XVideos, the Porn Empire Next Door - Part I

Nine minutes, 53 seconds, orgasm. This is the average visit duration of the world’s biggest porn site XVideos.

Every day millions upon millions of people visit this one place on the web that hardly anyone talks about. A secret giant. Ranked 10th most visited website in the world. Not even amazon.com gets this many clicks.

Videos on XVideos are made available to the global public. Countless users reveal their erotic fantasies with their clicks. Who’s in charge of such a huge platform?

Leading heads of Facebook, Google and Twitter give interviews. Whistleblowers expose their problems. But you don’t hear anything about XVideos, especially in Germany. And this despite the fact that many of the companies behind XVideos are located  in the Czech Republic. The traces of the porn empire lead from Prague via France to Düsseldorf.

Other porn platforms have been experiencing a wave of criticism and anger for almost two years. First and foremost Pornhub and xHamster, XVideos‘ most important competitors.

Together, the three giants dominate the porn market. Pornhub and xHamster, for example, have distributed nude photos of people who never wanted to show themselves in public in this way. For a long time, the hurdles against the dissemination of sexualized violence were kept low. This was followed by international outrage, petitions, court cases, proposed legislation. XVideos remained under the radar in all of this.

That is changing. These days, authorities are also investigating XVideos. Survivors of sexualized violence are going public. The EU is planning stricter laws that would also affect the platform. We report on the accusations against XVideos, follow the platform’s incredible rise to the top of the world – and show why things could soon change for XVideos.

About 150 meters from Wenceslas Square, is XVideos.

Dozens of companies are registered to this one, unassuming postal address: Krakovská 1366/25. A driveway leads to a backyard. To the left is a laundromat, to the right a strip club. On the wall, several plaques, including one that reads „WGCZ holding.“ The abbreviation stands for Web Group Czech, an inconspicuous name. „Web Group“ – that sounds like an average internet company. But behind it is the world’s largest porn empire.

The most powerful man behind the holding company is Stéphane Pacaud. He holds 93 percent of the shares, as can be seen from the annual report for 2019, published in the Czech commercial register. The remaining seven percent belong to a Hong Kong company, according to the report. A more recent annual report is not online, the key data may have changed since then.

A Frenchman is behind the most visited porn site

Who is Stéphane Pacaud? While bosses of other platforms like Facebook, Amazon or Telegram communicate publicly, the man behind XVideos avoids the media. Almost nothing is known about him – except his name.

According to documents from the Czech commercial register, Pacaud was born in 1978 and has an address in France. The French business magazine Challenges ranks Pacaud as the 245th richest person in France. The magazine estimates his wealth at 400 million euros. Such estimates may differ from reality.

In 2019, a French TV station claims to have made contact with Pacaud, at least on Skype. But the person on the other end had not provided any evidence that he was really Pacaud. Not even a photo. The face and voice of the world’s most powerful porn executive are not known to the public.

For the porn industry, that’s not even that unusual. Pacaud is not the only one keeping a low profile. Until recently, no one knew who owned the porn empire around Pornhub and who was behind xHamster.

The article originally appeared here