In its 16 years on the internet, Pornhub has attracted billions of visitors. As of 2022, it’s the 13th most-viewed website of all time. Its creation changed the ways in which porn was made and distributed, taking some control out of the hands of exploitative production companies and placing it further into the hands of the creators. But it opened the floodgates for another kind of exploitation, as non-consensual pornography flourished.
Now, Money Shot: A Pornhub Story, released this week, delves deeper into how they happened. And early reviews are divisive to say the least.
What is Money Shot: A PornHub Story about?
Money Shot breaks down the ethical failings of Pornhub as a platform, allowing the company and people to profit from pornographic material featuring non-consensual sex and trafficked victims. It speaks to activists, victims and former employees, who give first-hand accounts of such material existing on the site, and lays out the impact of it being shared.
On the flip side, the film also features adult performers who have experienced the knock-on effects of the anti-Pornhub movement. One is quoted in the trailer saying: “If it wasn’t for porn, I probably wouldn’t be alive.”
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Who worked on Money Shot: A PornHub Story?
The documentary is directed by Suzanne Hillinger, who has won awards for her films on worker exploitation. Her episode of TV series The Weekly, titled “The Myth of the Medallion”, looked into the way yellow cab drivers in New York were unfairly treated in a system rigged against them. It won her a News and Documentary Emmy in 2020. Jigsaw Productions are the production company behind it. They’ve worked on Netflix docs like Dirty Money and Alex Gibney’s The Inventor, about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.
Is there a trailer?
Yes, the trailer for the documentary dropped on 1 March.
What are the reviews like?
Money Shot: A PornHub Story premiered on Netflix globally on 15 March and currently has a 75% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Early critics have been divided on the documentary, with The Guardian giving it just two stars and saying it “failed to find a point of view” on its sprawling, multi-faceted subject area. The New York Times however, was more complimentary in its review, calling Money Shot “a documentary that casts a clear eye on the offenses of an industry driven by capitalism while never losing sight of the workers whose safety and success should be that profession’s number one priority”. As an industry, porn and sex work is notoriously divisive, so it perhaps make sense that reviews are split down the middle on how to take the documentary.