It’s difficult to shock on adult entertainment websites. When the product is already something as publicly taboo as Pornhub’s, it’s hard to startle with a thumbnail. If you’ve ever been on a site like Pornhub you’ll have seen, well, a lot. From entire categories dedicated to unlikely taxi situations to attractive women suddenly fancying plumbers, it’s honestly difficult to think of anything that could stop you in your tracks. But a Minecraft video might do it.
People are uploading innocent gaming videos to adult entertainment websites. Two of them, who go by Raptor Bacon and TastyFPS, tell me they mostly do it because it’s funny, but they’re also hiding Minecraft videos among porn clips as a promotional strategy. Clever. Raptor specialises in Minecraft, while Tasty plays Call of Duty. Both have found success in their art, and show no signs of letting up.
So how does someone make their start uploading gameplay to Pornhub? For Raptor Bacon, it was driven initially by the hilarity of the potential situation. “I honestly just thought it would be really funny,” said the creator. “You know someone’s going to be on there looking up the obvious content that you would find on Pornhub. And then they’ll just stumble into a Minecraft let’s play and they’ll be like: ‘Oh, that’s weird. I’m gonna watch that’. And it turns out a lot of people do.”
He wasn’t the first to think of the practice though. Others came before him. “There was one guy who posted a video that was just a redstone tutorial, which was really funny at the time. But then they purged a huge percentage of the videos on the website. Any video not posted by a verified member of Pornhub got deleted. But when they deleted all of those, there went most of the Minecraft videos. I was the last one standing.”
Tasty got his start due to good old fashioned content theft. Someone else ripped one of his Fortnite videos from YouTube and uploaded it to Pornhub without his knowledge—which is something that has been an ongoing issue with sex workers and content creators for most of the platform’s existence. “I ended up getting some comments on there saying that they saw this video on ‘the hub’. And at first I actually had no idea what they meant by that. But I got more and more comments saying they found this video on ‘the hub’ and then it kind of clicked. I ended up searching up on Pornhub and I found my video.”
After that, the Call of Duty creator says he decided to upload his own clips to Pornhub for the same reasons as Raptor. But suddenly, these clips were getting more attention on Pornhub than they were on YouTube. “I had people coming and finding me on Pornhub and then coming to my YouTube channel, my Twitter and stuff like that. They kind of kept doing it. And that’s why I’m still doing it now.”
They’ve got their own approaches to content on the site too. Though their gaming content is innocent in itself, they’ve both, in their own way, experimented with double entendres. “Dirty Hoe” from Rapor is just a video of him using a hoe in the game. Tasty in turn has “Twitch Streamer accidentally shows massive cock while streaming…” which is a picture of a cockerel. But many of each of their videos are titled just as you would a normal let’s play, adding to the content’s juxtaposition.
So what does success look like for Raptor and Tasty? Tasty’s biggest video on Pornhub has about 430,000 views. He says that continuing to post on the site leads to “at least 500-1,000 people a day, just clicking my Pornhub profile”. The Call of Duty player has even had one of his videos featured on the front page of Pornhub. “Based on my research, it’s like 40 to 60 videos a day get featured. I don’t know how it managed to have a Call of Duty video on the homepage, but I think it’s pretty cool.”
For Raptor, his content has been rising up the ranks of creators on the site. “I started off the year I’d like something like rank 120,000, at the very bottom of the barrel. And now I’m around rank 4,000 something.” The creator has even invested money into Pornhub’s adverts to experiment with their returns.
The CPM, or earnings per thousand views, are lower on Pornhub than they are on YouTube.”For Pornhub, it’s about roughly $1 for 1,400 views, Raptor says. “On YouTube, that’s like, $4-5.”
Tasty confirms it’s lower on his Pornhub content too: “It’s definitely way lower than other sites like YouTube.” And he makes the very good point that a “big company like Pepsi, they wouldn’t place ads on Pornhub, right?”
So what’s the endgame? Both creators have no intention of stopping their uploads. In fact, Raptor is hoping to make even better videos with a computer upgrade. Tasty has his own audience on Twitch too that he entertains to and is in the content creation space for good. Raptor Bacon, however, wants Pornhub to take its niche gaming community to the next level.
“What I would like to try and do is get Pornhub to start some kind of gaming thing, like a gaming section. It makes sense like on Twitch you have all the streamers who are like doing hot tub streams. I mean, what if all of those people were to go over to Pornhub, you know? It’s an appropriate website you’re not going to get like demonetized or something. And you know everyone’s gonna be there all for this for the same reason anyways, you might as well just have Pornhub start a gaming tab and then there’ll be me with Minecraft.”
Even without plans to expand into gaming content, Pornhub has attracted a small community of gamers. Both creators have reaped the benefits of viewers seeing their content on Pornhub before moving on to enjoy their content elsewhere.
There is a conversation about the desperate reality of content creator discoverability nestled in this phenomenon. It’s hard to ‘make it’ as a creator, no matter if your platform of choice is YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok. Scrolling through these sites for gaming content has become a bombardment of slacked mouths and wide eyes in front of oversaturated gameplay stills and OMG-face emojis. It makes sense that video creators like Raptor and Tasty would be attracted to one of the only popular video hosts where a Minecraft or Call of Duty video still stands out.
I’m not sure anything but gaming could have this bizarre success on Pornhub either. Maybe it’s because if any media is seen as unattractive or even actively unsexual, it’s games—even if Overwatch porn is wildly successful. Well until Pornhub has a problem with its niche users, I’m sure there will be more people using Pornhub as a place to set themselves apart from the other gaming creators out there.