New standards of respectability in contemporary pornography: Pornhub’s corporate communication

This article investigates the communication and branding strategies developed by Pornhub in order to describe the way in which the site reshapes the social meaning of pornographic consumption and builds a reputational profile directed to consumers, to mainstream media, to investors and to institutions. Since 2013, Pornhub–a tube site that is part of a bigger conglomerate (MindGeek) owning similar tubes and other pornography producers–has built its brand focusing on technological innovation, education, partnerships with artists and pop singers, sponsoring and social investment. Pornhub certainly cannot hide the pornographic nature of the material it distributes, but instead seeks to accredit itself with stakeholders giving to the tube the profile of corporate social responsibility as formulated by a standard like ISO 26000: 2010. In order to achieve public respectability through social responsibility, Pornhub is described according to a narrative that separates the infrastructure of the distribution (the tube itself) from the producers, the directors, the performers and the workers who create the pornographic video, who are still exposed to stigma.