Pornhub Stars Want to Teach You How to Make Dinner

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Porn star Sweetie Fox is known for all kinds of gamer cosplay. She’s performed as a sex-hungry vault dweller from Fallout, as Lara Croft “The Dick Rider.” On Pornhub, one of the platforms where she uploads content, her character videos do massive numbers. (One of her more popular vids netted 12 million views).

But Fox is also a miner—the term for someone who plays Minecraft—and in September, she posted a video of herself playing the game fully clothed. In less than a month, it has surpassed 1 million views on the site.

It’s the kind of content Pornhub is betting its future on. Starting this month, the adult entertainment site is inviting performers to earn new viewers from gaming, cooking, podcasting—or basically anything that doesn’t involve sex.

Ever wanted to learn what “physics-informed neural networks” are from Zara Dar, or what Jenna Starr likes to cook for dinner? (Steak and potatoes, by the way.) According to insights from the company, interest in safe-for-work content is blowing up on the platform. Podcast and gaming categories rose triple digits in 2025—podcasts alone spiked 327 percent—as did searches for “SFW,” which were up 114 percent.

Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community at Pornhub, believes these categories are gaining traction because viewers want to get to know performers beyond their adult roles. Nonexplicit content—which Kekesi says isn’t intended to replace X-rated videos on the site but rather complement creators’ existing content libraries—will be featured across video pages, search results, recommendations, and Pornhub’s various categories, in addition to Shorties, its scrollable vertical video feed.

By investing more in SFW content, Pornhub also wants to give creators the opportunity to grow their audiences and gain visibility in regions where the platform has decided to restrict access to the NSFW offerings on its site in response to age-verification laws in those localities.

Mounting censorship across the industry has forced adult creators to get more creative when it comes to protecting their livelihoods. Currently, 27 states (and counting) have adopted a form of online ID checks, which require users to upload an ID or other personal documentation to verify that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit content. Sixteen states, almost all of them with majority Republican legislatures, have likewise adopted resolutions declaring porn a public health crisis, with some, like Alabama, passing “porn tax” legislation on adult sites that operate within its jurisdiction. Free-speech advocates argue that age-verification laws, which have also been enacted in the UK, are making the internet less safe.

Since 2021, after passing up a PhD in neuroscience to work as an adult performer full-time, Isla Moon claims that she’s been banned from over 250 TikTok accounts. The instability of the industry has forced her to take SFW content seriously, and she is always on the hunt for creative solutions to make her income “more stable,” she says.

On TikTok, where the 25-year-old creator has nearly 2 million followers, she specializes in outdoor content—fishing, camping, “anything outside,” she says. Her adult videos sometimes play on the same themes with more of an uninhibited twist (as in “Busty Redhead Isla Moon Makes Horny Snow Angels”). In the past few years, due to the rising suppression creators are up against, she’s had to mix things up in terms of what she records while also strategically figuring out the best platforms to post on.

“Scary is the one word that comes to mind, honestly, because the platforms are getting very restrictive. I blew up on TikTok. It was my thing,” she tells WIRED, noting how her videos don’t get the same reach anymore. “Before you could you post stuff in a bikini, but now any cleavage is a no go.” Videos like that on Moon’s TikTok rarely exceed the five-digit view count, while others that feature her covered up breeze into six-figures. The push into more nature girlie content is “definitely a response to external pressures,” she says.

According to TiKTok’s community guidelines, nudity, “sexual activity,” and “sexually suggestive acts or significant body exposure involving youth” are prohibited. Similarly, the app bans “sexualized framing,” meaning “content that focuses on clothed intimate body parts through camera angles, editing, body positioning, or other methods and techniques” won’t get surfaced. “The creator’s intent matters, which we infer by looking at context,” the policy notes. Suggestive content is also age-restricted and sometimes not eligible for inclusion in the For You feed.

Moon, who cycles between OnlyFans, Fansly, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat, raking in an estimated $700,000 a month, is already seeing results on Pornhub. One of her SFW longform videos, which she started posting in October, is getting three times more views than it did on YouTube. “Isla Moon Survives 24 Hours ALONE in a -20 Snowstorm” is the fifth most watched video on her Pornhub page, with 261,000 views, compared to 86,000 on YouTube, where it was uploaded in January 2025. She says because people expect adult content “on Pornhub and platforms like that, the conversion I’m seeing is a lot better.”

Previously, Pornhub blocked access to the platform in 23 US states in protest of state-mandated age-verification laws, but with SFW content now accessible in many of those previously restricted regions, only four states—Indiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas—remain blocked. Given that complying with age-verification laws has caused traffic to flatline on the platform, the pivot to SFW content is also a way for Pornhub to get more eyes back on the site. Nearly 80 percent of Pornhub’s UK viewership has disappeared since the Online Safety Act went into effect.

Pornhub, which has more than 130 million worldwide daily visitors, has the potential to be an alternative for creators who regularly deal with problems of shadow banning or deplatforming on social media. In July, YouTube mass terminated dozens of ASMR accounts for violating its policy against “sexually gratifying” content, 404 Media reported, before restoring most of the channels following backlash and review of its automated enforcement, including Nananightray, ItsBunniiASMR, and RoseASMR, who had more than 330,000 subscribers.

OnlyFans, which has tried to shed its reputation as a porn site by carving out lanes for all sorts of PG creators, including comedy and fashion, made a similar move in 2025 when it expanded further into SFW content exclusively for entrepreneurs. Last October, the UK-based platform invited lingerie executive and ex-SuicideGirl Rachael McCrary to post business classes focused on pitching investors and brand building.

“Pornhub is and always will be a porn site that supports sex workers,” Kekesi says. “But that doesn’t mean porn is the only content that belongs here.”