Pushkin. This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome back. Here's your reminder. This is a series about power and money in the porn industry.

Some parts of this series are very much for adults. We should warn you that this episode contains

very graphic depictions of a type of pornography that some people might find upsetting.

In our last episode, we told you all about the way Mind Geek came up against a wall of reckoning,

the giant of online porn.

The company that has dominated this industry more than any other was finally cut down to size.

It was cut down by two of the most everyday businesses you could imagine,

Visa and MasterCard, huge payments companies that seem to moonlight as the regulators of world porn.

But here's the puzzle for this episode.

While Mindgeek took down millions of videos, its biggest rival seemed untouched by the whole affair. This other company serves more porn to more people

in the world today than Mind Geek ever did. Not only that, it makes Mind Geek look like a beacon of transparency.

Just listen to its extraordinarily forgettable name, WGCZ.

It stands for Web Group Czech Republic,

you know, because it's a web group in the Czech Republic.

WGCZ's tube sites, X videos and XNXX, host about 6 billion visits a month.

That's roughly the same as Twitter, and much more than Mindgeek's flagship site,

Pornhub.

But you're probably hearing about WGZ, the owner of all those popular sites, for the first time.

We've discovered that in the pornography world, the competition between the two companies,

Mind Geek and WGCZ, is fierce.

They're like rival clans, the Montague's and Capulets of porn.

...