One is that monopoly doesn't seem to be getting a lot of attention in our culture right now in general. Pinsker: It seems like this industry and any monopoly or unfair things going on in it probably don't receive as much scrutiny as another industry might, because the industry itself is stigmatized and thought of as something to keep at arm's length. So yeah, those doors on that building, like you say, would include YouPorn, RedTube, PornHub, Xtube, and then, their business model, much like any other media-business model, features vertical integration and horizontal integration, so they're really monopolizing the industry. I don't think it should be a total surprise that there's a monopoly, because that mimics the way that other large corporate interests scoop up smaller companies. Pinsker: Just to make sure I'm understanding how a significant portion of the industry is set up: There's this big company, and if you can imagine a building they own that says MindGeek at the top, there are all these front doors that have different labels, and the things that everyone is entering the building for is just a lot of stolen stuff. So then the folks who made the content can go after them, and they do, but you have to have a lot of time and money and resources to stay on top of that. Tarrant: Yes, and it's a huge problem within the industry because it's stolen, basically, and the tube sites are aggregators of a bunch of different links and clips, and they are very often pirated or stolen. Pinsker: A distinguishing feature of tube sites is that a lot of their stuff is actually taken from other places-it’s pirated content. Tube sites-such as YouPorn, RedTube, Pornhub-are hugely popular and it's estimated that MindGeek owns 8 out of the 10 largest tube sites. Those figures are really hard to determine because porn is mostly online, as opposed to DVD sales or magazine sales, which you can track more easily. Do you have a sense of how much of the industry that company controls? Pinsker: One thing I think many people might be surprised to learn is that many of the big-name porn sites are all owned by this one company, MindGeek. So those numbers get a little fuzzy, even though the industry is willing to say that it's suffering from piracy and after the Great Recession, and things like that. This is true for the industry's revenues, but also for pay rates for individual actors. Many productions don't even keep official records, and there are very few researchers looking at the economic side of porn, because a lot of times for academics and researchers, pornography is viewed as a sort of LOL, to-the-side kind of thing, rather than the very serious financial and economic matter that it is. Shira Tarrant: It's hard for several reasons. I spoke with her about what she found in her research, and the interview that follows has been edited and condensed for the sake of clarity. Shira Tarrant, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Cal State Long Beach, recently took stock of porn’s financial side in the form of a book, The Pornography Industry. But unlike nearly any other industry, these unseemly features are allowed to thrive, mostly unchecked, behind the curtain of social taboo.
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Like any other industry, porn has its shady qualities-labor abuses, content piracy, and a blemished supply chain, to name a few. With the publication of Playboy and Hustler in the mid-20th-century, porn started going corporate, and the industry has since bloomed into an enterprise so vast that people have a hard time estimating its size.
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The first efforts to make money off of this new endeavor could not have come long after that. Humans have been creating images of sex and genitalia for millions of years, but it is only in the past few centuries-since the 1600s, according to historians-that these representations started meeting academics’ preferred definition of pornography, which involves both the violation of taboos and the intention of arousal.