XTube and the tube sites, the free porn that gay amateurs made their own and that killed the DVD

In 2006 a Toronto company opened XTube, a YouTube for porn where anyone could upload, and two thirds of its viewers turned out to be gay men. For fifteen years it let amateurs film themselves and sell clips by the minute, while the free tubes around it emptied the studios' tills.

Las Vegas, January 2008. The adult film industry gathers for the biggest trade show of its year, and a Reuters reporter goes round asking about the one subject everybody is talking about: free porn. Steven Hirsch, co-founder of Vivid, the best-known studio in America, tells him that DVDs once brought in 80 per cent of his company's revenue and now bring in 30. A few aisles away, one of the founders of a Toronto website called XTube defends himself: "We're not pirates. We are providing a service that people think they can use to pirate"¹.

XTube was the first great adult site built on uploads, the porn answer to YouTube, and according to its own staff about two thirds of its viewers were gay men¹. For fifteen years it was where gay amateurs filmed themselves for strangers, where small producers sold their clips by the minute and where studio scenes leaked for free. This is the story of the tube sites, of the one that gay men made their own, and of how it ended.

YouTube with the lights off

YouTube opened in 2005 and showed that people would watch almost anything if it was free, short and one click away. The adult business copied the idea within months. XTube, run by a company in Ontario called Webnovas Technologies, was established in March 2006².

The format was simple. Anyone could watch, and anyone with a free account could upload a video, comment, rate, collect favourites and add other users as friends. In early 2008 the site carried about 200,000 free videos, most of them between thirty seconds and two minutes long, a mix of clips posted by studios as advertising and clips shot by amateurs at home¹.

That mix was the point. The media scholar Sharif Mowlabocus, writing about what he called "Porn 2.0", used XTube as an example of a new kind of site that was part video library and part social network, where the audience was also the cast³.

Summer of the tubes

XTube was not alone for long. Over two months in the summer of 2006, the journalist Benjamin Wallace found, three more sites launched that would become giants of free porn: PornoTube, RedTube and YouPorn. Pornhub followed in 2007⁴.

The difference between them was in where the videos came from. XTube grew out of its community of uploaders; the bigger tubes filled up with full scenes cut from studio releases, posted by users who did not own them. The studios saw their products given away for nothing within days of release.

Vivid went to court. In December 2007 it sued PornoTube, which belonged to the video-on-demand company AEBN⁴. AEBN's president, Scott Coffman, told Reuters that his free site limited clips to three minutes and was meant to drive viewers to pay-per-minute films, adding that giving away too much killed sales: "There is a fine line between giving away something small, a teaser ... and giving away the whole thing"¹.

Selling yourself by the minute

XTube's real invention was the amateur who got paid. Members could put longer videos behind a paywall, priced by the minute, and split the money with the site. According to the figures XTube gave the trade press in 2008, advertising made up only about a third of its income; the rest came from video-on-demand sales and from that revenue share².

The figures the site gave the trade press show who was earning. One gay man in his early twenties, a spokesman said, was making 2,600 dollars every two weeks, and XTube was making the same amount from him. On 23 December 2007 the site added webcams, letting members host their own paid video chats at a dollar a minute².

The audience was large and older than the stereotype. In early 2008 the site counted about 4.5 million unique visits a day and 37.5 million page views. Most members were over thirty, one was 77, and they lived above all in the United States, Britain and Canada².

Most uploaders were not in it for money at all. Wallace found that only 20 per cent of the videos submitted to XTube's amateur section were pay-per-view; the other 80 per cent were posted, as he put it, for kicks⁴.

The boys next door, for real

For gay men XTube became something more than a video site. It was a place to see bodies that looked like their own, men who might live down the street, not the shaved stars of the studio catalogues.

Wallace met a regular uploader, a former corporate auditor in a small town in the American Bible Belt, who had sold his self-made films on DVD for years. He said he had never liked mainstream porn and preferred "guys that look like you could walk up and talk to them in a club". On XTube he posted free previews to lure buyers to longer films at 50 cents a minute, and was earning about 1,500 dollars every two weeks, more than in his old office job⁴.

The site's biggest stars were a Boston couple known as Cole Maverick and Hunter, the most favourited uploaders on XTube by 2011, whose videos had been watched more than ninety million times. Their story is told in the chapter on the internet; what matters here is that they began, like thousands of others, by uploading a few snapshots⁴.

Not everyone stayed. XTube's own staff admitted that many newcomers arrived convinced they would be the next big porn star and left when they discovered that nobody wanted to watch them sit in a chair and touch themselves. Those who drew big audiences stayed, and some joined the paid programme².

The end of the DVD

The tubes did to the studios what the videotape had done to the adult cinema. Why pay for a disc when the best scenes could be found for nothing in an afternoon?

Vivid's numbers in 2008 were only the beginning¹. By 2014, according to industry figures reported by Slate, film production had fallen by three quarters since 2008 and DVD sales had halved. Performers who had lived on studio day rates went looking for other income, and the scenes they had been paid once for went on earning money for whoever posted them⁵.

Gay studios fought back harder than most, suing file-sharers by the hundred, as the chapter on the internet describes. But the habit of free porn was set, and a generation of gay men grew up without ever buying a tape or a disc.

One owner for everything

The tube business ended up in very few hands. At the end of the 2000s the German programmer Fabian Thylmann went on a buying spree of adult sites, among them XTube. By March 2010 he also owned the Brazzers network and four tube sites, Pornhub among them, in a deal he confirmed had cost close to 140 million dollars⁴.

The group took the name Manwin, then MindGeek after Thylmann sold out to his managers in 2013, and in 2023, under new owners, Aylo. In 2014 a performer quoted in Slate compared it to a giant retailer that had driven small shops out of business and then sold their goods without paying for them⁵.

Inside that empire XTube was a small, odd piece: older, more amateur, more social and much more gay than its sister sites. It was also the hardest to police, because it was built on uploads from strangers.

Thirteen years, then the off switch

The pressure came at the end of 2020. After a column in The New York Times accused Pornhub of hosting videos of abuse, Visa and Mastercard suspended payments to Pornhub⁶. By the summer of 2021 MindGeek was also fighting a lawsuit brought by dozens of women over videos posted without their consent⁷.

On 5 July 2021 XTube's users found a farewell notice. "After 13 years, XTube.com will be shutting down on September 5th," it said. Uploads were switched off the same day, every user video would be deleted by the closing date, and monetised creators were promised their last payments by 16 September⁶.

MindGeek told Vice that XTube had "a dedicated but small community" which would "be better served on one of our existing platforms", The site, which by then claimed more than nine million registered users, told them it was "time for us to move on to greener pastures"⁷.

What the tubes left behind

XTube closed on 5 September 2021. Years of amateur videos, many of them unique records of how ordinary gay men saw themselves and their partners in the 2000s and 2010s, disappeared with it, unless their makers had kept copies.

The idea it pioneered did not disappear. Selling your own videos, setting your own price, splitting the money with a platform and building a following of fans were exactly what the subscription sites of the next decade offered, with one difference: they asked every creator for identification before a single video went online. The wider story of how porn moved online, from scanned pictures to free tubes, is told in the chapter on the internet.