections for web sites below Part 230. MindGeek’s CEO and COO, Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, each stepped down in mid-2022. This all provides as much as a sequence of challenges that transcend even the baseline problem of operating a big net platform in 2023.
ECP’s press launch gestures at fixing the corporate’s authorized points. It says it intends to concentrate on “investing in MindGeek because the web chief in combating unlawful on-line content material,” together with enjoying “a number one position within the battle in opposition to unlawful content material throughout the web” — a job that presumably consists of issues just like the MindGeek-affiliated age verification tool AgeID, which it has beforehand promoted to be used by different grownup websites, or its picture recognition instrument Safeguard.
What, precisely, is Moral Capital Companions, the funding agency that appeared simply in time to make this single transaction? Effectively, its chairman Rocco Meliambro has roots in Canada’s hashish business, the place (amongst different issues) he served as a director of Nationwide Entry Hashish Company alongside fellow director Chuck Rifici — who additionally simply so occurred to be in talks to purchase Pornhub and different components of MindGeek two years in the past, according to a 2021 report at The Globe and Mail.
Rifici’s firm Bruinen Investments, which equally appeared out of nowhere forward of a possible deal for Pornhub, additionally had a outstanding reference to ethics — its web site promised to place “ethics first to ship secure, authorized and constructive on-line experiences for adults.” Each Bruinen and Moral Capital Companions additionally function a prison protection lawyer named Fady Mansour, in addition to Derek Ogden, a former director of drug and arranged crime enforcement for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Sarah Bain, a communications marketing consultant.
If these are the identical individuals, two years aside, what plan may they’ve for MindGeek? The earlier plan was easy: restructure, “rehabilitate its popularity,” and flip it or merge it with a SPAC, in response to a slide deck obtained as a part of a late 2021 investigation by The Logic. The thought was known as Venture Narsil, a reference to the damaged sword in The Lord of the Rings, and recommended that “the acquisition goal is without doubt one of the most acknowledged and undervalued manufacturers within the grownup leisure and know-how sector.”
