Industry Pornography Area served Worldwide | Products Pornographic films | |
Founded June 22, 2005; 11 years ago (2005-06-22) | ||
Brazzers (/ˈbræzərz/) is a pornographic production company based in Montreal, Canada. The online network consists of thirty-one hardcore pornography websites. As of October 2015, Brazzers.com has a traffic ranking of 1,650.
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History
Founded in 2005 by a group of Montreal investors, Brazzers became part of a larger group of pornographic sites under the corporate name of Mansef. In 2010, Mansef was sold to Fabian Thylmann, and rebranded as Manwin Inc. In December 2012, Thylmann was extradited from Belgium to Germany on suspicion of tax evasion.
In October 2013, Thylmann sold Manwin's assets, including Brazzers, to an internal management group, Mindgeek, headed by CEO Feras Antoon, and shareholder David Tassilo.
In 2014, Brazzers celebrated its 10th anniversary with a billboard in Times Square in New York City. The digital billboard was located at the corner of 47th and 7th and viewable for the entire month of August. Previously in 2010 Brazzers had used a Times Square billboard to promote its safe sex campaign and to announce its "Get Rubber!" slogan and website.
In September 2016, Vigilante broke the news of a database breach suffered by Brazzers, which affected almost 1 million users after the site was hacked in April 2013.
Operations
Brazzers is currently headed by CEO Feras Antoon, and owned and operated by Mindgeek, a multinational officially registered in Luxembourg.
Brazzers came under industry criticism for associating with streaming media sites like Pornhub. In response, in 2009, Brazzers initiated an anti-piracy campaign.
The company was acquired by Manwin in March 2010.
Litigation
In 2008, after being fired, producer Bobby Manila served Brazzers with a lawsuit for fraud and violating the terms of his contract. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court.
In February 2010, a lawsuit was filed by Pink Visual Studio accusing Brazzers' parent company, Manwin, of infringing on copyrighted content by distributing unlicensed video content on their free video sharing sites. Brazzers' network has been accused of benefiting from unlicensed content by indirectly benefiting from traffic from sharing sites, but this was the first time a well-known studio had filed a lawsuit. A class action lawsuit was considered by other studios.