The Teacher Who Turned To Pornhub to Make Money (In a Very Unexpected Way)

Can a math equation lead to stimulation?

Pornhub receives 639.6 million visitors to its website a month.

To put that in comparison, it’s about 100 million more than Netflix. So we know where people really go to ‘and chill.’ Until now, I believed that people were visiting purely for sexual reasons.

For visual stimulation to masturbate or to engage in some sex play with a partner. I was wrong.

It appears some people visit Pornhub for math.

Yes, math!

If Mohammad won’t come to the mountain

A Taiwanese math tutor by the name of Shun-Wei Chang was cast into the spotlight recently when he was featured on a PornHub Instagram live stream event.

The account ordinarily full of scantily clad women had a new hero — a fully clothed mathematician.

So how did Chang become a viral Pornhub situation?

Chang ran a tutoring center in a town in Northern Taiwan but, faced with stiff competition, found himself in debt to the tune of NT$1 million — approximately $36,000 USD.

Like many people seeking a side hustle, he went online. He started a website and filmed math tutorial videos to assist students in preparing for exams. Chang was cranking out up to 40 videos a day.

Despite the impressive output, the results weren't coming. So Chang came up with a unique idea.

If Mohammad won’t come to the mountain, you take the mountain to Mohammad. So Chang decided to post his videos where he knew there would be a lot of traffic.

If you build it, they will come

In May 2020, he started uploading his videos to PornHub.

There was nothing sexual about his videos at all. He was fully clothed in all of them and spoke only about math.

Like any good marketer, he used popular search terms to drive traffic to his videos — “naked,” “giant breasts,” “masturbation,” “threesome,” and “oral sex.”

He came up with a suggestive title for his page — Play Hard, Study Hard and waited for the traffic to come.

E=mc²

There are many categories on Pornhub — the most popular are Japanese, lesbian, hentai and milf. I looked but couldn't find any covering Pythagoras Theorem. Even looking for pi took me to unexpected places.

Each day there are 20,160 videos uploaded. So with a lot of competition and no Math category, the odds were stacked against Chang. Surely people who found his videos due to his sneaky search term usage would surely be disappointed when they found themselves learning about calculus.

But like any good underdog story, Chang rose above the odds to succeed. He reached over 7000 subscribers and over 2 million views across his videos in less than a year. Enough to pay off his debts and more.

I ride in a taxi and don’t have sex with the driver

Chang is not the first to upload suitable for work (SFW) videos to the platform.

Back in 2016, Ryan Creamer, a 26-year-old comic, was browsing for porn when he saw the “Work for Us” button and decided to apply and see if there was a market for his non-sexual satirical content.

His first video was “I Tuck You In After You Have Cum,” and featured Ryan doing precisely what the title suggests, ending with a kiss on the forehead from the viewer's point of view. The link was posted in a Reddit discussion and quickly went viral.

Ryan then began videos satirizing the stereotypical porn videos with some great titles:

• I Offer You Water (In Case You Are Parched Post Orgasm)
• I, Your Step Brother, Decline Your Advances but Am Flattered Nonetheless
• I Deliver You a Pizza and Don’t Put My Weiner in It

Not only did PornHub viewers like his content, but some of the most popular porn stars started tweeting his comment and telling their followers to follow him.

While Ryan’s videos are all suitable for work, he jokes that people are probably still masturbating to them.

Can we all start uploading random videos?

So Ryan and Chang have both made money by posting non-sexual content on Pornhub. Does this mean that all content creators can start doing this?

Well, PornHub themselves encourages it to some extent saying in response to Ryan’s videos, “Ryan’s content has been very well received by our community, and we encourage artists and creators alike to consider our platform to get their work out into the world.”

But before you get out your new iPhone and start filming, it seems that SFW videos that draw viewers on PornHub are few and far between.

Even typing in ‘non-sexual content” into the Pornhub search bar returns very sexual videos. I did a deep dive into the platform and couldn't find any that would be considered non-sexual.

Another website associated with porn, Only Fans, announced in August they would move away from sexual content in a bid to get financial institutions to invest capital into their business. While they quickly reversed that decision, they did launch an Only Fans TV streaming app available for download from the major tech platforms. The app features content across several categories, including music, comedy, cooking, and fitness.

The math man

Back to our math teacher Shun-Wei Chang.

His non-porn, porn career seems over. Since February, he hasn't posted a new video, seemingly content with the money he made and moving to more conventional ways to tutor math.

However, he does have one item that may very well enter the PornHub Hall of Fame. In each of his videos, he wore a grey hoodie. He admitted even though he wore it in every video over ten months; he never washed it.

Due to his popularity kicking off again thanks to all the global media coverage received this week, he is going to auction off his hoodie.

So for anyone with a sweat fetish, consider bidding on this famous item. Perhaps you could even wear it in your own PornHub video.

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