Recently some high profile instances of problems associated with user-uploaded content have been reported to card associations. This culminated with an opinion article published in The New York Times on December 4th 2020, as written by Nicholas Kristof titled: “The Children of Pornhub – Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?”
Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The Times since 2001. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his coverage of China and of the genocide in Darfur, so his attention to this topic has brought with it a significant amount of focus from the online business community inside and outside the world of adult entertainment.
Visa has responded swiftly to mounting public pressure and even took the unusual step of announcing its action by Tweet:
Those public articles, and presumably the private pressure that was applied because of them, lead to MindGeek, Pornhub’s parent company announcing significant changes to the way it would handle user-uploaded content now and in the future. Including limiting all uploads to verified accounts only, but as evidenced by the actions Visa and Mastercard took, it appears those fixes were deemed to be too little too late.
While the complicated political climate, specific ethical standards, enormous power held by Visa as a private company and blame placements can all be debated; we leave those arguments to be had by experts in that realm. However, when we use our own expertise at MobiusPay to look specifically at the payment processing requirements merchants need to be aware of, we believe the factors that matter are quite clear.
At a minimum, any site allowing any form of user-uploaded content should be collecting the following pieces of information from each and every upload account:
- Two Forms of Valid Identification of the person uploading
- A Current utility bill validating their information
- A current W-9 Tax Form
- Fully compliant 2257 documentation as generated by the merchant
- Model Agreement documentation as generated by the merchant.
The 2257 documentation and Model Agreement forms may not be something a tube site or user-uploaded site owner is already familiar with since many do not produce content of their own. We strongly encourage any site owner or merchant to contact their legal counsel and ensure these documents are properly drafted and authenticated.
Additionally, all merchants should only allow content to be uploaded by verified users. A verified user is one that has properly submitted all of the documentation listed above and has had it associated with a specific account on the site. Multiple accounts would require individual sets of documentation for each uploader.
While we fully appreciate the expense and effort these requirements put on merchants, we have enough experience in the payment-processing vertical to know that fully complying now is an infinitely better choice than dealing with any issues of noncompliance in the future. If you’d like to learn more about compliance best practices, contact MobiusPay today and we will do our best to explain each of the components in further detail for you.
Our goal as always remains the same, to provide merchants with the information and procedural support needed to engage in what card associations have deemed high-risk payment processing with as frictionless and simple a path forward as possible. We look forward to hearing from you and working with you.
