Weird6 min(s) read
An interesting question started doing the rounds this week, and it turned out that nobody had ever actually answered it.
It began on September 16 with a post that asked: "If this is the first video on YouTube, then what's the first video on X?!!"
The following morning, a user called gzvamp quote-posted it and aimed the same question at a completely different platform, writing: "We need answers @Pornhub"
That post landed on September 17 and has since pulled 7.3 million views, 68,000 likes and 748 reposts, with the replies full of people guessing and nobody producing anything solid.
So, we went and got some answers.
If you had typed the URL of the world's biggest adult site into your browser on March 28, 2007, you would have seen absolutely nothing.
No videos, no thumbnails, no search bar - no famous black and orange color scheme.
Just a gray placeholder page with the words 'Under Construction!' sitting under a header that read 'PornHub CMS : Version 0.0.1' with a copyright line crediting a Montreal company called Mansef Inc.
We know this because every version of that page is still sitting in the Internet Archive, waiting for someone to go through it.
What we found at the bottom of it is a genuinely strange piece of internet history, and it starts a full day after that under-construction page was captured.
The site that now publishes an annual year-in-review full of data about what America searches for has been archived roughly 4,400 times since 2007.
A developer named Dan Healy pulled a chunk of those snapshots into a public GitHub project called Semen and Semantics, originally to study how porn video titles changed over 16 years.
We went through the same archive looking for something else entirely: the oldest thing on the site.
The early Pornhub homepage turned out to be unusually generous with its metadata.
From late October 2007 onward, every video thumbnail carried a view count, a runtime, a star rating and, crucially, an 'Added' date.
We scraped every one of those dates out of every archived homepage capture. That gave us 246 dated records.
Then we sorted them.
The oldest date anywhere in that pile is March 29, 2007.
The video attached to it is called '1 Mann - 2 Pennis'.
It runs for one minute and 32 seconds - it is German, and whoever typed the title misspelled the German word for penises, which should be 'Penisse'.
By the time the archive caught it on the homepage on November 7, 2007, it had racked up 352,222 views and 394 user ratings, averaging four stars out of five.
Here is the part that makes it strange.
That upload date is the day after the archive captured pornhub.com as a blank placeholder, and it lands almost six months before the public could actually use the site.
To be precise about it, that is the oldest upload date that survives anywhere in the public record.
Pornhub has never published an answer of its own, and the archive has gaps, but we will come back to that.
The snapshots tell a fairly humbling origin story for a site that now generates enough traffic to make a single Super Bowl halftime show move its search data by 5,000%.
On August 22, 2007, the site was running a piece of off-the-shelf video sharing software called ClipShare, and it hadn't even been rebranded.
The page still carried the vendor's stock slogan, 'Your one-stop community for video sharing', and a stats box reading zero public videos, zero private videos, three members.
By September 3 it had 22 members and still no videos.
By September 16 it was live, with a working player, a tag cloud where the most popular tag had been used three times, and nine videos on the homepage with titles like "Kitchen Table F***ing" and, memorably, one just called "xxx".
Nine other videos in our data carry pre-launch dates, all quietly accumulating views before anyone was supposed to be watching.
The best performer of that early batch is a 13-second clip with a suitably filthy title which had pulled 531,646 views by late 2007.
There is also one dated April 29, 2007 that confusingly read 'Part 2' - which raises the obvious question of where 'Part 1' went.
Here is the honest version of the evidence we found, because there are limits.
Pornhub only ever displayed a plain calendar upload date on its homepage for about six weeks, between October 18 and November 28, 2007.
Before that window there was no date at all, and after it the site switched to vague relative labels like '3 months ago'.
That leaves seven usable archive captures, between them carrying dates for 246 individual videos.
By February 2008 the site's internal video numbering had already passed 74,000, so those 246 dated videos are well under one percent of what was sitting on the site.
The dates themselves are consistent. Six of those videos turn up in more than one capture, and every one of them reports the same upload date every time.
The internal numbering backs them up too, up to a point.
Among videos numbered above roughly 1,700, the ID order and the upload date order agree 99.9% of the time, which is what you would expect from a normal sequential upload counter.
Below that, they fall apart. In the block of low-numbered videos, which has the look of a library bulk-loaded into the site before launch, the dates jump around: video 322 is dated April, 378 is dated July, and 491 is dated March.
That is the soft spot in all of this.
For the very oldest material we are trusting a date field rather than a sequence we can independently check, and 'Added' may mean the day a clip entered Mansef's library rather than the day somebody hit upload.
So March 29, 2007 is the oldest upload date that survives anywhere in the public record, attached to the oldest video anyone can currently point at.
It is not proof that nothing older ever existed, and because the archive only ever preserved the homepage, anything that never reached the front page is gone for good.
Still, the oldest thing anyone can find on the internet's most-visited adult site is 92 seconds of badly spelled German, added to a website that did not yet exist.
The most searched-for performers of 2025 have a lot to live up to.
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