Pornhub’s “Dirtiest Porn Ever” Making Waves, for Better or Worse

We may as well talk about Pornhub’s “Dirtiest Porn Ever” campaign. The streaming porn giant announced last week that each time its new video is played through to the end, the company will donate an undisclosed amount to Ocean Polymer, a non-profit that reclaims and recycles plastic pollution from the world’s oceans.

The video in question features an “amateur” porn-making couple, Leolulu, going at it (without ever showing their faces, mind you) on one of the world’s most plastic-polluted beaches — while folks in Pornhub-branded hazmat suits clean up the beach around them. It’s part of the “Pornhub Cares” initiative, which over the past half decade has donated to causes like deforestation, saving the whales and the bees, breast cancer research, and more.

Cool, cool, yeah, yeah. We get it. Pornhub is grabbing headlines by doing something weird and newsworthy again. Those of us who pay attention to their antics (and those of MindGeek’s other tube sites, xHamster, YouPorn, and others) know the drill. Yawn. Still, though this latest bid for attention may be eye-rolling and the MindGeek conglomerate may continue to bloat itself on piracy and nefarious business tactics… We have to admit that they are doing some real good. 

The brand is leveraging its massive worldwide visibility to around 40 million visitors a day into environmental awareness and action. The initiative’s SFW landing page about the video even goes so far as to discuss the ocean-plastic problem in depth and give readers some tips on how to help (aside from wanking to the video.) 

And it’s working. As of the time I’m writing this, the video has racked up nearly 3.5 million views. The initiative is getting a ton of attention, with coverage piling up everywhere from Vice to LAD Bible to the Sun and more. 

As the Independent’s Almaz Ohene pointed out, this all may be a PR stunt that fails to address other major pollution issues like climate change and the danger it poses to the Carribean islands where “Dirtiest Porn Ever” was filmed. But even she had to admit, “The fact that a morally dubious pornography empire, associated with exploiting porn performers and facilitating piracy as well as developing the technology used as part of the UK’s questionable porn block law, is prepared to acknowledge the current state of the environment, indicates that it has more gall than many of the world’s governments.”

Over at Twitter, where the initiative appears to be roundly beloved, user Magnus wryly referenced this same sentiment in this tweet, and other users like TrafficJunky have rebutted that Pornhub is still doing more to raise awareness than…like…any other major corporate entity. With 6.5 million tons of litter entering the world’s oceans every year, killing 100,000 marine animals annually, and most of that plastic lasting for centuries before it degrades, it’s good to see somebody doing something. Even Pornhub.

All the moral quandaries that MindGeek’s sparkling jewel of a tube site has caused notwithstanding, it’s hard to disagree with verified Twitter user Corey Kindberg, who tweeted to his 13.2K followers, “pornhub as a brand is – and I can’t stress this enough – fucking brilliant.”