MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, is being acquired by Ethical Capital Partners, a new private equity firm in Ottawa, Canada.
Ethical Capital was formed in 2022 and is led by cannabis entrepreneur
Rocco Meliambro and criminal lawyer Fady Mansour, who is listed as
managing partner. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- According to traffic analytics firm Similarweb, Pornhub was the 12th most visited website in the world in 2022.
- PornHub’s parent company MindGeek is legally headquartered in Luxembourg but runs most of its operations in Montreal, Canada.
- MindGeek
is facing multiple lawsuits over sexually explicit videos of minors
found on its YouTube-esque tube sites, which rely on user-uploaded
content.
- In August, Visa and Mastercard announced they would
stop working with MindGeek after a court ruling said the payment
companies could be liable for illegal content on Pornhub.
- In
its most recent published financial results from 2018, MindGeek
generated about $460M in revenue with profit margins near 50%.
