The billionaire who took down porn

This is an audio transcript of the Hot Money podcast episode: ‘The billionaire who took down porn’

Patricia Nilsson
We’re two journalists from the Financial Times. We’ve spent six months following the money in porn. Our aim has been to find out who rules the industry.

Alex Barker
In this episode, we bring you our encounters with some of the biggest financial companies in the world and some of the most explicit discussions of sex in the series so far. So please be aware. This is definitely content for adults.

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Previously on Hot Money: A secretive former banker bought MindGeek, a giant porn company whose flagship site was driven by user-generated videos. The law allowed MindGeek to take a hands-off approach to moderation, largely avoiding legal liability for the content that users posted to their site. That’s pretty much all the context you need for today’s show.

Patricia Nilsson
When we started our investigation into the adult industry, we thought online porn was basically unregulated, uncontrollable in a way, just too big for any government to handle. But it turned out we were wrong. Well, not entirely. We just missed the real story.

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Remember Stoya, the performer and author in our first episode?

Jessica Stoya
I’m in lingerie. And people tip me. And I take my bra off or pull the cups down and I jiggle my shoulders while saying “T-h-a-n-k-y-o-u”. Though I, I get my period. And then I have cramps. And I really don’t want to be vigorously jiggling. But I also want people to know like, “Don’t tip me and be disappointed we are not doing vigorous behaviour tonight”. And, you know, it would be nice to be able to say “because I have my period”, but I cannot because it is a banned word.

Alex Barker
A banned word. What Stoya is describing here is live video work and it does sound fantastically absurd. Jiggling naked breasts for money. No problem. Typing the word “period” in the chat box. Absolutely forbidden. But why? What stopped Stoya from being able to type the word “period” into a chat box? Who or what was on the other end of that rule? The answer to that question took us to a place we never expected.

Patricia Nilsson
In this series so far, we’ve told you about the secretive owners of big porn companies like MindGeek, how they thrived in large part because of the taboos around porn. It gave them the cover to hide from scrutiny and accountability. But around two years ago, MindGeek faced a reckoning. It was brutal, it was public, and it revealed a whole lot of things about power and control in the porn industry. One day in December 2020, MindGeek went from being the most powerful company in porn to a business cowering under pressure, on the brink of collapse.

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Alex Barker
In this episode, we’re going to tell you how all of that happened. The chain of events that forced MindGeek to take the majority of its porn offline. MindGeek, just like Stoya, had to bow to one of the most powerful finance companies in the world.

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Patricia Nilsson
I’m Patricia Nilsson.

Alex Barker
And I’m Alex Barker.

Patricia Nilsson
And from Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, this is Hot Money.

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Act one: Mr Persistence

Bill Ackman
I think we’re known to be a good investor. We’re known for not being shy, willing to kind of share our views. I’ve been called the most persistent person in America, which I take as a compliment.

Alex Barker
That’s Bill Ackman. He’s a big name in the land of the Financial Times. And not just because he’s a billionaire. He runs an investment firm called Pershing Square. And it’s one of those firms that everybody knows about on Wall Street. Bill is not an investor in porn. On the contrary, during the pandemic, Bill pulled off one of the most insanely successful trades in the history of modern financial markets. He turned a $27mn bet into roughly a $2.6bn windfall. Yeah. That’s around 100 times the money within a few weeks. Not bad.

Patricia Nilsson
It doesn’t always go that well. He does sometimes lose, too, in an almost as-spectacular fashion. Anyway, Bill first made his name as an activist investor. He didn’t just buy shares in a company. He bought big stakes and then told chief executives what to do. And occasionally he even tried to kick them out. So when he shouts, people listen.

Alex Barker
What made him agree to talk to us about porn, of all things? Good question. His communications person asked him the same thing.

Bill Ackman
He said “Bill do you wanna do this? Be interviewed by the FT or whatever?” People just think reputationally, I don’t have anything to do with, I don’t want my name and the word porn in the same paragraph or story. And the problem with that is it allows . . . a lot of bad things can happen in the underground.

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Patricia Nilsson
And those bad things, he saw them in December 2020, when the New York Times published a powerful column by Nicholas Kristof. It was titled “The Children of Pornhub”. Bill was sitting at home scrolling on Twitter when the story popped up.

Bill Ackman
This Kristof article about Pornhub I found very challenging to read and depressing and also made me angry.

Patricia Nilsson
Bill has four daughters and the appalling accounts of exploitation hit a nerve.

Alex Barker
Kristof basically pulled Pornhub apart. He alleged the free porn site was infested with rape videos, and through talking to victims, he depicted it as a business that monetised spy cams, revenge porn and other horrid stuff.

News clip
Recent allegations claimed Pornhub may be profiting from footage of sexual assault, revenge porn and sex tapes obtained without consent from those involved.

News clip
Accused of hosting sexual assault footage, plus child sexual abuse material. Doing little to guard against and remove such content.

News clip
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also took notice, saying his government was working with police and security officials to address the issues raised in the New York Times column.

Alex Barker
Everyone in porn just refers to it as the Kristof piece. It was part investigation, part opinion column, and hugely contentious in the industry. Even people who hate Pornhub saw it as part of a broader war on porn.

MindGeek executives, the owners of Pornhub, denied wrongdoing, insisting they took a zero-tolerance approach to illegal content. Pornhub told us that they now have more comprehensive safeguards than most social media platforms. Now, we’re not gonna get into the details of the piece or who was right or wrong. We looked at the impact instead. There’s no argument over that, partly because of Bill Ackman.

Bill Ackman
You can destroy a 15-year-old and get them to commit suicide by just having her boyfriend share a video she didn’t wanna see and embarrass her in front of everyone. People kill themselves over that. Kids do. And the notion that people are profiting from this? Yeah, that got me.

Patricia Nilsson
Now, Bill is no prude. He’s not opposed to pornography. He’s a free speech advocate. But he was so moved by the stories in the article that he decided to do something.

Bill Ackman
I thought this was important. And the problem with the topic of pornography is people don’t want to acknowledge they’ve ever even viewed pornography, perhaps. And so it’s just easier to just let it pass.

Alex Barker
Bill made his name in the business of corporate influence. His whole shtick was forcing companies to do things they don’t want to do. And he comes armed with the deep contact book you’d expect of an American billionaire. He’s also a finance guy. So when he read the New York Times piece, he didn’t just get angry and think, what can I say to make politicians do something?

Patricia Nilsson
He thought about the way to kick a company where it hurts: payments.

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He knew that Visa and Mastercard are the rails that any digital business depends on to sell online. While so much online porn is free, big porn companies rely on premium paysites. They either own them or sell odds for them. They do need people to pay for porn. And how do they do that? Again, credit cards. Without payment processing, these aren’t just porn companies. They are failing porn companies. But he also realised there are good reasons why the payments industry sticks with high-risk sectors like porn. The more dicey the transaction, the higher the scrape, meaning the fees are higher and so the profit margins are better. There was no guarantee he could get the big payment networks to do anything.

Alex Barker
So he went full Ackman. He didn’t bother with a polite campaign or letters or whatever. He just picked up his phone and messaged Ajay Banga. Now, Banga was the chief executive of Mastercard at the time.

Bill Ackman
We both share a passion for tennis, and I’ve met him at a couple of big tennis type events, and I text this to him and I said, “Ajay please read the above piece. Mastercard is facilitating sex trafficking. PayPal has already withdrawn payment processing for Pornhub. Mastercard does not want to be the last company to do so. Please call and discuss if you disagree”.

Alex Barker
Banga replied immediately. “Hi, Bill. Just saw this”, he wrote before effectively laying down the law. If the allegations were proven, Banga wrote, Pornhub would be blocked from using Mastercard. Mindgeek’s top site would be partly cut off from the payments world.

Bill Ackman
To his credit, Mastercard very, very quickly got on top of this and came up with some pretty strong principles.

Patricia Nilsson
Mastercard acted after its investigation found unlawful content. It banned the use of its credit cards on Pornhub’s premium site. Visa followed by suspending not just Pornhub but all of MindGeek sites. It basically cut off the use of its credit cards on premium websites that generate about half of Mindgeek’s revenue — subscriptions that are paid for by credit cards. We reached out to Visa and Mastercard and both declined to be interviewed. The company stressed that their priorities are to support commerce and deter illegal activity. But it is fair to say these payment networks hardly ever remove a company from their systems. It’s a devastating move and the consequences were immediate.

Alex Barker
You might be wondering why free porn sites would crumble because Visa or Mastercard stopped them accepting credit cards. On the face of it, cheap sites are mostly ad-funded, but they are indirectly tied to bank rules. There are a few reasons for that. They run subscription tiers like Pornhub Premium. Some advertisers use credit cards to pay the cheap sites and a lot of the cheap site ad money comes from pay sites that are covered by Visa and Mastercard rules. And for that reason, an industry insider told us that some of Pornhub’s advertisers got cold feet about spending money with them. The result was that Pornhub’s cash flow dried up overnight. That triggered all sorts of other problems.

Just imagine the conversation with long-term subscribers. You know that porn company you signed up to a few years ago? Well, we’d really like you to subscribe again. You just need to go through all the hassle once more. But this time, please use Bitcoin or some other complex banking process instead of your credit card. The Mastercard move, which was then followed by Visa, was genuinely a watershed moment for the adult industry. Bill’s intervention wasn’t the only reason it happened, but with that text, it’s not hard to imagine he helped tip the balance.

Bill Ackman
The suspension happened very quickly and within a couple of weeks they announced a bunch of policies. It was really quick and impressive.

Patricia Nilsson
A few days after all of this, something else huge happened to MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub. Its lenders served it a notice of default — a warning that MindGeek wasn’t meeting the conditions of its loan. This hasn’t been reported before. We heard about it from a different billionaire who was approached by the company and it is confirmed in a footnote buried in Mindgeek’s latest accounts. The company was running short of cash. Its lenders weren’t happy. It was on the brink of collapse.

Alex Barker
At the same time, Mastercard was reviewing its policies for the whole porn industry, including what permissions you needed to upload any explicit video onto a site that uses credit cards. Basically, all those amateur uploads that help tube sites dominate the porn industry. The pressures on MindGeek were building. It had to do something. And just like that, Pornhub went from 13mn videos down to 4mn.

You probably were a catalyst for one of the biggest takedowns of media content off the web in the history of the internet. When 9mn videos ever been taken down overnight, it’s pretty extraordinary. Do you remember that moment and how did you feel?

Bill Ackman
I felt good about it. (Laughs) It felt good. People want to make their livelihood the way they make their livelihood. It’s their life, their body, their choice. I’m OK with it. As long as, you know, they’re a consenting adult, it’s fine.

Alex Barker
It was pretty interesting talking to Bill about the adult business. His game is taking the measure of a company, its strengths and its weaknesses. And here he was sizing up porn.

It isn’t a huge industry compared with the larger world of online entertainment. At its peak, MindGeek made around $450mn a year in revenue. Just for perspective, Netflix generates more than 450mn during an average week. But online porn can be highly profitable, and those profits have drawn in Wall Street over the years, as we’ve discovered in this series.

Patricia Nilsson
To Bill Ackman, the amazing thing is not that porn has access to finance. It’s that Wall Street types got into bed with companies like MindGeek while averting their eyes from potential problems. And when things went wrong, it was left to payment companies to mop up the mess.

Bill Ackman
It should be regulated by, you know, state actors, you would think. Right? But my experience waiting around for the government to act, to clean up, is painfully slow and bureaucratic.

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Patricia Nilsson
There are tens of millions of sex videos online, hosted in dozens of countries. Unless we all take a Chinese approach to censorship, no government can really police who watches it or control what is made. So the nearest thing to setting global rules for porn would come from Mastercard and Visa, because without Mastercard and Visa, there just isn’t much point in making porn because no one can buy it.

Bill Ackman
I think there should be de facto regulator of these companies. Right? They’re not gonna let you use a credit card to pay for a hit on someone, right? That that I’m sure is against their principles, right? So once you decide that you’re gonna decide what people can spend their money on and what they can charge the Mastercard for, or the Visa card, where we should focus then, then they have to be de facto regulators on what’s permissible content and what’s not.

Alex Barker
There was one more important thing that Bill didn’t realise when he texted the head of Mastercard. He wanted Mastercard to act like a regulator for porn. But after we dug into this, we found payment companies were already involved in setting the rules for this industry. They don’t like admitting to this role, but banks and payment companies do have a real say in what kind of porn gets made and sold online.

Patricia Nilsson
Act two: the List

Alex Barker
Some of you may have heard about the Hays Code back in the 1930s, in the early days of Hollywood. The Hays Code set the standards for what you could and couldn’t depict on screen. No lustful kissing, no nudity, no interracial relationships, no perversion — whatever that meant. It was all self-policed by the industry and amazingly, held in place well into the 1960s. It all sounds so strange today, like something from a bygone age.

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And what has this got to do with online porn? Well, when we saw the power Visa and Mastercard had over MindGeek, we wanted to understand how they could bring the world’s biggest adult company to its knees.

Patricia Nilsson
What we discovered is that the world of porn might just have its own version of the Hays Code. There’s a really curious system of rules. Rules on porn content, not enforced by porn producers, but financial gatekeepers — the payments world, a world ultimately overseen by Visa and Mastercard. We realise this sounds odd. It is odd, and it raised more questions than answers.

Alex Barker
I remember the moment the door to this world was opened for me. I was just chatting with an executive in the industry and she mentioned these lists, basically do’s and don’ts for porn production. So I asked her to dig one up and she shared a document of best practices, all compiled by a company called MobiusPay. Now Mobius is a payment processing company. If you’re a business that wants to take credit cards, you need a bank to sponsor you, a merchant account. Mobius helps to sort that out. It acts as a bridge between high-risk businesses like cannabis, porn or gambling and banks in the Visa and Mastercard system.

Patricia Nilsson
Jon Corona is MobiusPay’s chief operating officer, and he put together that one-page primer of things to avoid. We asked him to read the sample of problematic words.

Jonathan Corona
Twink, nymph, nymphet, any racial slur or symbol and teen. You know, these specific words tend to create problems.

Patricia Nilsson
Problems with who?

Jonathan Corona
With Visa and Mastercard, the acquiring bank and if it goes far enough, ultimately law enforcement.

Patricia Nilsson
When you sat down to create this list, you know, what do you base that on?

Jonathan Corona
The list and the words are in the interest of protecting the Visa and Mastercard brand reputation.

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Alex Barker
This was a lot for us to get our head around. The more we ask people about these porn lists, the more we realise they are almost Talmudic in nature. Visa and Mastercard are at the centre of this credit card world. They set down some broad guidelines on material that might be legal but just isn’t kosher, stuff that doesn’t fit with their brand.

Patricia Nilsson
And the banks and payment processors like Jon at Mobius —  they are expected to flesh that out. Now they don’t have much to work on. Not even 10 commandments. They get about five. Mastercard sums it up in just one short paragraph. They are against the sale of an image or service that is “patently offensive” or lacks “serious artistic value”. They ban videos involving minors, animals, mutilation or non-consensual behaviour. Now that all sounds reasonable. But just to make sure they are never wrong, Mastercard also says they ban any other material that Mastercard might find unacceptable in the future. Genius.

People like John, they need to make fine distinctions on what Visa and Mastercard allow and don’t allow, right down to a “twink” — which means a slim, young-looking gay man.

Do you have conversations with Visa and Mastercard? Do you, I mean, do you have a sit-down with them or talk to them on the phone? Are we saying, what do you think about “twink”?

Jonathan Corona
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Someone complains to the card brands that they take it very seriously and they will review your content. And if they find something they disagree with, they could terminate your account effective immediately.

Patricia Nilsson
Could you call it a type of self-censorship in the porn industry then? I mean, you have performers who are not doing certain things, not showing certain things because, you know, someone might cut them off.

Jonathan Corona
Correct. Yeah. It’s sort of self-censorship and self-policing. Ultimately, if you want to accept Visa and Mastercard, then you have to follow their rules.

Alex Barker
Jon explained that Visa and Mastercard have had rules on what porn can and can’t be sold online for more than a decade. It’s just that since the Kristof piece, they are all much more active in policing them. Jon says Mastercard has entire teams devoted to this, conducting investigations and reviews. Other tech companies are also hired to crawl websites, looking for content that breaks the rules.

Patricia Nilsson
And here’s the thing that really blew our mind. The lists evolve and the guidance evolves. New words or phrases are banned all the time, or unbanned like so-called “golden showers”, you know — peeing. It was off-limits for a lot of banks and payment processors. Then suddenly around 2016, it became kind of OK, presumably because the term was in the news a lot and somehow normalised. All of this implies that somewhere, there must be a decision-maker. Someone blesses these distinctions and how they might change. They decide what is fine to stream and what isn’t. Now, that is a relatively easy distinction to make when something looks outright illegal. Jon actually conducts his own checks and we should warn you here — we’re about to hear how he has come across disturbing videos.

Jonathan Corona
I start looking for prohibited type content and I search keywords within the website.

Alex Barker
He’ll type in a word like “rape” or “underage” or the countless variations of those themes.

Jonathan Corona
I did come into a situation where it was kind of disturbing content. I can’t say with certainty that it was paedophilia, but what I did was I screenshotted everything, brought it to my first-line supervisor and we both just filed a report with the FBI. I felt we had an ethical obligation to at least alert someone in a position of authority to review what we had seen.

Patricia Nilsson
If Jon searches for a term like “twink”, he might need to take several steps. For example, look at ID documents from the performer to confirm that he’s over the legal age.

Jonathan Corona
And racial slur. We don’t allow it. And I understand there are free speech concerns there, but I would just tell them, “hey, this word here, the bank’s not gonna approve it. You need to change it to something else”.

Alex Barker
There are some areas where the boundary is hard to draw when vetting porn, like hypnosis or sex while someone appears to be asleep.

Jonathan Corona
Of course they’re acting, but not actually asleep and no one’s actually getting hypnotised. But being asleep means that the person sleeping does not have the ability to render consent and the thought of hypnotising someone into doing what you want them to do removes the ability to render consent. Even though it’s all acting, it’s all fiction. Those perceptions is what makes it prohibitive.

Patricia Nilsson
Jon talks in a pretty matter-of-fact way about the details of these lists, where they draw the line and what they try to stop. But it’s actually a pretty huge deal. Mobius, the company that Jon works for, essentially acts as a stand-in regulator for pornography, doing the work that governments aren’t doing, on behalf of Visa and Mastercard. It amazed us that this level of supervision exists at all, and even more so, who does it. To see how much of an influence these codes really had on porn production, we went back to somebody we trust and what they told us — well, it was a little graphic, but truly stunning. That’s after the break.

Act three: More power than the Pope

Jessica Stoya
Yeah. Come on in.

Alex Barker
So thank you for, for letting us into your home. It’s great to see you in New York in person. And the snow is here.

Jessica Stoya
It’s snowing. On Christmas. (laughter) Yeah.

Alex Barker
Brooklyn is white.

We’re in Stoya’s apartment. This is where she told us about that detail that got us going down this whole path to begin with:  that she can’t type “period” in a chat box on some porn platforms. As a performer, she’s seen a lot of different business models, from pay sites to cam sites to creative platforms like OnlyFans. They all have different characteristics, but there was always one common theme, one powerful constraint on what content could be made and sold online. She remembers Visa and MasterCard’s influence coming up way back almost 15 years ago, right from the start of her career when she was shooting for a big porn studio.

Jessica Stoya
I was on a porn set for Digital Playground and someone had four fingers in me, and the director was like, “Watch the thumb”. And I’m like, “Wait, you can’t put a thumb in”. And he was like, “No”. And I’m like, “What if it’s just a thumb?” And he’s like, “Just a thumb’s fine”. And I’m like, “What if it’s four fingers and then another finger from the other hand?” and he’s like, “That’s fine. It’s just the thumbs. The thumbs make it fisting”. And I was like, “This is so strange!”

Patricia Nilsson
It does sound strange. Now, this would have been back in the days when DVDs were being sold. So the rules have evolved. But on Stoya’s set payment companies were basically calling the shots.

Jessica Stoya
Somehow, Mastercard and Visa are deciding this is high-risk, right? This is porn. So this is high-risk. They’re deciding this is, this kind of sexual act, this is acceptable. This is not acceptable. So this is actually an incredible amount of power, more power than the Pope on this subject, whoever these people are at Mastercard, deciding.

Patricia Nilsson
When it comes to rules, Stoya likes to understand what she’s dealing with very precisely. So at one point, she got in touch with a payment company called CCBill, which is one of the biggest in porn. What she wanted was a set of rules, the detailed rules, the ones that precisely lay out the limits of what they think Mastercard and Visa tolerate. And so they shared it, all four pages of it.

Alex Barker
They can literally tell you on these lists what you can’t make, right?

Jessica Stoya
Yeah. I mean, or you could make it, but you can’t put it anywhere, which is akin to banning it. And, you know, some things should be banned, right? Sexual depictions of minors. That is bad. That is not OK. It is a problem. It should not be allowed anywhere. Bestiality again, bad problem, shouldn’t be allowed.

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Patricia Nilsson
In full, it’s a crazy document, totally bizarre in parts, the kind of thing you might expect from lawyers set loose at a fetish convention with a mission to categorise every little kink.

Alex Barker
The interesting part is the grey zone: sexual activity that is technically legal, but in practice not tolerated. That’s a different kind of power in porn. And what’s so interesting and so difficult to grasp is that there isn’t just one set of rules, but many. Visa and Mastercard don’t seem to want to publish a detailed set of rules themselves that would acknowledge that they’re effectively the biggest regulators of porn. So instead they just issue deliberately vague guidelines about what fits their brand. Banks and payment processors and platforms then have to interpret for their own customers what the limits of Mastercard and Visa might be. It’s like guessing the wishes of an all-powerful king. You only know you’re wrong when you’re punished. And like all efforts to codify and regulate human behaviour, the rules can get weirdly precise. Where do you draw the line?

Jessica Stoya
Like how many slaps before we consider it a spanking, instead of an ass slap? How many bursts of fluid before we decide what we’re seeing is not female ejaculation, it is urine.

Patricia Nilsson
I mean, you can laugh about some of this. There is, would you believe, a code about fairy costumes. Two people in fairy costumes having sex? That’s OK. But if one of them is half man, half beast or in human form — no, no, too close to bestiality. One platform, worried about bestiality, banned animals even straying into the shot.

Jessica Stoya
How close can a cat be before it is considered an inappropriate distance? Anyone who has lived with a cat knows. Like filming — unless there is a room that you can shut a cat in, filming anything without intrusion by a house cat is very difficult.

Alex Barker
Then there was the question of blood. Visa and Mastercard are clear: violence, mutilation — those are not things they abide in porn. But if you break that down, things start to get complicated. What about porn stars dressed as vampires devouring ketchup blood? Is that allowed? Well, try to find that online. On the internet, vampire porn with fake or real blood is like a forbidden good. And of course, not all blood comes from violence.

Jessica Stoya
Because I have a uterus and I’m 35 and I get my period somewhere between every 20 and 31 days. And so sometimes there is blood in my vagina and you can see it in the vulva. And that cannot be portrayed in a commercial sex video. And I feel that menstruation is completely natural. And I also use my vagina for work. Someone at Visa or Mastercard finds this completely natural biological process to be unacceptable. Then we’re raising people who are becoming sexual in a culture where menstruation is completely erased. Whoever is the arbiter of what can be done with sexual media and sexual performance like, I have no idea who they are. Did they take a philosophy class? Like, are they, do they have a degree in women’s studies?

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Patricia Nilsson
When we set out to find who rules online porn, we did not expect to be confronted with such a thought experiment: a porn star wondering who actually regulates the sight of certain bodily functions. But here we are, like a lot of credit card customers staring at the fine print and still confused. Do payment companies control porn? In a way, they have huge influence. But we sensed that wasn’t the full story. For that, we needed to keep digging. We still wanted to figure out how these payment companies actually use their power.

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Alex Barker
Coming up on Hot Money, we want to introduce you to a man with the world’s most popular porn site, a site with double the page views of Pornhub.

Kelly Holland
Running out of a throwback, Soviet bloc apartment building in Prague? I mean, they’re still operating as if they were a shadow company.

Alex Barker
It’s one of the top 10 websites in the world. And when Pornhub took down 9mn videos because they upset Visa and Mastercard, this guy — well, he still has 9mn videos up.

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Patricia Nilsson
Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Patricia Nilsson.

Alex Barker
And me Alex Barker. Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer. Edith Rouselot is our associate producer. Our editor is Karen Shakerdge. Amanda Kay Wang is our engineer. Music composition by Pascal Wyse. Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez Casado. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein.

Patricia Nilsson
Special thanks to Renée Kaplan and Roula Khalaf at the Financial Times and Mia Lobel, Leital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Thank you to Similarweb for providing our web traffic data.

Alex Barker
If you want more from the FT, try our new app featuring eight essential stories every weekday. Search FT Edit in the iPhone App Store. Your first month is free and it’s 99 cents a month for six months after that.

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