MONTREAL — Mastercard is investigating its relationship with MindGeek-owned advertising portal TrafficJunky after The Logic found the platform allows advertisers to build campaigns around keywords including “13yearoldteen,” “not18,” “momdaughter” and other terms that imply illegal activity.

TrafficJunky provides advertising services to MindGeek, the Montreal-founded, Luxembourg-based company behind Pornhub and dozens of other pornographic sites. Founded in 2008, the portal offers those wanting to advertise on MindGeek-owned sites “granular targeting,” including by keyword—the terms people use to search for pornographic material, some of which is uploaded by users—for what the company claims are 150 million daily visitors and 4.6 billion daily impressions. “Keywords allow you to select the content you would like your campaign to be served alongside,” reads a TrafficJunky web page with information about its advertiser campaign tool. 

These include terms that appear to violate Pornhub’s terms of service, which prohibit its users from posting content depicting underage sexual activity and incest, among other things. And while TrafficJunky bans the English word “rape” as a targeting term, advertisers can target their ads toward searches that use the word in different languages. For example, the site allows advertisers to target ads to people searching the Russian or German words for “rape”—as they can the Japanese translation of “child rape.” (Last year, TrafficJunky announced its expansion of the company’s geotargeting features to Japan.)

“We are looking into this further. And, should their controls not fulfill legal or network requirements, we will ensure the bank that connects them to our network takes action to resolve the situation,” Mastercard senior vice-president Seth Eisen told The Logic via email.

Mastercard permanently terminated the use of its services on Pornhub, MindGeek’s best-known site, after an investigation following a December 2020 New York Times column that said the site was “infested with rape videos.”

“The only MindGeek business impacted by our investigation was Pornhub,” Eisen told The Logic in January.

The credit-card company, based in Purchase, N.Y., has continued to process advertising buys on MindGeek’s sites. Advertising—display ads, and those that play before videos—is MindGeek’s biggest source of revenue, according to its CEO Feras Antoon’s testimony in front of a parliamentary committee last February.

“We are an ad-supported platform. That’s how we make our revenues. That’s how Pornhub makes its revenues,” Antoon said, estimating that advertising represented approximately 50 per cent of the company’s revenues.

MindGeek refused to provide comment on the record. Questions sent to the company elicited a response, via a Gmail account, from someone using the name “Ian Andrews.” In parliamentary committee testimony last February, MindGeek executive Corey Urman said “Andrews” was “a pseudonym for someone who works in our media communications team.” It is against The Logic’s editorial policy to publish comment from sources whose identity it can’t confirm.

Visa, which stopped providing payment services to Pornhub at roughly the same time as Mastercard, also continues to process payments for TrafficJunky. Visa global brand-protection director Elizabeth Scofield didn’t respond to The Logic’s requests for comment.

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.