Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Money Shot: The Pornhub Story’ on Netflix, a Documentary Gamely Digging Into Internet-Porn Controversies

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story (now on Netflix) digs into the controversy surrounding the pornography WalMart of the internet, what was, and still kind of is, a one-stop shop for all your sexy needs. It’s produced by prolific documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (famous for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and directed by Suzanne Hillinger (of the COVID-19 doc Totally Under Control), who dig into the recent fallout from Pornhub’s business practices, which were as groundbreaking as they were unethical. Fortunately, this is compelling topical fodder for many reasons. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite finish the job, and here is where I kindly request that you keep your double-entendres to yourself. 

MONEY SHOT: THE PORNHUB STORY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a fun question directed at porn actors: What was the first porn you ever saw? There were sleepovers, DVDs, late-night HBO softcore flicks. Then, a Controversy Montage opening credits sequence, you know, the type that nearly every Netflix documentary has. And now, a little background on Pornhub, owned by a tech company called Mindgeek, based in Montreal, with drab offices that look like every other corporate workspace out there – I mean, if you didn’t know better, you’d look at this nondescript building (and you’ll see many, many shots of it in this film) and never, ever once think it’s home to so much slurping and porking! Anyway, Pornhub grew to be one of the internet’s most heavily trafficked sites for reasons that are obvious, but less obviously, because search-engine optimization geniuses engineered it to be the first stack of links people see when they Googled their favorite fetish. 

We meet a couple of sex workers, Gwen Adora and Siri Dahl, who used Pornhub to fuel their careers. Specifically, the Modelhub corner of the site, a platform allowing self-employed people like them to post and profit on their own content, and not be exploited by bigger, potentially unethical production companies. It allowed Gwen to do her own videography, marketing, editing and everything else all by herself; one actor says his income working for a studio was $4,000 monthly, but it jumped to $10,000 thanks to Modelhub. Problem is, anyone could upload anything to the platform, monetized or not, and it was untraceable – which led to all manner of disgusting content, from child porn to rape videos, existing among Pornhub’s many millions of ad-supported videos.

This is the part of the documentary when we meet the lawyers and journalists. Some of the lawyers represent organizations that purport to be fighting the proliferation of sex trafficking and child porn, inarguably noble endeavors, but are quietly fueled by extremely conservative Christian orgs looking to abolish the very existence of pornography by conflating legal, consensual sex work with the industry’s most reprehensible elements. A New York Times writer published an op-ed exposing how Pornhub tended to drag its feet when asked to remove such grotesqueries, likely due to the hundreds of millions of dollars it was reaping in ad revenue and data mining. Activists leaned on credit card companies to yank payment-processing support from Pornhub, so the company scaled back, clamping down on regulation and dropping roughly 80 percent of its videos. And guess what – legit, ethical sex workers like Gwen and Siri lost a major revenue stream. It’s a story as old as time: The prudes overreached, and the liberated suffered.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Money Shot isn’t the best work to bear Gibney’s name in the credits, but it shows some of the culturally relevant sensationalism of his other films and series, among them Going Clear, The Crime of the Century and The Forever Prisoner. Netflix also dipped its toes into the porn industry with the controversial Hot Girls Wanted and Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On.

Performances Worth Watching: Siri Dahl and Gwen Adora advocate for their line of work in a thoughtful, matter-of-fact way that’s ultimately endearing. 

Memorable Dialogue: A handful of lines could be thesis statements to their own individual, focused documentaries: 

“Pornography is pornography, and that has to inherently imply consent, 100 percent of the time.”

“At its root, this is an internet problem.”

“Porn is the canary in the coal mine of free speech.”

“I think (Pornhub) could have done more to prevent certain things, and chose not to. And only really changed some things after it got in trouble.”

Sex and Skin: Some for sure, yes, with all of the more graphic images blurred out, but ultimately, there’s less sex here than in 365 Days.

Our Take: There’s a fascinating story to be found in the Pornhub saga, but Money Shot never finds its footing narratively. Hillinger attempts to encompass many points of view, distracting the film’s focus: Is the film about amoral corporations prioritizing profit over people? Is it about the stigma associated with sex work? Is it about a politically rooted culture war? Is it a porn-industry explainer? Is it a story about the taming of the Wild West of the internet? The doc takes small bites out of all these topics, and likely leaves us more informed than we were before, but not as informed as we’d like to be, or should be. 

It leaves many, many questions unanswered: Is there research to back up the talking heads’ claims that porn exists on “a razor’s edge” of legality and morality? What are some of the ways the porn industry regulates itself to prevent abuse? Why do sex workers face difficulty finding another line of work (which is not to imply that they should, but the recent instability of the business threatens livelihoods)? How is pornography protected by free speech laws? How does OnlyFans, a popular porn-content platform that people like Siri Dahl migrated to in the wake of Pornhub’s controversy, function, and is it similarly compromised? I could go on; so many documentary series could be trimmed down to standalone films, and so many films, like Money Shot, could be expanded into in-depth series.

Hillinger often seems to skew perspective toward sex workers, peering over their shoulders for an insider’s view of how the porn sausage is made, and yes, please accept my apology for that analogy. (It’s amusing to watch Siri Dahl record a rate-your-dick video, solicited and paid for by one of her fans in apparent need of a little objective assessment on his junk; it’s also amusing how silly and harmless it is.) But for every fascinating moment there are too many staid, momentum-killing instances of people reading lines from legal documents, or talking heads making claims that go unquestioned and unsubstantiated. Notably, Hillinger only lands interviews with former Pornhub employees and doesn’t get key anti-porn activists on camera (hence, the proliferation of lawyers as commentators here), indicators that a tighter focus on the experiences of sex workers might’ve yielded a stronger film.  

Money Shot is an awkward documentary. It’s disorganized and lacks clarity, juxtaposing some of the eye-opening and entertaining realities of porn with the grim subject matter of human trafficking and sexual abuse, but never exploring either in a thorough or satisfying manner. It opens a can of worms and lets us peer at the squirming mass within, and try to find some rhyme and reason to it.

Our Call: Let’s face it – the subject matter compels us to press play on Money Shot. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by an exploration of 21st-century internet porn? Bottom line, the manner in which it humanizes and sympathizes with sex workers is enough to say STREAM IT, despite its many flaws.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.