Visa and Mastercard end ties with the ad arm of Pornhub owner MindGeek, after a court ruled Visa must face a lawsuit alleging it is liable for CSAM distribution
Visa (V.N) and Mastercard (MA.N) on Thursday said they had suspended ties with the advertisement arm of MindGeek …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second time the card networks have cut MindGeek off, but the first time they have done it under legal compulsion rather than reputational review. In December 2020, Mastercard barred its cards from Pornhub after its own content review, with Visa suspending usage pending a probe — a commercial decision the companies could reverse. The new move follows days after a US federal judge ruled that Visa must face a lawsuit alleging it is liable for CSAM distribution on MindGeek sites, converting a brand-safety question into a litigation exposure question.
The pressure on MindGeek has been building along two tracks at once: legal and managerial. In June, the company lost its CEO and COO after an investigative report on years of hosting nonconsensual videos (the executive resignations). Extending the suspension from the main site to the advertising arm signals the networks now treat every revenue line of MindGeek as tainted, not just consumer payments.
First-order effects
- MindGeek's ad business loses Visa and Mastercard as settlement rails, forcing advertisers and publishers on that network onto slower or costlier alternatives — repeating the pattern set when the main site was cut off in 2020.
- Visa and Mastercard are now defending themselves in court while actively shrinking their transactional footprint with the plaintiff's target, a defensive posture that makes any future re-engagement with MindGeek legally fraught.
Second-order effects
- MindGeek's properties will lean harder on payment rails outside the card duopoly — Pornhub already shifted its premium service to cryptocurrency-only after the 2020 cutoff (the crypto pivot) — which pushes revenue into channels the networks cannot monitor or monetize.
- Other payment providers and ad-tech intermediaries touching adult content face the same liability logic the judge applied to Visa, so expect preemptive audits and terminations across the ecosystem rather than waiting for lawsuits.
Third-order effects
- If processor liability holds up in litigation, card networks become de facto content regulators — forced to vet what merchants publish, not just how they get paid — raising the fixed compliance cost of operating any user-generated-content platform at scale.
- The squeeze pushes adult and UGC platforms toward harder-to-interdict payments just as Visa and Mastercard are themselves retrenching from crypto partnerships amid regulatory uncertainty (the paused crypto plans), leaving a widening gap between where platforms can transact and where regulated networks will follow.
The trend: Litigation is turning payment networks from neutral toll-takers into liable gatekeepers of platform content, accelerating adult platforms' migration to alternative payment rails.