MindGeek, the internet company best known for operating Pornhub, said that CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo have resigned.
In a statement to Variety, a company representative said, “Antoon and Tassillo leave MindGeek’s day-to-day operations after more than a decade in leadership positions with the company. With the company strategically positioned for long-term growth, MindGeek’s executive leadership team will run day-to-day operations on an interim basis, with a search underway for replacements.” The rep added that the leadership transition has been in the works since early 2022. Antoon and Tassillo will remain shareholders in MindGeek.
News of the exit of MindGeek’s two top executives comes shortly after the New Yorker published an 8,000-word investigative piece on the company.
According to the article, Pornhub has hosted sexually explicit nonconsensual videos — including those with children — for years. MindGeek’s policies say videos on its site are vetted to ensure that they don’t feature minors and also to verify that the videos have been shared with the consent of the people who appear in them. However, the New Yorker interviewed several women who discovered videos and pictures of themselves on Pornhub that they did not consent to sharing and who spent months trying to have them removed. According to MindGeek, the company does not post content without first passing it through human and automated moderation. In addition, when users flag a video, it is disabled until a review is conducted, according to the company.
MindGeek, which has about 1,600 employees, lists its headquarters in Luxembourg but its main office is in Montreal. The company’s website describes its mission as “To deliver a world-class portfolio of entertainment experiences and IT solutions to a global customer base, utilizing our expertise to drive innovation and build new solutions exceeding customer expectations.”
According to MindGeek, it is now beginning to “invest deeply in expanding creator-first offerings” as well as additional “opportunities for content monetization.” The company says it currently provides hundreds of thousands of models “with the opportunity to earn a living” and is seeking to “massively expand” the number of talent it works with.
Pornhub, along with other MindGeek-operated platforms like YouPorn, reach 150 million daily visitors, according to the company.