#42: At Pornhub, All of Your Work Is NSFW
The woman behind Pornhub’s social media has a hard time telling her grandma about her job.
On this week’s episode of HYPEBEAST Radio, we sat down with Aria Nathaniel, who runs all of Pornhub’s social media presence. Predictably, Aria has a hard time explaining what she does for a living, especially to her family. “Once my mom figured out that we were, like, #23 on the list of most visited websites, she got it.” Her grandmother, though, is a bit of a different story.
Aria explains that she has cultivated and curated Pornhub into her personal account. “You can check it — there’s no porn on there. It’s mostly me tweeting about eating avocado toast and wanting to throw up.” A self-styled “Twitter goddess,” Aria has also used her blue-check mark to rally support around another personal cause: fan-girling for John Mayer. “John is like my Mecca,” Aria says. “I wanna go home to him, and I pray to him.” According to Aria, though, Mayer has long played hard-to-get — she has some theories as to why he hasn’t responded to her incessant tweets. She did get a reply—once—on Mayer’s birthday, which she keeps framed on her desk, at home, and as her background on her work computer. “I was written about in Forbes,” she says, incredulously, “but I don’t give a shit — John Mayer said ‘thank you,’ and I have a boner for ten years!”
The Pornhub offices are “the most corporate office you will ever go into.” Aria was shocked at the professionalism of it all: “It’s not Google! Everyone expects us to have a Google office, or a HYPEBEAST office, but it’s not.” The office is getting a gym soon, though, so Aria has high hopes. “I won’t use it, but I’ll Instagram from the treadmill in some athleisure, streetwear, activewear, and then I’ll get off.”
Aria estimates that the Pornhub account gets an average of one DM every three seconds. “If I even went through that tab for two days, it’d only cover the last ten minutes.” And in case you were wondering what kind of messages people send to the world’s biggest porn website, Aria says it’s “nonsense—all of it is nonsense. It’s all emojis, ‘bobs and vagine.’”
Aria also explains a bit of the behind-the-scenes work that went into that Pornhub x Richardson NYFW party: “I was having the worst anxiety at that party. I was sitting in a corner with Diplo, like ‘what is happening here?!’ It’s so smoky in the VIP, I have asthma. I’m wearing this very tight bodysuit and pleather, aggressive dominatrix skirt and a horrible spray-tan.” Besides that, Aria befriended the strippers. “They took me under their wing,” she says. “Because I’m very small, I think they thought I was maybe a squirrel.”
Over the course of this conversation, Aria tells us that while she does not kiss and tell, she can divulge that she’s working on a custom-made PH varsity jacket for Ja Rule. “It’s gonna say ‘I SMELL PUSSY’ on the back,” Aria says. She also explains how the Pornhub analytics team crunches the numbers behind porn to show how people react to near-apocalyptic moments. Lastly Aria reveals why Pornhub has made the move into the streetwear and merch space, collaborating with brands like Richardson and staging pop-ups in New York.
Check the episode out above, on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else podcasts are found.