With all the issues going on with Pornhub at present due to Visa and Mastercard we thought we would take the time to give you a bit of a history lesson on Pornhub’s origins.
It is currently owned by Manwin who is predominately owned by Bernard Bergemar as per Business Insider. Manwin owns many sites including RedTube and YouPorn. Prior to this it was owned by MindGeek which is the Company Fabian Thylmann set up then on sold his stake to Feras Antoon and David Tassillo. Fabian had originally purchased Pornhub and other entities for $140m in 2010 from the four founding owners who created this amazing piece of art. It has not been discussed what Fabian sold PH for when he made a fast exit from porn in late 2012 as he was charged by German public prosecutors with tax evasion.
The Founders Of PornHub
The founding owners of PornHub were Matt Keezer, a web developer, Stephane Manos, Oissam Youssef and Antoon Feras They were friends at college at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada in 2007 and each had a love of computers, the internet and porn. Don’t we all 🙂
2007 was 2 years after YouTube had been launched and people were seeing how fast it took off. And they were thinking porn needed it’s own YouTube as YT was not adult friendly. So a few free porn tube sites started popping up online. One being PornHub.com.
A picture of Antoon Feras.
It was Matt Keezer who purchased the pornhub.com domain name for $2,750 off a guy he met at a playboy mansion party. That’s right, business got done at those parties too 🙂
Matt Keezer has now moved onto running a flight booking website and Youssef and Manos work at a company that buys and grows software business’s.
Their First Start In Adult
Back in 2003 Keezer, Manos and Youssef had already been running sites like Jugg World Ass Listing, KeezMovies and XXX Rated Chicks. These sites were all run under the company named Mansef.
When they first started in adult they focused on big titties… Then they realized MILF was an insanely popular niche… This lead them to combining both of these and targeting big titty MILF content.
They then founded Brazzers which you all know. Due to the niche they targeted they were credited with being the ones that revived the breast augmentation industry. That’s a nice thing to be known for doing… A legacy if you wish.
What Skills Did Each Of The Founders Have?
The roles of each of them were Youssef ran the business, Manos was sales and culture and Keezer was the SEO guy. Antoon said Keezer was the best SEO in the world and was able to rank a website at the top of google for porn words “porn” and “sex”. These are lottery terms for any adult website owner. Niche Porn Sites ranks number 1 on google for the term “Niche Porn” but we are still working on ranking number 1 for “porn” :p
What Was The Biggest Advancement For PornHub?
Without a doubt the biggest game changer for PornHub was when Fabian purchased it and started looking at it solely as a data business. Fabian was the creator of the NATS affiliate software which is what almost every affiliate program worth joining uses. His objective for NATS was simple, he wanted to create as many possibilities as possible for people to spend money. He later sold NATS and used the proceeds to start purchasing the tubes and porn production companies. Fabian started collecting detailed data tracking all the sexual fantasies of it’s millions of users each day. With all this data he then used it to increase user experience and with that targeting of advertisements. The site was converting more and more people and increasing earnings ten fold. Here is a video of Fabian discussing PornHub with his brother Oliver Thylmann.
And here Fabian discusses Manwin, SN-Invest, YouPorn and NATS. He also reveals people go to the porn tube for 9 minutes to jerk off then leave. In India this time is 12 minutes. Why? Who knows. He talks about why it’s hard to sell things other than adult content on these sites because these people are only on the site to get off, and not to make any purchases like new Televisions.
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