Over the past few years, porn industry claims that its very existence has become threatened by piracy have only increased. […] a new type of site has emerged offering a staggering and immediately accessible range of content, at an entry price of absolutely free.

Due to their similarity with YouTube, these sites are known as ’tube’ sites. They operate in much the same way as YouTube, with content being uploaded by their users for viewing by others.

[…]

‘Mindgeek’ may not sound familiar to everyone, but this is the new name for one of the biggest companies in the adult industry.

Formerly known as Manwin, Mindgeek is a huge company that has scooped up some of the biggest tube sites in the world including YouPorn, Pornhub, Tube8, XTube, RedTube, ExtremeTube and SpankWire to name a few. All in all, Mindgeek is reported to be one of the top three consumers of bandwidth in the world.

While Mindgeek sites act within the law by operating an efficient DMCA process that removes user-uploaded content at the request of copyright holders, many adult producers and performers feel that the sites are hitting their bottom line. But while that might be true for some, for others a much more complex situation is emerging.

[…]

After making huge quantities of cash via its tube sites, Manwin/Mindgeek bought up several top studios including Brazzers, Digital Playground, Mofos, MyDirtyHobby and Twistys. The company also sucked up the Reality Kings brand and became an online partner of Playboy. This means that some of the performers complaining about piracy on tube sites are actually being paid by the company running them.

[…]

In the meantime, it’s reported that a new porn video is made in the United States every 39 minutes. How many will be produced by Mindgeek companies or distributed via their tube sites remains to be seen, but in any event the company could be making money at one end, the other, or intriguingly – both ends at once.
[Why Are Porn Perfomers Scared to Talk About Internet Piracy? sur TorrentFreak.com]

Le méchant pirate qui rachète les entreprises qui produisaient le contenu qui on fait sa fortune. Incroyable non ?

Comme quoi, le porno a toujours été en avance sur le reste de la production culturelle.

Après tout, le modèle économique derrière pour eux, c’est une offre Premium avec un contenu disponible immédiatement en top qualité dans un environnement clean en payant un abonnement, ou un contenu à la qualité plus que variable, disponible sans garantie, de manière gratuite grâce à la pub.