A Canadian personal 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’ll proceed to function underneath an unidentified group of present executives alongside an ECP administration staff that features “legal professionals and former hashish buyers.” ECP also confirmed the news on its web site.
MindGeek is a large however troubled model. The corporate owns a number of 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 baby 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 court docket mentioned Visa could potentially be held liable for serving to MindGeek “monetize baby porn.” Authorized challenges in opposition to the location stay ongoing, and it might face additional strain as US lawmakers push to weaken legal responsibility protections for web sites underneath 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 issue of working a big internet platform in 2023.
ECP’s press launch gestures at fixing the corporate’s authorized points. It says it intends to deal with “investing in MindGeek because the web chief in preventing unlawful on-line content material,” together with taking part in “a number one function within the combat in opposition to unlawful content material throughout the web” — a task 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 software Safeguard.
What, precisely, is Moral Capital Companions, the funding agency that appeared simply in time to make this single transaction? Nicely, 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 Positive on-line experiences for adults.” Each Bruinen and Moral Capital Companions additionally characteristic 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 advisor.
If these are the identical folks, two years aside, what plan would possibly they’ve for MindGeek? The earlier plan was easy: restructure, “rehabilitate its fame,” and flip it or merge it with a SPAC, in line with a slide deck obtained as a part of a late 2021 investigation by The Logic. The thought was known as Challenge Narsil, a reference to the damaged sword in The Lord of the Rings, and prompt that “the acquisition goal is likely one of the most acknowledged and undervalued manufacturers within the grownup leisure and expertise sector.”