It took the EU’s microscope to wake up the Parliament and the government in Cyprus to the activity of international giants in the production and distribution of internet porn, based in Nicosia and Limassol.

The EU is mainly concerned about the issue of minors’ access to such material and for this reason, as of today, it is imposing conditions. The companies themselves are reacting by bringing legal action against the European Commission.

In Cyprus, the issue also has an economic dimension, in addition, of course, to the content of the material. AKEL MP Nikos Kettiros, as the newspaper Politis wrote, has registered the matter for an ex officio examination by the relevant parliamentary committee, as the answers he received in a letter to the Ministry of Energy, Trade and Industry were not satisfactory and, for an unknown reason, its content was described as “confidential”.

The Cyprus-based companies, according to Politis, are five: XHamster – Hammy Media ltd (Wisebits group), Stripchat – Technius ltd, Faphouse – Tecom ltd and Virtual Taboo – Camon Trading ltd in Limassol.

Also Pornhub – Ayio Freesites ltd (Aylo group) in Dali.

Industry under the EU’s bridle

From today porn content companies Pornhub, Stripchat and Xvideos will have to comply with strict rules under the European Digital Services Act (DSA), according to the European Commission.

As Euronews reported, these specific obligations include reporting risk assessment reports to the Commission, putting in place mitigation measures to address systemic risks associated with the provision of their services, complying with additional transparency obligations, including on advertising, and providing access to data for researchers. The additional provisions came into force today for Pornhub and Stripchat and next Tuesday for XVideos.

The DSA makes designated very large online platforms responsible for ensuring safer, more transparent online spaces. They must identify and address systemic risks in an effective manner, particularly when it comes to mitigating risks to the welfare of minors, among other things.

The European Commission is closely monitoring compliance with the DSA obligations by these platforms, in particular as regards measures to protect minors from harmful content and to counter the dissemination of illegal content. Fines for breaching the rules can reach up to 6% of their global turnover.

Millions of users

The three platforms fall into the category of those identified as very large as they are sites visited on average by more than 45 million Europeans each month.

Companies such as Pornhub are subject to stricter scrutiny because they have not done enough to prevent illegal content such as child rape videos and non-consensual and revenge pornography from being uploaded to their platforms.

EU regulators and political institutions have been lobbying for years to ensure that these platforms implement age verification measures to prevent minors from accessing their sites.

The decision marks a victory for the European Commission. The EU clashed with some major porn platforms, which have argued in recent months that they did not fall within the monthly visits limit to face additional content control rules.

Pornhub claimed to have 33,000,000 users each month, while Stripchat said it was visited by nearly 32,000,000 Europeans each month.

Xvideos missed the deadline for publishing information on user numbers and later revealed it had more than 160,000,000 monthly users in the EU.

The EU rules certainly apply to the big social media such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Companies will have to propose concrete measures to mitigate major online risks such as violence against women and the protection of minors, and will have to go through external audits.

Brussels has listed 22 platforms subject to the rules – which include the need to introduce age verification measures to protect minors and the creation of a library of ads posted on their sites.

Based in Cyprus, with a Greek founder

Cyprus has for many years been the headquarters of the world’s largest internet porn companies and no one has bothered.

In protothema.gr we had published since 2019 information and data about MindGeek, which last year was renamed Aylo and has state-of-the-art offices both in Dali (outside Nicosia) and Limassol. It is a multinational company that dominates the online pornography landscape with dozens of websites and many millions of users.

The “famous” porn star Stoya in the documentary “Pornocracy: The New Sex Multinationals” refers to her experience of working with MindGeek (Aylo) when she visited the company’s offices in a European capital. As she said, she met several men with Greek surnames and heavy Greek accents who claimed to be from Quebec, Canada.

The truth is that there is a Greek root in the company’s history. After the huge success of YouTube, the Greek-Canadian Stefanos Manos from Quebec thought with two friends of his to build a similar platform exclusively with pornographic material, to which there would be free access.

They set up Brazzers in Montreal, which sourced material from the traditional porn industry, which at the time had not realised the huge penetration of the internet and sold the DVDs it produced at low prices.

Brazzers (specialising in large-breasted women) began to create other websites and expand into internet porn at an incredibly fast pace. In 2009 the US authorities turned against the Mansef group of companies that owned Brazzers and frozen $7 million in assets for various tax violations in the US.

Manos and his associates then sold Mansef to Fabian Thylmann of Germany, who renamed the group Manwin Inc. which was generously loaned, with the involvement of former Goldman Sachs executives, to expand. But it seems that suspicions of tax evasion again arose and Thylmann in 2012 was extradited from Belgium, where he was living, to Germany.

It seems there was a settlement and so there were no criminal proceedings. Thylmann sold the Manwin Inc group for $73 million and the group was renamed MindGeek. At the time, it is estimated that MindGeek had 15 billion clicks each month and revenues in excess of $100,000,000 per year. At the same time, it maintained offices in several countries, including Cyprus.

Aylo (formerly MindGeek) manages the most popular pornography websites including YouPorn, Pornhub, Redtube, Xtube, GayTube, Tube8. At the same time, it has expanded its activities to other non-pornographic content websites and high quality online services.

Porn overconsumption

Research conducted in relation to pornography up to January 2024 has shown that each month more than 5.81 billion people visit pornographic sites worldwide (statistics from the top 3 sites).

Also in 2023, 165 billion porn videos were viewed, which translates to 33 videos per adult in the world. It was also found that every year, 17.8 trillion hours of porn are viewed worldwide. If we were talking about one person, they would have to watch porn non-stop for 20,000 centuries!

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93% of boys are exposed to porn in some form before they turn 18. For girls the corresponding figure is 62%. The worrying thing is that 15% of boys and 9% of girls have also seen child pornography.

Around 25% of all searches on online applications are related to pornography.

Women make up 60% and males 40% of users of pornography websites. 69% of the purchase of online pay-per-view content involves the purchase of porn content. It is estimated that 30% of the internet industry is pornography-related.

According to a 2021 report, there are 420,000,000 pages of pornographic content on the internet, and almost 35% of all internet downloads are related to pornography.

About 25% of workers access pornography from a work computer, according to a study by the Nielsen Company.

The porn industry has a global turnover of $100 billion, of which 12 to 14 billion comes from the US.