A Canadian venture capital fund buys the group that owns Pornhub

Pornhub application on a mobile.Getty Images

MindGeek, an emporium of online adult content, has new owners. The conglomerate of platforms such as Pornhub, YouPorn and Redtube passes into the hands of Ethical Capital Partners, an Ottawa venture capital firm, for an amount that has not been published. MindGeek, which is registered for tax purposes in Luxembourg but is headquartered in Montreal, has been accused in recent years of spreading child pornography and sexual assault.

“We look for innovative and ethical companies that operate on the frontier of new and evolving industries. We have identified in MindGeek a dynamic technology brand that rests on a foundation of trust, security and regulatory compliance,” Fady Mansour, founder and partner at Ethical Capital Partners, said in a statement Tuesday. The new owners called MindGeek “a leader in the fight against illegal content online.”

The venture capital firm was created in 2022, among others, by lawyers and former executives of the cannabis industry. Ethical Capital Partners claims to be a group that “looks for investment opportunities in sectors that require ethical leadership.” According to the latest figures available, MindGeek had revenue in 2021 close to 460 million dollars.

An article published in The New York Times in December 2020, based on various testimonies, pointed to the presence on Pornhub of images resulting from child abuse, revenge porn, rape, and hidden cameras. Works in the Canadian press also gave a voice to other people affected by the platform owned by MindGeek, placing special emphasis on the economic benefits derived from these attacks and on deaf ears to the complaints expressed.

Visa and MasterCard suspended their relationship with Pornhub, while organizations and politicians asked MindGeek to explain what kind of controls their websites had. Pornhub reported the implementation of “supplementary” supervision measures and proceeded to delete two thirds of the content on its platform that was not verified. MindGeek has been the target of at least seven class action lawsuits in courts across Canada and the United States. According to analytics firm Similarweb, Pornhub ranked 12th on the list of the world’s most visited sites in 2022.

Feras Antoon, CEO of MindGeek, and David Tassillo, COO, testified in February 2021 before a committee of Canadian parliamentarians. At this meeting, they lamented the suffering of several people due to the dissemination of images, although they insisted that their company was doing everything possible to prevent these incidents from happening again. Antoon and Tassillo left their positions last June. However, they retained their shares.

Derek Ogden, another of the weight partners at Ethical Capital Partners, stated after announcing the acquisition of the pornography giant: “The adult entertainment industry will always be subject to significant legal and regulatory scrutiny. We are very aware that mere compliance is not enough and that MindGeek must reassure, communicate and take a more visible leadership role.” Ogden worked for more than two decades in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He later served as president of a detective agency and went on to hold relevant positions in the cannabis industry.

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