You may have heard of the Thothub shutdown. A massively popular website disappears virtually overnight. So, what was Thothub about? Why did it shut down? Is there an alternative out there? Let’s take a little look, shall we?
What was Thothub.tv?
You have heard of OnlyFans.com, right? If so, you are probably familiar with the fact that OnlyFans allowed content creators, mostly models, to put their content behind a paywall. If you wanted to see special pictures from a model (almost certainly nude pictures), then you would need to start following them on OnlyFans.com. This would cost you some money.
This is where Thothub.tv came in. This was a site that allowed people to pay for content on OnlyFans.com, and then display it on Thothub.tv for free. It is essentially going to be piracy. Thothub.tv basically limited the amount of money that creators could make from their work. After all, if their paid content was being given away for free, how would they make money?
Thothub.tv became popular rather quickly. It wasn’t too long before just about every major model on OnlyFans had their content shared on the platform. While Thothub claimed that they were removing clearly pirated images, some people argued that they never did anything of the like. Or, if they were, the number of image removals that they were doing was kept to the absolute minimum. That being said, the lawsuit filed against the website did agree that certain threads had been removed.
What happened to Thothub.tv?
To be honest with you, nobody actually knows why Thothub shut down. They never actually said. One day the website was there, and the next it had completely disappeared, never to be seen again. However, there is every indication that the closure of Thothub was tied to a lawsuit.
A lawsuit alleged that Thothub was posting pirated content on their website. It claimed that it was a breach of copyright and that the website should be closed down as a result. It is unknown how much the site was being sued for. However, since the person that filed the claim has over a million followers on Twitter, and charges a huge sum of cash for access to her OnlyFan account, we can only imagine that the money that Thothub was being sued for was well over the million-dollar mark.
Within just a couple of days of the lawsuit being filed, Thothub was no more. If you try and head to the website now, you will notice that there is nothing there. The domain name is dead. Honestly, it almost appears as if there was no website there in the first place.
Since Thothub did not say why the site closed down, we can do nothing but speculate that it was tied to the lawsuit. Since the website seemed to be growing by the day. They even had some major sponsors on board, so it is unlikely that they were running out of money. As a result, we have no reason to doubt that they closed down due to the pending lawsuit. The lawsuit made some pretty serious charges against the site (including profiting from a criminal enterprise, which carries severe penalties).
We can imagine that Thothub probably didn’t anticipate the seriousness of the claims made against them, so by shutting down, they can help to prevent other lawsuits being filed. As of the time of writing, only one claim has been made against the site. There is, however, a chance that this may turn into a class action law suit.
Honestly, at this point, we seriously doubt that even if Thothub wins the lawsuit (it is unlikely that it will), the site will never return. As we are going to discuss in a short while, other websites have started to crop up which fills the niche that Thothub was in. These sites are going to start to gain all the traffic, and Thothub will suffer as a result. If Thothub does return, it will no doubt be run by a chancer that is probably not going to be running the same type of website again. It will be Thothub in name only.
Who started a lawsuit?
The lawsuit was filed by Deniece ‘Niece’ Waidhofer. The process was incredibly quick. Mere days after she filed her lawsuit, Thothub.tv was shut down. At the same time, she filed a lawsuit against several companies that opted to advertise on Thothub. However, the chances of her succeeding with that case are slim to nil. There hasn’t really been any evidence in the courts that you can sue advertisers on a platform.
A lot of people are speculating that Waidhofer does not really have any chance to win this case. Although, it is tough to see why she didn’t have a case. At the end of the day, somebody was profiting from her copyrighted content. This is not allowed. Although, Thothub.tv can probably claim that since they allowed user posts, they are in the clear. After all, the law in the United States dictates that a party cannot be sued for content posted on their website if it were user-posted content, hence why Facebook and Twitter suffer no legal repercussions for content posted on their platforms.
Is there an alternative to it coming anytime soon?
There almost certainly will be an alternative to Thothub in the near future. After all, nothing has ever stopped people from posting paywalled photos in the public domain before. The site that seems to be the most promising at the moment is www.sexy-egirls.com. In fact, there seem to be a lot of people on the forum treating it as the next Thothub. Of course, this doesn’t mean that this will eventually end up happening, but it does seem likely.
Of course, other alternatives will pop up eventually. Reddit seems to be hosting a lot of similar images right now. It is worth noting that many sites inside of the United States may be a bit dubious about starting up a similar website right now. They will at least want to wait until the lawsuit has blown over. After all, people probably do not want to be sued for a lot of money.
