It's baffling to me that Mindgeek isn't more widely reported on. It's a massive company, apart from Pornhub it owns the majority of the streaming sites, as well as several of the largest porn production companies.
Prior to Mindgeek, porn production and distribution companies had been locked out of normal finance structures, but Fabian Thylmann was somehow able to raise over $300 million dollars and proceeded to just buy up company after company.
It touches on the wider porn industry, but there's one German Journalist interviewed that's completely baffled as to how Mindgeek could actually be making money, and implies the whole thing is a scam.
Back in the day, porn companies were able to circumvent the payment processor bans a lot more easily thanks to there being more of a cash economy than today, and it being more easier to use shell companies in the era before internet and online shopping.
In the "Golden Age of Porn" during the 1970's and 1980's, the majority of porn companies were either directly controlled by the Mafia or were often colluding with it, as the Mob pretty much had a monopoly on the "stag films" in circulation in the 1940's, 1950's, and 1960's. That also went a long way in being able to circumvent the finance industry.
Even the porn companies that weren't mob-controlled like Playboy and Hustler were able to get around these restrictions by being officially registered as regular print publishers. That's one of the reasons why Playboy Magazine was always a mostly softcore magazine even after porn was legalized and why they had articles from guys like Norman Mailer, it was a way to get around the porn bans of the 50's and 60's and later the payment processor restrictions.
Larry Flynt did a similar thing with Hustler. Flynt's company actually publishes a wide variety of normal print magazines completely unrelated to porn, and Hustler is technically only a single subsidiary of a wider company.
Bob Guccione did a similar tactic back in the day, but Hustler and Penthouse were always up front about what they were and that's why Larry Flynt was constantly in court and why Bob Guccione made Caligula and helped finance Central Park Media's early hentai dubs back in the 90's, including the infamous Urotsukidoji theatrical cut.
Larry Flynt was able to still circumvent the finance industry's lockouts by virtue of the fact that Hustler's parent company published plenty of non-porn magazines and print media.
IIRC, Bob Guccione was already sorta independently financially well-off even before he started Penthouse, since he owned and managed a chain of laundromats in the New York metro area, and the earliest issues of Penthouse had non-pornographic articles in addition to nude photos, mainly dealing with conspiracy theories, sensationalist tabloid news, and similar content before they went full hardcore smut.
Hugh Hefner always wanted to maintain the illusion of Playboy being a classy-yet-sexy men's art and lifestyle magazine, which is why Playboy Magazine never featured hardcore porn and why so many established authors kept writing articles for Playboy into the 21st Century.
I wouldn't be surprised if the founder of MindGeek made his initial wealth elsewhere before the company was established.
