The company Mindgeek owns large porn sites such as Pornhub and Youporn, but has gone under the radar of the financial press, according to reporter Patricia Nilsson at the Financial Times.

- I discovered two years ago that this company had a secret owner and when I say secret I mean that many in the porn industry did not even know he existed, she says.

The sites turned the power structure upside down

Since the 60's, porn film actors and consumers have been at the forefront of technology.

When the video cassette was launched in the late 70's, the majority of cassettes sold were pornographic videos and according to a study from the 90's, the majority of all pictures on the young internet consisted of porn, writes the BBC.

But when porn streaming sites ran across the DVD market, porn producers ended up in the backwaters.

The sites pirated wildly from the DVDs and the actors did not manage to fight back against the piracy in the same way as Hollywood.

Since then, the economy of porn has changed fundamentally.

"Wow, a porn king"

Tech guys and investment bankers became the new industry winners and when Patricia Nilsson discovered that a former employee at the investment bank Goldman Sachs owned Mindgeek, she thought she might have found the biggest power player in contemporary porn.

- I thought wow, here is a porn king who seems to control the whole industry, but when we started following the money, the track went around him, she says.

Make sure they stay on the carpet

It was not really that simple for a secret banker to control the whole industry.

However, there were more conventional power players in the porn industry - something that became apparent in the winter of 2020 when these power players cut ties with Pornhub after a revelation that the site shows porn videos with minors.

- If you want to understand who really has the power over these companies, it is Visa and Mastercard who make sure that porn companies adhere to rules that they think are acceptable, says Patricia Nilsson

The podcast "Hot money" is broadcast in eight episodes and is published by Financial times.