BTC Friendly Pornhub Loses Visa, Mastercard Payments After Allegations

Pornhub has been hit with a damming investigation from the New York Times, which had uncovered alleged videos of both child abuse and rape on the site. As a result of this, both Visa and Mastercard, two of the world’s biggest payments giants, announced today that it would no longer process payments for the adult content platform.

Pornhub’s Getting It Rough

With these two giants in the payments industry out of the picture, only JCB (Japan Credit Bureau) and Discover are left as credit card options, with the only other reliable way to make payments on the place being the use of various crypto, most prominently being Bitcoin (BTC). The crypto options were introduced after Pornhub had a fallout with PayPal, the payments giant, which forced the firm to improvise.

Litecoin and Bitcoin were first accepted back in September for payments for premium subscription services, but it had already been accepting the Dogecoin fork, Verge, since back in April of 2018

Always A New Way To Try Things

The site allows its “entertainers” and webcam models that do their business on the site to receive payments either by way of Tron or Tether. Another alternative is Cosmo Payment, or even through the use of direct bank deposits. They just can’t use PayPal, ever since the firm pulled out unexpectedly back in November of 2019.

In Pornhub’s blog regarding the departure of PayPal, it’s clear that the use of USDT came as a result of that.

As for Visa and Mastercard’s departure: Mastercard was quick to say that this move is permanent for the Pornub Premium subscriptions, meaning they have no chance of redemption. Visa, however, took a more lenient approach, stating that the move is temporary, though this pends on the results of its investigations the payment giant is doing on its own.

Stuck In Unoptimized Crypto Payments

Pornhub is undoubtedly going to take a hit out of this, and it will be forced to innovate to keep the money flowing and start boosting the confidence both regulators and consumers have in its product. Pornhub’s key strength for recovery is the fact that it won’t ever run out of demand, just more competition to have consumers scratch that specific itch.

The platform will undoubtedly need to streamline its crypto payments process. While the site gladly takes LTC, BTC, and XVG as a means of payment, the process itself isn’t seamless in the slightest. Choosing to buy with crypto only leads users to pages where they have to give in their credit information regardless, and some serious streamlining is needed before they can expect the cashflow they used to get.

Who knows, this might actually do the crypto space good, as well.