Behind the scenes of porn there’s an industry that rarely ends up in the spotlight, and that lately has been moving faster than it seems. Platforms that host the content, tools creators use to make a living, capital flowing into the sector, technologies changing the way we watch it. Starting today we’re opening a column to follow it closely and tell you who’s launching what, who’s buying whom, and where the trade of making and selling porn is heading.
This first issue of Sex Tech & business covers roughly the past month, from mid-August to mid-September, and it’s already full enough to reveal a thread. The center of gravity is shifting toward the creators. Some are going as far as making them shareholders in the platform, some are making them easier to find, some are promising to verify them and shield them from fakes. In the background, the technology keeps racing ahead, between virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
MintStars, the platform that made its creators shareholders
The biggest news of the month is a quiet change of course. MintStars, an adult content platform founded in 2021 and incubated at Harvard, has decided that its creators collectively own 20% of the company, with a right to a share of future profits or of the proceeds if it’s ever sold, split according to earnings, referrals and activity on the platform. Co-founder Jessica Van Meir, leaving the company for a PhD at the Harvard Kennedy School, gave up her 23% stake. 20% went to the creators, 3% was donated to an organization defending sex workers’ rights.
The scale is still small. According to the Boston Globe, the platform has around 10,000 creators and 32,000 fans, with the smallest earning a few hundred dollars a month and the largest more than ten thousand. What counts, though, is the model. Where OnlyFans keeps a 20% commission, MintStars presents itself as a “worker-friendly” alternative, shifting the costs onto subscribers and now handing a slice of ownership to the people who make the content.
The move comes as the adult world is once again drawing traditional investors, after years of wariness. In recent months the fund Architect Capital acquired around 16% of OnlyFans for more than 500 million dollars. And it isn’t an isolated case. Ethical Capital Partners already owns Pornhub, and behind the platform SLUSHY there’s venture capital money. As Barnet Sherman, a finance lecturer at Boston University, explained to the Boston Globe, adult platforms are “relatively low-tech and low-maintenance” in a high-demand market, easy to run and profitable to resell. MintStars is trying to tell a different story, one in which part of that value goes back to the people who generate it.
Artificial intelligence, made-to-measure girlfriends and search in plain words
The month brought yet another chapter in artificial companions. SxxxAI, a platform launched recently, lets adult users create a virtual girlfriend, customizing her looks, her personality and even how she behaves in bed. The model is freemium. Creating the companion is free, but chatting with her and generating custom photos and videos costs money, with subscriptions ranging from 1 to 99 dollars a month, and the priciest “elite” tier allowing up to 50 girlfriends and 3,000 credits. It was mostly the English-language tabloids that covered it, in alarmed tones, and several experts warned about the effect of a partner built to indulge every desire. More interesting than the outcry, though, is how the company itself sells the product. According to a spokesperson, building a companion around everything you find attractive, speaking to her every day and weaving an ongoing story with her makes the bond “much more immersive than simply generating an image.” Beyond the tone, what matters is that AI companions are now a market of their own.
Another side of AI, the kind that helps you search rather than create, comes from Madrid. It’s called HornySearch, a search engine launched on September 11, and the idea is simple and genuinely useful. Describe in words the scene you’re after (“a brunette in an outdoor pool in daylight”) and the engine returns the exact moment, with a timestamp and a preview, pulled from real videos already online. “Every tube has millions of videos and the same 10 tags,” summed up co-founder Pablo Inigo Sanchez. What sets it apart from the flood of AI tools is that it generates nothing. As the company points out, it simply indexes content that already exists.
Virtual reality picks up speed
The most advanced front of the month is virtual reality. DreamCam and Braindance VR have joined forces to bring live cams into VR. Braindance is known for its photorealistic 3D volumetric videos, shot with a cutting-edge capture technique (the so-called 4D Gaussian Splatting), and now, alongside that recorded content, it’s adding a live experience, with real-time performers, chat, tips and interaction during the show. It’s the kind of integration that until recently would have looked like science fiction.
Smaller but in the same vein, ARPornTube has introduced instant streaming for its AR and passthrough VR content. Instead of downloading the whole file, the user picks a scene and sends it straight to the DeoVR player. The platform gathers free trailers and previews from producers like SLR Originals and PassthroughVR, an insider detail that nonetheless shows how immersive viewing is trying to become as easy as opening any ordinary video.
Finding, verifying and building loyalty with creators
Three of the month’s releases all aim to bring order to a market that has grown too crowded. OnlyGays, from Mango Digital, is a search directory for LGBTQ+ creators, indexing them across several platforms (OnlyFans, JustForFans, Patreon, Instagram) from a single entry point, with around 400 verified profiles at launch. Free Creator Hub does something simpler, gathering only free OnlyFans profiles, filterable by category and features, without hosting any content and pointing each time to the creator’s official page.
CollabGPS, built to verify creators and collaborations, has added a badge system that certifies users’ identity, a stamp of authenticity that’s worth a lot in an environment full of fake profiles.
On the loyalty front there’s YourVids, with its Your10 feature. Fans can publicly display their ten favorite creators on their profile, but only after reaching a monthly spending threshold set by each creator, with the list resetting every month. As co-founder Gino puts it, the idea is to make support visible, instead of leaving it as a line in the transaction history.
YessMistress, BDSM dating and verified profiles
From the Netherlands comes something different from everything else. YessMistress is a BDSM dating community, the place where dominants and submissives find one another, message each other and arrange paid sessions and services handled within the platform. Rather than selling content to watch, it connects people. Its distinctive trait is the verification of dominants, a filter meant to keep out fake profiles, identity theft and scams. And there’s one rule worth flagging: AI-generated avatars are banned. In a sector racing toward the synthetic, here the whole bet is on being real.
YessMistress isn’t the month’s only novelty with a European passport. HornySearch started out in Madrid, and the US-based SextPanther, a paid-messaging platform (pay-per-text sexting), has announced its arrival in the United Kingdom and the European Union, an expansion still thin on details about countries and timing but which marks yet another American operator eyeing the European audience. Small signals, but they all point the same way. In Europe, beyond consuming, people are starting to launch.
We’ll see you again in the next issue. Which of these stories caught your eye the most? Let us know in the comments or reach us on Instagram!
