The online payment service PayPal announced on Nov. 13 that it will no longer offer its services for Pornhub, one of the most popular pornographic websites in the world with approximately 2.8 billion visits every month.
Although Pornhub is primarily a free porn-video sharing site, like YouTube, thousands of "performers" or "models" can upload their videos on the site and earn money from advertising on their channel(s). Many of the payments are processed through PayPal.
"We are all devastated by PayPal's decision to stop payments to over a hundred thousand performers who rely on them for their livelihoods," said Pornhub on its blog page.
According to its Terms of Service, PayPal "prohibits all account holders from buying or selling sexually oriented digital goods, including downloadable pictures or videos, subscriptions to websites, or other content delivered through a digital medium.”
A spokesman for PayPal told Vice's Motherboard, “Following a review, we have discovered that Pornhub has made certain business payments through PayPal without seeking our permission. We have taken action to stop these transactions from occurring.”
A spokesman for Pornhub told Motherboard, "Decisions like that of PayPal and other major companies do nothing but harm efforts to end discrimination and stigma towards sex workers. While we still have several payment methods for our models available, we will continue to add more sex worker friendly ones and explore cryptocurrency options in the near future."
Concerning PayPal's decision, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE) said, "PayPal made the right choice to no longer partner with the pornography industry by ending its work with Pornhub and we are encouraged by this new commitment!"
"When mainstream corporations normalize the pornography industry -- such as PayPal, Carl’s Jr., Kraft Heinz, and many others have done over the years -- they fund and promote its inherently sexually exploitive content," said the NCSE.
"Not only does most mainstream pornography depict themes of violence against women, incest, and racism, but recent revelations also exposed the fact that sex trafficking and child sexual abuse videos have been found on Pornhub and other sites like it," said the organization, "yet another important reason we are grateful for PayPal’s decision to end its partnership with the site."
According to SimilarWeb, Pornhub is the 11th most visited website in the world and the 7th most visited site in the United States. The U.S. makes up 23% of the the site's total traffic. There are, on average, 2.8 billion visits to Pornhub every month.