A few decades ago, the men who ran the world’s biggest pornography companies were happy to be famous. They showed off a lifestyle they hoped looked glamorous, appearing in public in silk pyjamas or with a woman in a swimsuit on each arm. Porn moguls like Larry Flynt of Hustler and Hugh Hefner of Playboy were household names.
“Say what you want about these old perverts, who once set the tone of our sexual culture, but at least you knew who they were and what they were selling,” Patricia Nilsson writes in her new book, Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else. “These days, the men calling the shots are nowhere to be seen.”
It’s not that they’re simply shy about posing with the women who make them money, or wary of giving interviews. The owners of the industry’s biggest companies are so desperate to stay anonymous that we often don’t even know their names. They’ve realised it’s wiser to live in complete obscurity.
So Nilsson’s decision to start investigating pornography for the Financial Times must have been very unwelcome news for these mostly invisible leaders of a sector that has gone largely unexamined for decades. For five years, she gave the industry the same deep analysis a journalist would give to the oil and gas markets. She wondered why, unlike most businesses of a similar size, porn companies rarely made headlines. “I started wondering: why is there so much porn everywhere? Why is the online world so saturated with images of people paid to have sex?” Nilsson says. At the start of Guilty Pleasure, she asks: “We live in a world where as many people have instant access to free porn as to clean water. Why aren’t we more curious about the growing role of pornography in our lives?”
Nilsson, 34, says she belongs to “the first generation that came of age on the internet, and to whom oceans of free porn were a normal part of life.” This perspective has shaped her calm, pragmatic approach to the subject. “Of course there are parts of the industry I’m critical of,” she says. “My argument is not that we should be neutral towards porn, but that we need to accept and understand it as a real industry, and ask what its growth and popularity says about the state of our economy and the world of work.” Nilsson is in London when we meet. She has British and Swedish citizenship but Polish roots, and lives in Frankfurt, where she is nearing the end of maternity leave (she finished writing her book in the exhausting first weeks after giving birth).
Her investigations led her to discover that the industry’s owners were now tech nerds and bankers, with no particular interest in pornography itself. “I started realising: this industry isn’t really about porn any more. I would go to these porn conferences and I couldn’t find anyone who actually worked with porn. I couldn’t find anyone who even knew someone who worked with porn, because all these people were working in [web] traffic or payment processing,” she says. I’ve attended a couple of these conferences and been equally struck by the number of men in zipped tech-bro gilets who want to talk about impenetrably dry ideas like affiliate marketing, barely acknowledging that they work in the world of explicit adult content.
Nilsson was determined to bring the sector’s leaders out of the shadows, partly because she wanted to reveal who was getting rich through porn and how they were doing it. But she also disliked the hypocrisy of these men, some of whom had become billionaires. “Online sex workers literally have to bare it all; once you put your image out there on the internet, even if technically you controlIt can be very hard to ever live down the IP. So it’s terrible when the people profiting from the industry have the nerve to say, “I want to protect my anonymity and I don’t really want to be associated with sex work,” she says. “They don’t want to put their names out there, they don’t want to put their faces out there.”
She was the first person to track down Bernd Bergmair, the mysterious figure who owned MindGeek—then the world’s largest pornography company and the conglomerate operating Pornhub—from 2013 to 2023. He turned out to be an Austrian former Goldman Sachs investment banker, described as an “uncle type” in expensive clothes, who was so determined to stay hidden that others in the pornography world called him a ghost and doubted he existed. Bergmair had written his undergraduate thesis on “financing strategies for corporate acquisitions,” and knew so little about pornography that early on he took his competitors out for lunch to pick their brains about how the business worked.
Bergmair, a banker who had worked in Frankfurt, London, New York and Hong Kong, “seemed entirely uninterested in the sex [work] that underpinned the empire he was buying,” Nilsson notes. “He knew it was a highly profitable business and he just cared about ensuring that the structure was safe enough so that he could keep taking his dividends out.” In 2020, Pornhub removed millions of unverified videos, some of which may have contained nonconsensual pornography, rape, child sexual abuse, violent sexual abuse of women and other abusive content.
Later, she travelled to Prague in search of the elusive owners of WebGroup Czech Republic (WGCZ), a company based in nondescript, unsignposted offices, given a deliberately unremarkable name to mask its true nature: the pornographic empire behind Penthouse, distributing content watched by hundreds of millions. Stéphane and Malorie Pacaud, the French twins in their 40s who own the company, eluded her; they occasionally appear on lists of France’s wealthiest individuals but have otherwise succeeded in staying under the radar.
“One of the reasons it’s still so hard today to regulate pornography is because you crack down on one site, and suddenly there are 15 other copycat sites coming from different jurisdictions,” Nilsson says. “You can launch a website from wherever in the world, and it can be so hard to know who’s behind them or where they are. You don’t know who’s pulling the strings.”
This matters because it means the owners of businesses that are recalibrating our sexual culture cannot be obliged to attend public hearings to explain how their business models operate, Nilsson says. Bergmair never answered regulators’ questions and now it is too late. In 2023, MindGeek was acquired by a Canadian private equity firm, Ethical Capital Partners (“you can’t make this up,” Nilsson says) and renamed Aylo. The company has a complex ownership structure, leaving uncertainty about “who controls the one-way mirror that is watching, learning from and reshaping our sexuality.”
View image in fullscreenA pedestrian walks past an adult DVD store in Times Square, NYC, in 2017. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Nilsson began her investigations thinking she would be looking into something transgressive and remote from her own life—but she quickly realised that the logic governing how online pornography businesses worked had spilled into the mainstream. Regardless of whether or not we are consuming explicit content, the technological advances the industry pioneered now shape the experience of being online for the rest of us. She argues that the story of the online porn industry is actually the story of the internet today and “why it makes us feel so weird.”
We’re already familiar with the way pornography companies drove early improvements in the power of the internet from the 1990s onwards, to enablLarge quantities of video need to be distributed to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. But Nilsson lists half a dozen other ways pornography has shaped how we navigate the internet. We can also thank pornography businesses for developing reliable, high-quality video streaming, driven by the need for glitch-free camming, where models broadcast live video feeds of themselves to customers and chat with them. And long before influencers started figuring out what they needed to do to grow and maintain a lucrative social media following, webcam models were deciding how best to curate online personas to keep audiences’ attention and elicit generous tips. Nilsson says her own virtual world is usually full of cheerful sourdough recipes or restaurants she wants to check out on her next trip to Sicily, but she realises now that the way “all this lovely, worthwhile content” is transmitted to her phone, and the way she consumes it, is closely based on a model developed by online pornography tech developers. Companies such as MindGeek trade on desire, so they became expert early on at spotting what people browsing the internet are genuinely interested in. “Staring at content that is algorithmically engineered to arouse you is a perfect metaphor for our relationship with our devices and the internet and social media. Pornography is no longer just about sex – its logic of capturing attention through stimulation, keeping us watching rather than doing, is embedded in the online world,” she says. Social media sites have learned from innovations developed by pornography companies – how to make the stream of content addictive, how to ensure people stay browsing for a little longer. “One reason it’s still so hard to regulate pornography is because you crack down on one site, and suddenly there are 15 other copycats. We’re often scrolling, and we feel like we’re living these things, but we’re not. We’re stuck in this sort of endless loop of gratification and self-soothing, and we use our phones to calm ourselves down, or just take our mind off things, but we’re not living.” She calls this the “masturbatory” model of the internet; a model that feeds us content designed to “make us feel good, to arouse us, to flatter us, to make us linger”. She traces a clear line from the carefully flirtatious interactions of women stripping online for camming work, trying to get tips from their clients, to the docile and sycophantic tones given by developers to chatbots, “who indulge our fantasies and make us feel better than any person in our real lives can”. In parallel, online outrage also has roots in pornography and the competition for hits, she argues. “If you look at the state of online culture today … we have so much anger and everything feels so extreme. This follows a trend you could see on Pornhub a long, long time ago – where the onslaught of free material meant that content needed to shock more and more to stand out, making pornography become more and more extreme,” she says. Anyone who followed last year’s race between the British porn stars Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips to outdo each other by broadcasting themselves having sex with hundreds of men will know what she means. Nilsson’s primary focus is analysing the business model, rather than charting the experiences of the women who create the content. She doesn’t soft-soap the extremes of the industry – documenting, for example, the disturbing popularity of “humiliation porn”, which is pornography that involves actors being used sexually by a group of men to the point of gagging or tears. But many of the women she interviews emphasise how the work has given them options. A different perspective is offered only occasionally. View image in fullscreen Nilsson in Frankfurt, 2026 Photograph: Stefanie Kösling/The Guardian She tells me she felt awkward when she found herself sitting next to a depressed webcam modeI was at an adult industry event in Prague one evening. Nilsson had been invited by Katya Tiuni, a Ukrainian woman who turned to camming in the 1990s to escape the poverty that followed the collapse of communism. Tiuni later founded a school for women who wanted to become online sex workers, teaching them how to build a brand and keep an audience loyal over time. More than 10,000 women have attended her webinars.
But the young woman sitting next to Nilsson wasn’t enjoying the training. “I tried to chat about the job, and she was just so unhappy. She kept saying, ‘I don’t want to be here, I miss home, I made a mistake.’ It was such a contrast to Katya’s lean-in feminism, that feeling of empowerment through making money,” Nilsson says. This woman’s views on the industry don’t make it into the book.
Instead, Nilsson is careful not to judge. “Historically, most feminist analysis of sex work has come from women who have never done it, or who have never been in a situation where it might seem like the best option available. If we genuinely want to support sex workers, their own accounts of what the work means to them have to be at the centre of the conversation,” she says. Thinking about what the rise of online pornography means for women like her, who have to “live in a world where the idea that you can buy female attention and affection” has become mainstream, is a “completely different conversation from what it actually means to the people doing sex work.”
More interesting, she says, is to ask why so many women are choosing to enter this world. She wonders what we can learn “about the state of capitalism when so many people are saying, ‘Actually, it’s not going to work for me to get a degree, try to get a job, and work my way up, because just earning an income, if you don’t already have assets, doesn’t work anymore. I need to hustle to get a down payment on a house.'”
Finally, she’s curious about the link between social media and a growing willingness to post explicit content. “Why,” she asks, “do we have an online culture that has made self-exposure so normalised, and the drive to monetise your own image so normalised, that the step to actually selling pornography isn’t that big for many people?”
Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else by Patricia Nilsson is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the article about Patricia Nilsson exposing the porn industrys biggest bosses
Beginner Questions
Q Who is Patricia Nilsson
A She is a journalist who wrote a book called The Big Porn Bosses She spent years investigating the business side of the online porn industry
Q What does bare it all mean in this context
A It has a double meaning It refers to the performers who are naked on camera but it also means the bosses who are finally being exposed and having their secrets revealed
Q Who are the porn bosses
A These are the wealthy owners and executives who run the major porn websites and production companies They are the people making millions of dollars behind the scenes
Q Why is she exposing them
A She wants to show the reality of the business While the bosses get rich many performers are exploited underpaid and have no safety net She is shedding light on the dark side of a massive industry
Q Is this book just about the performers
A No While it talks about the performers experiences the main focus is on the business executives and how they built their empires often at the expense of the people working for them
Q What is the worlds biggest porn boss referring to
A It refers to the owners of the most popular free porn sites and the major production studios These individuals control the majority of the content people see online
Intermediate Questions
Q What is the main problem with free porn websites
A The main problem is that they make billions in ad revenue while paying the performers nothing The article argues that these sites have destroyed the ability for performers to make a living as users no longer pay for content
Q How do these bosses avoid responsibility for the content
A Many claim they are just platforms like YouTube or Facebook They say they dont produce the content they just host it This allows them to avoid liability for illegal or nonconsensual videos
Q What is the Pornhub scandal mentioned in the article
