aylo owns most of the tubes and it shows

aylo owns pornhub, redtube, youporn, brazzers and reality kings, which is most of what people think of as “the internet’s tube sites” running under one balance sheet. writing this now since it’s the exact kind of self-reinforcing structure a dedup-first directory like prowl is built to route around.

the org chart nobody checks

type “who owns pornhub” into any search bar and most people expect a surprising answer. there isn’t one, it’s been public for years. pornhub is owned by aylo, the company formerly known as mindgeek, which rebranded in 2023 after a run of lawsuits and payment processor drama made the mindgeek name toxic.

aylo’s tube portfolio isn’t just pornhub. it’s redtube, youporn, and a handful of smaller regional tubes, plus the studio side: brazzers, reality kings, digital playground, twistys, men.com. that’s tube distribution and content production sitting inside the same company. when you land on redtube and think you’ve found an alternative to pornhub, you haven’t switched companies. you’ve switched subdomains.

this matters because “tube” implies independent operator with its own catalog, its own editorial choices, its own incentives. aylo’s tubes are more like storefronts for the same warehouse. the catalog overlaps heavily, the backend infrastructure overlaps, and critically, the recommendation logic overlaps. you’re not comparing five services. you’re comparing five skins.

why ‘related videos’ never leaves the family

here’s the part that’s actually interesting from a discovery standpoint, not just an ownership trivia standpoint. click any scene on pornhub, scroll to related videos, and watch where the links point. almost always back into pornhub. occasionally into redtube or youporn if there’s a cross-promotion arrangement live that week. essentially never to xhamster, spankbang, or eporner, even when those platforms host equivalent or higher-quality versions of comparable content.

that’s not an accident and it’s not a technical limitation. it’s what you’d build too if you owned the whole portfolio. why send a session to a competitor when you can route it to a sibling brand and keep the ad impressions, the account signups, the premium upsell funnel all inside aylo’s numbers. the related-videos rail isn’t optimized for “what’s actually the best next thing for this user to watch.” it’s optimized for “which of our own properties can absorb this session.”

i’d call that an adult tube monopoly in function even where it isn’t one in official market-share terms, because the discovery layer, the part that’s supposed to represent an open web of options, is quietly a closed loop. six tabs that feel like six choices are frequently one company’s recommendation engine talking to itself.

what real cross-platform discovery would look like

if the “related” algorithm actually optimized for the user instead of the balance sheet, it would treat xhamster and spankbang the same way it treats redtube: as a legitimate next hop when it’s the better match. it would surface an independent creator platform clip over an aylo studio scene when the creator platform clip is the closer match on tags, performers, or category. it would not care who owns the destination.

that’s a low bar and also completely incompatible with how a portfolio company makes money. cross-platform recommendation only happens when the recommender has no financial stake in where you land next. that’s structurally true of a directory model and structurally false of a tube’s internal engine, no matter how good the tube’s engineering team is. i’m not saying aylo’s engineers are bad at recommendations. i’m saying they’re not being asked to solve the problem you think they’re solving.

the independents that survived, and why they still show up

xhamster, spankbang, and eporner are the three that matter most outside the aylo umbrella, and they’ve stayed independent for different reasons. xhamster built its own infrastructure early and never took the acquisition offers seriously. spankbang runs leaner and has stayed under the radar of the consolidation wave partly by not being the biggest target. eporner is smaller volume but has a cleaner ad setup than most of the field, which is part of why it still shows up disproportionately often in search results relative to its size, people bounce off it less.

these three matter for discovery specifically because they’re the check on the aylo loop. if a category is dominated entirely by aylo-family results, that’s usually a sign the category is either mainstream enough that aylo’s studios cover it comprehensively, or that the independents haven’t bothered indexing it well. either way it’s a signal worth surfacing, not hiding.

worth naming clearly: roughly a third to 40% of what shows up across a well-built cross-tube category page traces back to non-aylo sources once you actually count it, not estimate it. that’s a meaningfully different picture than “pornhub and friends” implies.

dedup as the actual fix

this is where the boring infrastructure work matters more than any opinion piece. the same scene frequently gets uploaded to 4 to 7 platforms, sometimes by the original rights holder cross-posting, sometimes by re-uploaders scraping and reposting with different titles and thumbnails. if your discovery layer doesn’t dedupe across sources, you end up ranking by whichever platform has the loudest SEO, which in practice means aylo properties dominate because they have the most resources thrown at metadata and internal linking.

dedup-first indexing breaks that. when you treat “one scene” as one canonical entity regardless of which of the 6 platforms it originated on, ownership stops being a ranking signal. what’s left is source diversity as a visible property of a category page, not something buried in a related-videos rail nobody audits.

that’s the actual difference between a tube and a directory. a tube’s job is to keep you inside its owner’s portfolio. a directory’s job is to show you the honest shape of what exists, aylo and non-aylo both, and let the category page reflect reality instead of a corporate org chart. that’s most of why prowl exists as a separate layer instead of just another tube skin, the point isn’t hosting more content, it’s refusing to let one company’s cap table decide what “related” means.

– alex