“The modern porn industry, the online porn industry, is not really about porn. It's not really about sex. The pornography is just a byproduct. What the business is really about is the attention that the pornography is attracting.”
Top Comment · October 2026
Context
Nilsson on what she learned while investigating the owners of Pornhub: at her first industry conference, almost everyone she met worked in traffic trading, ad tech or payments. She argues that early porn sites were laboratories for the incentives and technologies the rest of the internet now runs on.
Transcript
…thought they were stealing from them and thought they were ruining the industry because porn directors and porn performers, and you know, the people who made up the porn industry, of course, they didn't want the stuff they were making to be sort of uploaded and consumed for free. So I think that's
empathize working in television.
…in an industry where performers are literally made to barrel, the people who are making money from this business model were basically demanding to be completely unknown. I mean, I remember the first porn conference I ever went to. The only people that I met were traffic traders, you know, people working in ad tech, payment processors. And that was sort of the moment when I started realizing that the modern porn industry, the online porn industry, is not really about porn. It's not really about sex. The pornography is just a byproduct. What the business is really about is the attention that the pornography is attracting. I thought I was writing the story of what happened to the porn industry when it collided with the internet. But really, what I was learning was this was the story of what happened to the internet once it merged with the technologies and incentives from porn. This is why early porn sites and porn companies became these laboratories for the technologies and incentives that have really become the…
That's one of the most interesting things about your book is it's not just about porn. You begin to realize how much of the internet has been shaped by porn. But can you explain a little bit about how that economy works and how that kind of platform economy and platform design and ad tech and…
Going back to Fabian Tillman, so this German developer who at one point was the face of Pornhub, he never actually built a single porn site. What he had built in the late 90s was one of the first pieces of affiliate marketing softwares. And affiliate marketing is, to use a modern example, when a…
How do they make money from that? How can they make money from tracking how someone moves around a porn site?
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