Most mainstream social media platforms have struggled with what is euphemistically referred to as a “porn problem.” Some, like Facebook and Instagram, have responded by instituting draconian and perplexing anti-obscenity policies, while others, like Vine, simply make it more difficult for users to share naughty content.
Enter Pinsex.
A social pinboard that touts itself as a smutty offshoot of Pinterest, Pinsex (obviously NSFW) allows users to save, share, upload, and browse adult content. It also features an online sex toy store, interactive camming services, and a platform for porn stars to interact with fans, the most recent being adult performer and cam girl Hailey Morgan, who announced that she was joining Pinsex as a porn star “investor” last month.
Helmed by CEO Christian Thorn, who launched the site a little less than a year ago, Pinsex touts itself as one of the few social porn sites on the market to successfully merge adult content and social media. Thorn says it gets 120 to 150,000 unique visits a day, and the company hopes to break a million by next year.
Pinsex is far from the only site of its kind. There are a slew of adult social-networking services like Bang With Friends, as well as similarly Pinterest-inspired adult pinboards like Snatchly and Sex.com’s Pornterest. There are hubs like Reddit's GoneWild, where women trade revealing photos for comments and upvotes.
Yet with the exception of Tumblr, which hosts thousands of porn-oriented blogs (one estimate suggests that they make up 11.4 percent of the site’s total content), Thorn believes that most attempts to merge adult content and social media have been “quite failed.”
“For some reason so far no one has really managed to make sex and porn social,” Thorn says. “In my opinion, it’s because the products haven’t been good enough, or maybe they’ve not been easy enough to [navigate] and maybe also if you come into a site and it starts popping up advertising left, right under and above, people might feel scared and probably don’t wanna use a service like that. …
“We think that in today’s new world, there are a lot of people who wanna share their likings.”
Because watching porn is traditionally thought of as a solitary and private activity, it’s understandable that attempts to get users to connect with one another would achieve limited success. That’s why Pinsex gives users the option to pin anonymously, using an interface that’s as clean and accessible as possible.
“We don’t wanna make it look like the typical porn site,” Thorn says. “We tried to make it softer, easy, simple. Our advertising is never pop-ups, to make the user experience as streamlined as possible. So what comes into focus is what people wanna share.”
Like Tumblr, which hosts a panoply of female-friendly porn blogs, Pinsex is also attempting to cater to a female audience. According to Thorn, it offers female-friendly content among its 75-odd categories, and the most pinned images are moody, black-and-white nudes rather than penetration GIFs or yawning vaginal close-ups (although those are certainly present as well).
Unlike Tumblr, however—which, after it was acquired by Yahoo, dealt with its “porn problem” by making it more difficult for users to search for porn tags—Pinsex is first and foremost a platform for adult content. That might make it less palatable to mainstream consumers, but it also ensures that those looking for a place to share their favorite clips, GIFs, and images will have a place to do so without fear of getting banned or censored.
“When powerful companies do their best to block a lot of porn, in my opinion, they’re inviting their users to find another place to share it,” Thorn says. “If that’s the case, they’re very welcome to Pinsex.”
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