Amazon, Google, and Facebook are well-known for their abilities to harvest data and use it to predict what certain users will buy, watch, read, or share. When it comes to streaming services, one might expect that Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu are the industry’s data analysis masters. But Quartz reports that it’s actually the porn industry that mines user data on the deepest level.
Pornhub is widely acknowledged as the world’s leader in porn streaming, though there aren’t many formal studies ranking different sites alongside each other. The Pornhub network of sites, which includes YouPorn and Redtube, attracts about 125 million daily visitors. “In 2017, Pornhub transmitted more than the entire contents of the New York Public Library’s 50 million books combined,” wrote Quartz.
The world’s largest porn company, MindGeek, essentially has a monopoly on the multi-million dollar industry.
UPDATE: Catherine Dunn, VP of Communications for MindGeek, reached out to TechDecisions to provide some corrections to inaccuracies in the Quartz article:
MindGeek does not have anything approaching a monopoly on the industry. More accurately, MindGeek is a tech company that owns a portfolio of adult websites that, together, make it one of the largest players in the adult industry. We’re proud to own four of the top 10 and seven of the top 100 tube sites in the world and to be among a handful of companies in the space which generate significant traffic to its various properties.
But what makes MindGeek so powerful is its ability to use the data they mine from their streaming sites to produce customized content for their users.
The nature of porn allows MindGeek to mine a lot of data from one user is a very short amount of time. Most porn videos are shorter than 20 minutes, and the average viewer is watching for less than 10 minutes. Videos also don’t need elite actors or high production value, and much content is provided at no cost to MindGeek, as it is homemade by users.
Kal Raustiala, professor at the UCLA School of Law and International Institute and Christopher Spigman, a professor at New York University Law School, analyzed this kind of data communication in a recent study:
“While a ten-episode run of The Crown is a very expensive proposition to produce, and one that surely benefited from Netflix’s data analysis, each episode is one hour,” wrote “By contrast, while the videos on a site such as Pornhub vary widely in length, many are less than 20 minutes. And with the average viewer staying on only ten minutes, and often toggling through multiple videos in that ten minutes, MindGeek can amass an extraordinary number of data points from each consumer.”
MindGeek uses a technique called “data-driven authorship,” in which they produce content that is tailor-made for users according to what they have previously enjoyed. MindGeek’s data mining methods don’t just look at what videos users are choosing. They are looking at what moments they pause at, which scenes they skip, which scenes they rewind to. They even harvest data regarding the type of clothes the actors wear and the type of furniture in the videos.
Most people switch between videos while streaming on porn sites, which allows MindGeek to accumulate specific information over multiple videos in a short amount of time. While they do not sell this kind of information to third-party companies, as user data regarding porn could have dangerous blackmail potential, they have used their data mining ability to create an infinite amount of satisfying content for each user.
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