MONTREAL — Despite placing high-profile bans on consumer payments to the controversial adult site Pornhub, Visa and Mastercard continue to process advertising purchases for the site, the biggest source of its parent company’s revenue.

Visa, Mastercard and Discover banned the use of their services on Pornhub—one of the internet’s largest repositories of pornographic videos, owned by the Montreal-founded, Luxembourg-based MindGeek—following the December 2020 publication of a New York Times column that said the site was “infested with rape videos.” Mastercard permanently terminated the use of its services on Pornhub following a company investigation that determined the site hosted illegal content. Visa and Discover did much the same.

Yet while you can no longer use Visa and Mastercard’s credit cards to buy content or subscriptions on Pornhub, advertisers can still use Visa and Mastercard to buy ad placements on the Pornhub website, and on videos uploaded to the site, by way of TrafficJunky, MindGeek’s online advertising portal.

“The only MindGeek business impacted by our investigation was Pornhub,” Mastercard senior vice-president Seth Eisen told The Logic via email. Visa didn’t respond to a request for comment, but in December 2020, said it would “reinstate acceptance privileges for MindGeek sites that offer professionally produced adult studio content.”

Much like YouTube, Pornhub’s biggest source of revenue is advertising—display ads, and those that play before a selected video. “We are an ad-supported platform. That’s how we make our revenues. That’s how Pornhub makes its revenues,” MindGeek CEO Feras Antoon told a parliamentary committee in February 2021, estimating that advertising represented approximately 50 per cent of the company’s revenues.

TrafficJunky brokers over three billion daily ad impressions, according to MindGeek’s corporate website, though a recent Vanity Fair article pegged the number at 4.6 billion a day. TrafficJunky sales director Graham Collie didn’t respond to The Logic’s request for comment.

Certainly, MindGeek’s ad revenue dwarfs that of its subscriptions, with the company taking in $213 million in advertising revenue and $52 million in premium subscriptions in 2018, according to a pitch deck The Logic viewed in December 2021. The deck, from Toronto-based private equity firm Bruinen, projected that MindGeek’s growth through 2026 would come largely from advertising. “Average revenue is 1,000 impressions is 50 cents,” it reads. 

(Founded by former Liberal Party CFO Chuck Rifici, Bruinen made a US$525-million offer for MindGeek last summer, which company executives ultimately rejected.)

Following the New York Times column, MindGeek removed millions of videos from its sites and only allowed video uploads from verified users. Yet it remains unclear whether the company secures consent from all individuals appearing in clips on Pornhub and other MindGeek tube sites. Neither Antoon nor MindGeek CFO David Tassillo responded to a request for comment.

Along with TrafficJunky, Visa and Mastercard also process payments for Probiller, MindGeek’s in-house payment platform that allows users to buy content and memberships from MindGeek-owned brands. Though Visa and Mastercard can’t be used to buy Pornhub Premium or ModelHub content, both cards work on Pornhub’s online store, where users can purchase Pornhub-branded swag. 

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, a signatory of two open letters to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleging MindGeek was complicit in the “exploitation of women and minors,” said she was “disappointed” that Visa and Mastercard were still processing payments for MindGeek-owned properties.

“Pornhub had behaved in a non-ethical manner, and when Visa and Mastercard cut their ties with the company it resulted in a lot of good publicity for them. In doing business with a different entity of MindGeek, by saying it is different from Pornhub, the credit-card companies are minimizing what Pornhub did,” Miville-Dechêne said.

Last November, Miville-Dechêne reintroduced a bill that, should it become law, would compel adult sites like Pornhub to implement age verification and limit sexually explicit material to individuals who are at least 18 years of age. The month after, France’s communications regulatory authority asked Pornhub and four other adult sites to institute age-verification measures within 15 days, or risk being blocked in the country.