The harsh, horribly unsexy truth about the porn industry in the 21st century is that it's basically a capitalist monopoly. In Netflix's Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, one of the most-visited websites in the world is shown as a dull, grey office block consisting of open-plan cubicles and computers tracking data and advertising spend. Of course, we all know the epicentre of most fun things in our lives usually operates out of some kind of sterile, urban cement block. Still, when it's an incubator for search terms like ‘hentai’ and ‘milf’, it really brings the illusion of escapism crashing down to earth.
The hour-and-a-half-long documentary by Suzanne Hillinger seeks to expose the dark side of the biggest porn site in the world, from its starting point at the advent of the 00s digital boom to its stratospheric growth. Somewhere thereafter, it explores how the duty of care for the people who make its content has been thrown around like a hot potato as the site found itself at the centre of a sex trafficking scandal.
The film is expansive in its scope, talking to and hearing from sex workers who make their living on the site and through pay-per-services like OnlyFans and former workers at MindGeek (the parent tech company that runs Pornhub), as well as journalists, whistleblowers and victims of the site's alleged mismanagement and shady dealings around non-consensual content ending up monetised on the platform.
The film will explore how the site fundamentally changed the world of pornography
Porn thrives in the shadows. From its inception, it has been relegated to the top shelves of newsagents, the 3-digit channels at the backend of the TV guide and midnight incognito windows. At one point, the film references a moment of digital omnipresence for Pornhub, when it decided to release its most-searched terms and bring the secret shames of people's browsing history into the public domain. As is almost monotonously explored in the doc, those insights that got the world talking are the result of algorithmic data farming by rows of tech bros and advertising teams hired specifically to tap into the scandal of sex. hot stuff, obviously.
Money Shot is smart in overloading the front end of its documentary with the deeply unsexy reality of what it takes to get our rocks off. Even in talking to sex workers who make their living from Pornhub and other sites like it, it pulls the curtain back on the mundane, cold reality of creating content, from ring lights to iMovie edit screens. It's a cold shower on the experience most consumers have with porn. That frigid, fluorescent bulb on the whole thing, however, is what makes later explorations of the site's alleged history with platforming sex trafficking and the economic reality of professional sex workers getting their livelihoods cut off more sobering.
So while you could argue that a title like Money Shot is given to whip people up into a frenzy, either extremely pro-Pornhub or against, the reality is that it's there to explicitly lay bare that everything – the production, the content glut, the overlooking of exploitative practices – is just about economics. Which is actually just a real boner killer.
