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Business journalist Patricia Nilsson investigates the secretive owners of the world's biggest porn companies in her new book Guilty Pleasure, revealing how bankers and tech figures profit while avoiding scrutiny.
Business journalist Patricia Nilsson has spent five years investigating the pornography industry for the Financial Times, and her new book Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet exposes the匿名 power players who own the world's biggest adult companies.
The book reveals how these owners, now tech nerds and bankers, avoid public scrutiny while profiting from an industry that shapes the internet and modern life. Nilsson, 34, belongs to the first generation that came of age on the internet, to whom oceans of free porn was a normal part of life.
She says her argument is not that we should be neutral towards porn, but that we need to accept and understand it as a real industry and ask what its growth says about the economy and the world of work. She asks in the book: We live in a world where as many people have instantaneous access to free porn as to clear water. Why aren't we more curious about the growing role of pornography in our lives?
Decades ago, porn moguls like Hustler's Larry Flynt and Playboy's Hugh Hefner were household names who paraded a glamorous lifestyle in public. Nilsson writes: Say what you want about these old perverts, who once set the tone of our sexual culture, but at least you knew who they were and what they were selling. These days, the men calling the shots are nowhere to be seen.
Bankers Replace Moguls in Porn Industry
The owners are so anxious to remain anonymous that we often don't even know their names. Nilsson's investigations revealed that the industry's owners are now financiers with no particular interest in pornography itself. She says: I started realising this industry isn't really about porn any more. I would go to these porn conferences and I couldn't find anyone who actually worked with porn, because all these people were working in traffic or payment processing.
Attendees in zipped tech-bro gilets discuss dry notions like affiliate marketing while barely acknowledging their work in explicit adult content. She was the first person to track down Bernd Bergmair, the mysterious figure who owned MindGeek, then the world's largest pornography company and operator of Pornhub, from 2013 to 2023.
Bergmair was an Austrian former Goldman Sachs investment banker, described as an uncle type in expensive clothes, so determined to stay hidden that others in the industry called him a ghost and doubted his existence. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on financing strategies for corporate acquisitions and knew so little about pornography that he took competitors to lunch to learn how the business worked.
A banker who worked in Frankfurt, London, New York and Hong Kong, Bergmair seemed entirely uninterested in the sex that underpinned the empire he was buying, Nilsson notes. She writes: He knew it was a highly profitable business and he just cared about ensuring that the structure was safe enough so that he could keep taking his dividends out.
Pornhub Removes Unverified Videos 2020
In 2020, Pornhub removed millions of unverified videos, some of which may have contained nonconsensual pornography, rape, child sexual abuse, violent sexual abuse of women and other abusive content. Nilsson also travelled to Prague in search of the elusive owners of WebGroup Czech Republic, known as WGCZ, a company based in nondescript, unsignposted offices with a deliberately unremarkable name to mask its true nature. WGCZ is the pornographic empire behind Penthouse, distributing content watched by hundreds of millions.
She disliked the hypocrisy of industry leaders, some of whom had become billionaires, and said: Online sex workers literally have to bare it all; once you put your image out there on the internet, even if technically you control the IP, it can be very difficult to ever get it down. She added: So it's terrible if the people profiting from the industry then have the gall to say I want to protect my anonymity and I don't really want to be associated with sex work.
They don't want to put their names out there, they don't want to put their faces out there. Nilsson, who has British and Swedish citizenship but Polish roots, lives in Frankfurt and finished writing the book in the exhausting first weeks after giving birth. She subjected the industry to the same deep analysis a journalist would give to oil and gas markets, wondering why pornography companies rarely made headlines despite their scale.
Financial Times Investigation Targets Leaders
Her decision to investigate the sector for the Financial Times was an unwelcome development for its mostly invisible leaders. Nilsson wanted to reveal who was getting rich through porn and how they were doing it, bringing the sector's leaders out of the shadows. She noted that the industry is not really about porn anymore, with conference attendees working in web traffic or payment processing rather than with performers.
The book, Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, examines how porn has shaped the internet and our lives as a whole.
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