Alex Barker

What she'd witnessed was the birth of the modern porn industry.

And that led us to Curtis Potech.

He was there running one of the first big porn tube sites, pretty much by accident.

Back in 2006, when Stoya started her career, Curtis was working as a strip club DJ.

He needed a day job, so he answered an ad to work on a support desk.

Curtis was one of many who were swept up in the wild rise of the tube sites.

It was online anarchy.

Nobody in the old porn industry knew who was in charge.

All Curtis knew was that the shoestring operation at Xtube was mainly funded by a mysterious Chinese businessman.

They called him Mr X. The early days of Xtube were chaotic, but there was a basic goal.

Get as many people visiting the site as possible, and hope the advertising money followed.

Curtis says it started off slow, but eventually Xtube found its niche in gay porn.

And as clips went viral and worked their magic, things took off.

So Curtis, the strip club DJ turned tech bro, ended up becoming the subpoena king.

And Xtube wasn't the only company winding up producers.

Things were getting nasty, almost Godfather nasty.

Another popular tube site called Youporn got sent a bullet in the post, an actual bullet with the word Youporn etched into the side.

Xtube almost folded when it had to pay a half a million dollars to a porn producer who sued them for hosting pirated videos.

But it survived.

By 2008, they charged a million dollars just for the ad slot across the top of the site.