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Comment by dx87 | Hacker News Reader

Someone brought up the same question on /r/showerthoughts on reddit, and one of the Pornhub employees said that there had been internal talks about it, especially after Youtube started demonetizing tons of channels, but they weren't actively developing anything. The main issue I can see would be advertisers not wanting to be associated with the brand, even tangentially. YouPorn had sponsored an esports team that ran into issues being allowed to tournaments because the tournament sponsors didn't want their brand name to be presented alongside a porn site.

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I mean, the biggest issue is saying the team is affiliated with a porn site. But if "MindGeek" sponsored an eSports team, my guess is most people would be fine with it, in part because they didn't know that it was a company that owns porn sites.

While obviously they'd restore adult content to Tumblr, my guess is they'd keep Tumblr as a somewhat mainstream brand, and not let it be too directly associated with their existing properties to maintain mainstream appeal. A YouTube competitor would fall along the same lines.

It would get out though. There'd be a lot of hoops that PornHub would have to go through to make a wholly owned subsidiary they could use to spin-up a YouTube/Vimeo like platform on and it not come back to pornhub in the PR/advert sense.

Although we all know a few people here and there who don't know YouTube is owned by Google, the majority of people do understand the YouTube + Google/Alphabet relationship.

> the majority of people do understand the YouTube + Google/Alphabet relationship

I think this is very tech centric view. I asked my wife (tech savy enough but doesn't work in the industry) and she didn't have any idea who owned Youtube, and had never heard of Alphabet.

I know it's only one data point, but I think it's easy to be blinkered when actually the truth is probably that most people outside of tech have no idea about tech company relationships.

The eSports team was "Team YP" and there was no explicit or even suggestive reference to YouPorn on the website or jerseys.

I mean you can spin up a new company that brands differently but uses their hosting infrastructure.

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