Predecessor Mansef, Manwin Products Pornographic films Founded 2004 | Area served Worldwide Number of employees 1,000 Type Privately held company | |
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Industry Adult industryInformation Technology (IT) Services Content DeliveryOnline AdvertisingStreaming Media Owner David Marmorstein Tassillo, Feras Antoon Profiles | ||
Bdm39 how mindgeek s ad network uses big data technologies to push billions of impressions per day
MindGeek is a global IT company active in Content delivery, Streaming media, and Online advertising, the company is a privately held conglomerate headquartered in Luxembourg City with offices in Dublin, Hamburg, London, Los Angeles, Miami, Montreal, and Nicosia. Its operations are primarily related to Internet pornography, but also include other online properties such as the comedy video and meme website videobash.com and celebrity gossip site celebs.com.
Contents
- Bdm39 how mindgeek s ad network uses big data technologies to push billions of impressions per day
- Mannequin challenge 2016 mindgeek
- Origins and early history
- Timeline of acquisitions growth and partnerships by Manwin and Mindgeek
- Adult industry
- Pornhub Network
- Pornographic movie studios
- Advertising
- Malvertising
- ASACP
- Age verification in the UK
- Antitrust lawsuit against ICM and ICANN
- Patent lawsuits
- No on Government Waste Committee
- References
Mannequin challenge 2016 mindgeek
Origins and early history
In the late 1990s, German-born Fabian Thylmann created NATS (Next-Generation Affiliate Tracking Software), which was used for marketing pornography across different websites. In 2006, Thylmann sold his shares in the company that controlled NATS and used the proceeds to purchase the Privat Amateure website.
Between 2006 and 2010, Thylmann bought three more web sites; MyDirtyHobby, Webcams and Xtube. The domain name manwin.com was first registered in August 2007.
In March 2010, Fabian Thylmann bought the assets of Mansef and Interhub, owners of porn assets like Brazzers and Pornhub, and changed the name of the company to Manwin. Thylmann also bought WebCams.com in a separate deal during the same period.
Adult blogger/journalist Mike South broke a story that Manwin had gotten 168 million dollars in financing from Fortress Investment Group, which turned out to be a part of a larger loan financed by Colbeck Capital. Fox business news reported on it in March 2013.
In October 2013, Thylmann sold his stake in Manwin to the senior management of the company, and later in the same month the company's name was changed to Mindgeek. This took place as Manwin and RedTube, a very large Porn Tube site not in its network, merged. Previous stories emerged that Manwin was acquiring RedTube, but as news broke out of the size of the deal, it was clear that RedTube was merged into Manwin and, combined with Manwin's management's buyout, created a new pornography juggernaut called Mindgeek.
In March 2013, members of Mindgeek's senior management from were cited alongside the CEO of gaming technology giant Amaya Inc. and various of its own senior officers and stakeholders. The Quebec Market Authority, the province's market regulator which is somewhat equivalent to the U.S. SEC, investigated Amaya's executives for trading on privileged information. According to the charges, some Mindgeek executives were found to have benefited from the leak of information, although they were not major players in the insider trading ring.
Timeline of acquisitions, growth and partnerships by Manwin and Mindgeek
MindGeek acquired ExtremeTube, SpankWire, KeezMovies, but in October 2015, these sites were sold to Glorious Holdings Investment.. These sites are interlinked in network called Spankwire Sites in similar fashion as the PornHub Network.
Adult industry
In 2013, the adult industry news website XBIZ described MindGeek as "the largest adult entertainment operator globally", and a spokesperson from Manwin, who spoke to the Irish Independent newspaper in 2013, stated that they are "one of the top five bandwidth consumption companies in the world".
It has been reported that MindGeek's dominance in online pornography may have negative results because of the monopolistic powers they have from owning both production and distribution avenues.
Pornhub Network
The "Pornhub Network" is a network of web 2.0 websites accessible through Mindgeek's PornMD search engine. Mindgeek owns and operate all of the websites in the Pornhub Network, which include GayTube, Peeperz, PornIQ (launched by Pornhub), PornMD, Pornhub, RedTube, Thumbzilla, Tube8, and YouPorn.
The three highest ranking sites in the Pornhub Network are Pornhub, RedTube and YouPorn. In November 2013, it was reported that Pornhub has over 1 billion visitors per month, and a December 2014 article in Adweek states that Pornhub has 50 million daily visitors. Pornhub.com scores at Alexa Global Rank 72 (as of 19 December 2014).
According to TrafficEstimate.com, Redtube.com generates over 90 million visits per month, and YouPorn.com generates almost 80 million visits per month (based on the data for 30 days up to mid November 2014. Data for Pornhub.com was not available from TrafficEstimate). YouPorn claim that their partner program has 400 content providers who participate.
MindGeek's mobile pornography websites handle millions of visits each day in North America, they were awarded the "Future Mobile Award for Mobile Adult Services" by Juniper Research in 2012.
Pornographic movie studios
MindGeek owns the pornographic movie studios Babes.com, Brazzers, Digital Playground, Reality Kings, Twistys, and Men.com, they manage the websites of Wicked Pictures, and Really Useful Ltd., and they established 3DXSTAR in partnership with Funky Monkey Productions. Mindgeek also manage Playboy's online and television operations (although they no longer manage Playboy.com, see history section above). In January 2014, a Mindgeek official stated that they were developing an Android app for Google's Chromecast digital media player, along with an app for Panasonic smart TVs, that would enable streaming of Playboy.tv content. The plan to release a Chromecast app was shown to be unfeasible in February 2014, when Google originally revealed their terms of service for Chromecast app developers, which stated that "We don’t allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material."
MindGeek owns the reality pornography (commercial pornography that emulates amateur pornography) video websites Mofos, MyDirtyHobby, Sextube, and Webcams.
Advertising
Mindgeek host advertisements on their sites using their TrafficJunky ad network and other sites, which receives billions of ad impressions on a daily basis.
Pornhub (which is owned by Mindgeek) have conducted several of their own advertising campaigns, including a billboard in Times Square, product placement in the film Don Jon, and a tree planting campaign. According to the vice president of Pornhub, Corey Price (who commented in December 2014), Pornhub want to make watching porn "something that's acceptable to talk about", which would be likely to benefit Pornhub, since according to Price "it's still taboo [to advertise on X-rated sites like Pornhub]". In October 2013, the media and marketing publication Digiday reported that Pornhub has already shown advertisements for various mainstream products on the Pornhub web site, including advertisements for movies, musical acts, anti-virus software, and a food delivery service, although most advertisements were still adult-related.
Malvertising
It was reported in April 2013, that visitors to some of the world's most popular (by Alexa rank) pornography sites risked malware being installed on their machines by malicious third party advertisements. The claims were made by security researcher Conrad Longmore, who writes a blog on malware, spam and scams. Longmore's figures were collected using Google Safe Browsing Diagnostics, which looks for harmful content on websites, and the statistics for two sites; xHamster and Pornhub were published by BBC News. The BBC article stated that based on Longmore's research, 5% of pages on xHamster (which has never been owned by Mindgeek / Manwin), and 12.7% of pages on Pornhub incorporated malvertising. MindGeek (still known as Manwin at the time) said in a statement that their own figures showed that 0.003% of the advertisements they served over the period that Longmore's data was collected contained malware, and they said that the advertisements they serve are monitored for malware and malware is immediately removed.
In July 2013, Manwin announced that they had come to an agreement with the online security provider RiskIQ to scan third party advertisements hosted on their TrafficJunky ad network for malware before they go live, and to continue to monitor ads for malware once they are live.
ASACP
Mindgeek has been a Platinum Sponsor of ASACP (Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection) since 2011. ASACP is an American non-profit organization that fights against child pornography and aims to enhance the effectiveness of parental content filtering technology through the provision of the RTA ("Restricted to Adults") label, which can be implemented by webmasters of adult sites.
Age verification in the UK
In May 2015, Mindgeek joined talks with the Digital Policy Alliance in light of a pledge by the Conservative Party (which won the 2015 general election in the UK) to obligate UK internet service providers to block access to hardcore pornographic websites that do not implement age restrictions by using verifiable age checks.
The Digital Policy Alliance is funded by digital technology companies, and informs members of parliament in the UK and the EU on policy issues that affect online and digital technologies. The DPA has a working group to create age verification methods that can be used to comply with the expected new laws.
When the change in law was first asked for by the UK video-on-demand co-regulator ATVOD in March 2014, Mindgeek said in a statement to the BBC: "The best solution lies in a multi-layered approach in which the parent assumes the central role."
Antitrust lawsuit against ICM and ICANN
Manwin Licensing and Digital Playground filed an antitrust lawsuit in California in November 2011, against ICANN and ICM Registry over the introduction of the .xxx TLD. Amongst their allegations, Manwin claimed that in introducing the new suffix, ICANN and ICM registry had exploited the market by making domain registrations expensive with no price caps in place, and created a need for defensive domain registrations with no provision for companies to block typos of their trademarks. Manwin announced that it would not allow its content to be used on any sites with the suffix, with Fabian Thylmann, who was then managing partner of Manwin saying: "We oppose the .XXX domain and all it stands for. It is my opinion that .XXX domain is an anticompetitive business practice that works a disservice to all companies that do business on the Internet."
In September 2012, ICM filed a counterclaim for $120 Million against Manwin Licensing International. Part of the 24 page long claim alleged: "Manwin, Digital Playground, and their related companies, affiliates, brands, and certain third party affiliates have conspired to boycott the .XXX TLD and have coerced and/or encouraged the boycott of .XXX websites by third parties."
All of ICM's counterclaims were dismissed in the second half of February 2013. The judge in the case stated: "Harm to ICM only is not sufficient to constitute antitrust injury. It must allege harm to the competitive process."
In May 2013, Manwin agreed to settle the antitrust lawsuit it brought against ICM Registry over the cost of .xxx web domain names. The settlement will result in discounted wholesale prices of $7.85 a year for .xxx names during May 2013, and similar offers the future. ICM Registry is owned by British former fax-machine mogul Stuart Lawley. The settlement provides that ICM will not pay any money directly to MindGeek.
Patent lawsuits
In May 2013, ExitExchange Corp. sued Manwin USA Inc. in Texas, alleging that its patent for pop-under advertisements had been infringed by Tube8.com and Pornhub.com.
In July 2013, Manwin was sued by the operators of Skky Inc.; John Mikkelson and Robert Freidson in Minneapolis over the alleged infringement of a patent which describes a method for delivering compressed audio and images on mobile devices.
In October 2014, MindGeek USA Inc. was sued by Preservation Technologies LLC in Delaware for alleged infringement on 19 different sites operated by Mindgeek of 11 patent components on data distribution and communication systems, such as a system for cataloging and retrieving videos and other media associated with keywords. The case was withdrawn in March 2015, after Mindgeek came to a settlement deal with Preservation Technologies LLC.
No on Government Waste Committee
Manwin were the biggest funders of the No on Government Waste Committee which was supported by a coalition of entertainment companies, local business organizations, community activists, adult entertainment performers and healthcare advocates." The committee ran the No on Measure B campaign. The No on Measure B campaign was supported by the Los Angeles County Federation of Republican Women, Los Angeles County Republican and Libertarian Parties, the Valley Industry & Commerce Association (VICA), and the Log Cabin Republicans of Los Angeles.