[HN Gopher] MindGeek: The secretive owner of Pornhub and RedTube
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MindGeek: The secretive owner of Pornhub and RedTube
Author : feross
Score : 139 points
Date : 2020-12-17 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ve55 wrote:
| If I owned MindGeek I don't think I'd be too open about it either
| given the types of articles I'd start seeing on the front pages
| of outlets about me. What do they expect?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| thepasswordis wrote:
| To the people who want to pretend like pornhub is just another
| tech company, or who think it's cute that they might hold
| business meetings in front of pornography scenes:
|
| I would just ask you to read some of the stories of the women who
| are abused by this industry. They're not uncommon, and they're
| not anything like the "abuse" somebody might describe in a manual
| labor job. Some of these stories sound like these women are
| essentially being raped, over and over, for profit, and then
| their abuse is being viewed by millions of people on the internet
| every day.
|
| It's not cute, and there is a reason why the founder of this
| company would want to hide his name. He is trafficking in what is
| often times videos of the worst moments of some women's lives.
|
| Read the stories that Mia Khalifa has put out, or Stoya, or
| girlsdoporn, or "exploited college girls", or watch the
| documentary "hot girls wanted". This stuff is _horrible_ , and
| "mindgeek" appears to have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for
| the toll that their exploitation of these women takes on them.
| nicbou wrote:
| Even if you completely ignore the rape and abuse, the front
| page routinely features some pretty brutal stuff. I'm not sure
| it's the sort of stuff that should be normalised.
| cwwc wrote:
| sad to see this so highly downvoted. seems people don't want
| admit what they themselves have normalized
| wintorez wrote:
| Looking at their website reminded me of this scene from Silicon
| Valley: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZKcn6MYPYPs
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Don't think this is any longer the case. MindGeek being the
| company behind most of the large porn brands has been known for
| years.
| perardi wrote:
| It's not so much that a secret that MindGeek is the holding
| company behind all this, it's more that MindGeek itself is a
| cipher. From the article...
|
| "No entity exemplifies this more than MindGeek, which with very
| little scrutiny or accountability, has quietly become the
| dominant porn company. The Montreal-based business is the owner
| of several of the sector's most visited sites including
| Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn. At least according to public
| financial records, MindGeek towers over the pornography
| industry in Europe and America.
|
| Despite this, basic facts about the company are largely
| unknown. That includes its main owner--a businessman called
| Bernard Bergemar, whose name is almost completely invisible on
| the Internet but who has a claim to the title of the world's
| most successful porn tycoon. Until this Financial Times
| investigation, his identity was secret, known only to a small
| circle of MindGeek executives and their advisers."
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I mean, being a porn tycoon isn't exactly something you use
| in an introduction.
|
| "Pleased to meet you, I'm Bergemar, frequently known as the
| Lord of Porn, but you may also know me as the..."
| d33lio wrote:
| I can only imagine... "pleasure to meet you, I peddle
| petabytes of digital tits and ass"
|
| edit - petabytes
| fakedang wrote:
| Petabytes more like it, although the recent purge might
| have brought it down back to TB territory.
|
| That being said, this was the only introduction that
| elicited a chuckle out of me.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I assume it's very unlikely in puritan US, but more
| tolerated, say, in Czechia
| elric wrote:
| Porn tycoons don't refer to themselves as porn tycoons. But
| it's not like they're secretive about it. They're about as
| open about it as other people are about their non-porn
| business. Sometimes it comes up in conversation, sometimes
| it doesn't, but it's not like anyone's out denying it or
| anything.
|
| Source: worked in porn.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| Most are most certainly hiding it.
|
| Everyone in adult uses shell companies. The vast majority
| of them don't tell their neighbors and the local PTA what
| they do, so they are pretty secretive. I knew some execs
| whose wives didn't even know what they did.
|
| source: worked in adult for decades.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I lived in LA for a long while and met lots of porn
| people over the years.
|
| My experience was the performers tended to be pretty
| casual about mentioning it socially. Maybe not the first
| thing they bring up, but it would come around eventually.
| They also tended to be sort of proud of it.
|
| The crew people tended to be a little more low key about
| it, but mostly because they did legit film crew work as
| well and worried it might hurt them if higher ups knew.
| And the union thing applied to some. Couldn't do non-
| union work officially.
|
| I only ever met low-end producers. They didn't care who
| knew what they did, at all. My social circles didn't
| include the big time porn producers (this was back in the
| day when DVDs were still sort of viable).
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > Source: worked in porn.
|
| Should I assume in an IT-related role? If so, anything
| you can share (without naming names) about what's
| different or special, from a technical standpoint,
| compared to a "normal" company?
| arcticbull wrote:
| "Hey, I'm Bergemar, I run a tech company called MindGeek.
| Oh, you haven't heard of it? Yeah, we're focused on adult
| entertainment."
| wongarsu wrote:
| "I'm the owner of the fourth largest video streaming site,
| and a couple of smaller ones" seems like a great
| introduction to me.
| swarnie_ wrote:
| "We recently had to purge 80% of our content because we
| couldn't say with any certainty that it was legal"
|
| Not something i would like to have on my business card.
| wolco2 wrote:
| Something like 98%
| troublewizard wrote:
| Before Fabian cashed out of Manwin/MindGeek, I spent a short time
| writing code for him in the early days. It is for sure a very
| deep, shady network of people and entities.
|
| At the same time he ran Manwin, he also owned several file
| hosting websites (some of which I wrote code for) he would
| directly promote on piracy & porn forums under alias. Most of
| these were filled with child abuse and his policy was to remove
| the links but not the files when receiving takedown notices (as
| he paid out through an affiliate system for promoting these
| links). He cashed out on most of these when people started
| digging, but kept hold of some of the torrent trackers he ran.
|
| About time people like this are revealed for who they really are.
| The piracy, not so bad. Turning a blind eye to child abuse,
| pretty bad.
| mikkergp wrote:
| On LinkedIn the first name that comes up as an employee of
| Mindgeek is a backend developer named Hugh Janus. That is all.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Legal advisors: Bohlsach, Wang and Company
| SmokeyHamster wrote:
| Director of Marketing: Izai Sum Ding
| swarnie_ wrote:
| Tech support by Ben Dover?
| msandford wrote:
| Ease up everyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Talk#Humor
| tyurok wrote:
| Jon Ronson has a good audiobook covering this[0] with a follow-up
| on a pornstar's death[1].
|
| It covers a little bit of the MindGeek story but primarily how
| pornhub rebuilt the industry.
|
| [0]: http://www.jonronson.com/butterfly.html
|
| [1]: https://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Days-of-August-
| audiobook/dp/...
| polote wrote:
| I dont understand what is secretive about Pornhub and Mindgeek,
| it is pretty obvious that Redtube, Pornhub, Youporn,... belongs
| to the same entity as there is a banner at the top named "PornHub
| network".
|
| There are several Pornhub employees, reading HN, answering
| questions same happens on Reddit, they are pretty transparent
| actually.
|
| I don't understand why we need those articles making feel like we
| are in science fiction. If you want really secret businesses look
| into dating apps or Google/Facebook ads
|
| Edit: and just to add, imagine how hard is it to run pornhub.
| Even though watching porn is one of the most common leisure in
| the world. Nobody want to work with them, nobody want to rent
| them servers, nobody want to sell them their ads, nobody want to
| be their payment processor ,... because porn is taboo. So yeah
| they probably have to find tricky ways to do things. At the end
| of the day they only make 500m of revenu, which is nothing,
| Tinder only is making 3-4 times that.
| 420codebro wrote:
| You're daft as fuck rofl. The reason there is controversy is
| Pornhub and Mindgeek host revenge and child porn.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| Years ago I supported some networking equipment. We had a
| customer who had a name I didn't recognize. I was always curious
| about who buys our product and this company was hard to track
| down as to what they ... do / if they even existed.
|
| Then the tech support case went on and they sent me the logs I
| requested... yeah lots of dns related entries for porn sites and
| etc.
|
| I really don't know if they just provides services to other porn
| companies or what but it explained a lot. Even talking to them on
| the phone they were really careful about how the characterized
| the traffic. Accordingly I never asked them anything about it,
| just solved the issue(s) and moved on.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Lots of companies involved in selling, renting, leasing and
| supporting big piles of 1U servers at major traffic exchange
| points have had dealings with the porn industry. Whether they
| know it or not.
|
| It looks very mundane when eyeballing the bare metal, like a
| few 44U cabinets full of supermicro, dell or custom whitebox
| servers.
| monocasa wrote:
| And just about anyone who sells JBODs too. They go through
| JBODs like you wouldn't believe.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Sample size of one here, but I've seen vast amounts of
| customized for the purpose ZFS stuff. Some designed for
| longer term slower storage, sort of a cousin of the
| backblaze storage pod, and others designed for higher
| throughput.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Porn is probably 50% of the internet, the other 40% is online
| streaming (netflix, amazon video, youtube etc) the last 10%
| is other traffic.
|
| Pretty much all of the big telcos, all of the networking
| equipment makers etc - are made out of porn money at the end
| of it all.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| According to Forbes [1], it's much less:
|
| > In 2010, out of the million most popular (most
| trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related
| sites. That's about 4% of sites.
|
| > From July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches
| were for erotic content.
|
| Granted, that's number of sites and not content/traffic,
| but streaming has exploded in the past decade, so I doubt
| it's gone up.
|
| They also specifically call out the "50%" claim, and say
| it's an outdated one from the early days of the web, from
| when it was more niche and had a more male-dominated
| culture.
|
| Side note, the most interesting part of the article, and
| relevant here:
|
| > So what's the most popular porn site on the planet?
|
| > The single most popular adult site in the world is
| LiveJasmin.com, a webcam site which gets around 32 million
| visitors a month, or almost 2.5% of all Internet users!
|
| > You're telling me a webcam site is more popular than
| PornHub?
|
| But once again, ten-year-old data.
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieruvolo/2011/09/07/how-
| much...
| barkingcat wrote:
| Yah .. I wouldn't trust Forbes re: porn on the internet.
|
| Ask your 18 year old son and he'll tell you the truth.
| noizejoy wrote:
| But what are numbers for network traffic (percentage of
| petabytes transmitted)?
| walrus01 wrote:
| From an ISP perspective with a _lot_ of singlehomed
| business and residential users, the vast majority of
| traffic by volume in Gbps is not immediately obvious as
| porno. It 's normal looking traffic coming from the major
| CDNs, youtube, netflix, amazon, hulu, etc. And then from
| the big cloud providers (amazon aws, google/gcp, azure,
| etc)
|
| For a small ISP that's purely buying transit, once they
| establish a presence at a major IX point and can peer
| with some huge content sources, it'll drop their transit
| bill in half almost immediately.
|
| Then you do have porno content coming from huge hosting
| companies/entities such as Choopa.
|
| https://www.peeringdb.com/net/813
|
| It's actually pretty rare to peer directly with a porn
| host, if I had to guess at it, I'd say most of the
| traffic is coming in via transits such as hurricane,
| cogent, telia, ntt, etc.
|
| one note, ISP traffic isn't measured in disk space
| measurements like terabytes or petabytes, it's measured
| in present tense Mbps or Gbps.
| noizejoy wrote:
| Sounds to me like it's quite difficult to determine
| traffic percentages then. - Which in turn makes any
| discussion of "porn is x% of the Internet" kind of
| impossible to have in a realistic way.
| throwaway_45 wrote:
| 35% of internet traffic is porn
|
| https://www.webroot.com/us/en/resources/tips-
| articles/intern...
| ma2rten wrote:
| I would have guessed that the average person spends more
| time watching non-porn movies than porn and that non-porn
| streaming takes more bandwidth because it tends to be
| higher quality.
| yardie wrote:
| I went to a HN meetup many years ago and one of the engineers
| from Mindgeek was presenting. It was one of the better attended
| events (standing room only) and he was quite candid about the
| technology they were using. Cloud was still nascent and with TB
| databases and PB of videos AWS wasn't an option a serious
| option.
|
| It's porn, it's not exactly illegal but from what I understand
| they were very careful about managing transactions. Always
| moving card processors, and they had to tell users the
| transaction was coming from different names simply because
| buyers didn't want Pornhub.com showing up on the credit
| statement.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| >they were really careful
|
| This is something a pornstar elucidated for me on Eric
| Weinstein's podast[0] - note, he goes out of his way to keep
| the discussion "PG" so as to be listenable to as many people as
| possible. Payment procecessors are a de-facto regulator and
| skew conservative.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHNBCVGH34c
| snarkypixel wrote:
| Small anecdote. At some point I was hiring designers and had a
| few candidates listing MindGeek on their resumes. I didn't think
| too much of it.. until I saw the portfolio! It was kind of an
| awkward moment looking at a designer's portfolio of porn landing
| pages with all my colleagues/employees around, and trying to keep
| a straight face while evaluating the design of huge boobs taking
| 90% of the page. Turns out MingGeek is a big employer of junior
| designers. They pay well and are extremely professional.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| There was a scene/episode in HBO's Silicon Valley where they go
| to a pornsite operator conference that was b2b. Other than
| their hilarious made-up names for each website and their niche,
| it was just another boring business conference.
| throwaway287391 wrote:
| Did they really not provide censored versions of their
| screenshots or give you some sort of warning before you opened
| their portfolio? That's funny, but IMHO it doesn't sound very
| professional when applying to work at a non-porn business if
| that's the case.
| pluc wrote:
| I worked there for 2 months, AMA.
| jariel wrote:
| Is there any legitimacy to the notion their b-model was built
| effectively on 'piracy' and that they ignored take down
| requests?
| pluc wrote:
| I can't really speak to the early history, but I mean they
| bought most of the Tubesites back then which we all know had
| a fair amount of piracy - so from a guess, I'd say they were
| aware and it was part of the strategy, yeah. For the takedown
| requests, no idea.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| i think the record speaks for itself on this. its pretty well
| understood what the previous owners were up to and how they
| originally populated the site with content.
|
| no employee can confirm nor deny this for legal reasons or
| just lack of access to that part of the system/code.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| It's true of YouTube back in the day, it's not unreasonable
| to think it's probably true of other tube sites too.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Were you located in Montreal?
|
| Second question: Do you think there's anything unique about the
| culture in Montreal (as compared to the rest of Canada) that
| makes it a good place to have an office of people working on
| porno related content?
| pluc wrote:
| Yes, and I don't think so. People are generally open-minded
| here but I think the same would be true for most of America
| at least when it comes to "professional" pornography.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Based in Montreal? How secretive was the hiring process?
| brummm wrote:
| I know a few people that work there. It's a normal tech
| company, like many others. There is nothing secretive about
| it.
| auxym wrote:
| I used to live on Montreal and came across PornHub job
| postings a few times on indeed. Very open, claiming unique
| challenges due to being the largest porn site in the world,
| etc.
|
| They don't seem to have anything up atm, maybe they stopped
| posting on indeed.
| pluc wrote:
| Yes. Not secretive at all.
| waterfirezero wrote:
| i am about to apply for a job there (Montreal). How is the
| working environment?
| pluc wrote:
| There's a real corporate feel to it that I didn't expect.
| Some people have been there for a decade and have gotten very
| comfortable. There's a strong hierarchy - directors,
| managers, leads, and everyone else.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| It's just a normal tech company inside. What's the pos you
| are applying for? Just curious.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Would be great to hear in general what the work environment was
| like, what the work itself was like, the holiday parties, etc.
| From previous AMAs for this and similar companies, the takeaway
| seems to always be: It's a lot more "normal" inside the company
| than people expect.
|
| Some specific questions:
|
| * When engineers and QE are doing their regular dev+testing
| work all day long, do they use actual videos from the site, or
| are there "tame" videos used for dev+test so as to not be so
| distracting?
|
| * Similar to above, how much of the day (like, how many hours)
| would a regular developer or tester be looking at the content?
| Do people become totally desensitized to it? Like, I know
| people say "it's just a regular job", but I have a hard time
| believing people aren't aroused by it, at least part of the
| time.
| pluc wrote:
| > * When engineers and QE are doing their regular dev+testing
| work all day long, do they use actual videos from the site,
| or are there "tame" videos used for dev+test so as to not be
| so distracting?
|
| Real videos. People not wanting to work directly in contact
| with pornography is a huge problem to recruitment.
|
| > * Similar to above, how much of the day (like, how many
| hours) would a regular developer or tester be looking at the
| content? Do people become totally desensitized to it? Like, I
| know people say "it's just a regular job", but I have a hard
| time believing people aren't aroused by it, at least part of
| the time.
|
| Depends what you do, a regular developer probably doesn't
| look at a lot of porn except when testing their stuff in a
| near-prod setting. Some people watch porn all day (eg video
| editors) and there's a high turnover rate there.
|
| Oh, and the work environment was oddly corporate.
| sorahn wrote:
| > It's a lot more "normal" inside the company than people
| expect.
|
| It was, just a tech company doing tech things.
|
| > or are there "tame" videos used for dev+test so as to not
| be so distracting?
|
| We had some public domain videos playing on a loop for
| internal testing environments, or some "screensaver" type
| videos.
|
| > Do people become totally desensitized to it?
|
| Yes, and relatively quickly too. The regular content was more
| looked at as a curiosity. "You found someone doing _what_?"
| "Let me see."
| pocketcheeze wrote:
| Do they pay within the ballpark of big tech? I imagine some of
| their scalability problems require the best of the best.
| wolco2 wrote:
| I'll chime in. No they are not offering FAANG or bay areas
| salaries for equal experience. They would pay wokay for the
| montreal area. Glassdoor lists a system developer role for
| under 100,000 cnd.
| pluc wrote:
| You can't expect bay area salary outside of the bay area.
| They'll pay well with the context of the local market.
| pluc wrote:
| Yeah they'll spend the money on someone they think is worth
| it
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Was there any effort to hide the end product to employees? I
| know that from the outside, MindGeek tries to look like any
| regular tech/data company. Is there a gap between the software
| side of things and the "pornhub website" team? Is the video
| department hidden? How is the culture?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| No it's not. It's pretty open overall. People sometimes
| discuss tech/business details in front of porn scenes as well
| because you have to. And perhaps among the first few
| questions HR is going to ask if you are OK with working for a
| XXX company (they didn't say it directly on my case but
| hinted enough) during the recruit process.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| > People sometimes discuss tech/business details in front
| of porn scenes as well because you have to
|
| Now I am picturing an open office plan with a porn set one
| one end of it. Surely the studios are separated from the
| software departments?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| No it's just some videos played in a TV in meeting room.
| It was for looking at Chrome dev tools I believe. Studios
| are not even in Montreal AFAIK but I could be wrong.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Alright, thanks. My other question was about culture.
|
| What is the demographic? Are there a lot of women, gender
| minorities, etc.? Are things like harassment complaints
| taken seriously? In short, is it a "locker room" culture
| or more similar to what you find elsewhere at web
| agencies in MTL?
| wolco2 wrote:
| It mirrors a regular startup which is more male.
|
| Agencies in general are more populated with women,gender
| minorities for a variety of reasons.
|
| Porn doesn't hang on the walls. And you are more likely
| to find harassment outside of a business like this
| because everyone would try harder to make the female
| welcome because of the sigma.
| pluc wrote:
| Yeah the porn is mostly shot in LA/Miami I think.
| pluc wrote:
| No, porn is very much part of the culture. There are posters
| of porn stars on the walls (like, official company-sponsored
| posters). Asa Akira is one I remember being a popular
| "ambassador". They've had porn stars at their office parties.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| What was their Ops/Infra team like? Is it all self-hosted?
| pluc wrote:
| I don't know how much I can say here but when it comes to
| PornHub and Ads, they're hosted but they pretty much own the
| host (although they don't, just in the sense that they
| probably account for 90%+ of that host's income). I was
| always curious why they didn't straight up buy them - and
| when I asked I was told it was just less trouble this way.
| They don't have much of an ops team though they do have a
| small (<10 devops team)
| msoad wrote:
| why only two months?
| pluc wrote:
| Trial got terminated because (as a manager) I told my
| superior who had just kicked off a project specifically
| mentioning overtime would be needed that if overtime was
| needed it was likely because we didn't plan properly.
| walrus01 wrote:
| There's a couple of mentions of Cyprus in the article, but I'm
| kind of disappointed in how the article doesn't expand into any
| more detail on how having a Cypriot corporation can be used for
| tax avoidance purposes, and to hide the beneficial owners of
| unusual things.
|
| It's my understanding that the part of Mindgeek that rents
| colocation space, owns/leases/runs servers and buys wholesale
| scale Internet access in Canada, is the Cypriot corporation.
|
| This isn't really a "new" thing in the internet porno business,
| people have been doing funny things with panamanian, cypriot,
| maltese, manx, channel islands, nauru corporations and such for
| 20+ years.
| d33lio wrote:
| Cypress is attractive, except for the fact they are the first
| nation to have "tried" a "bail-in" of sorts where the gov't
| pillages the bank accounts of its citizens for monetary relief
| in 2013.
|
| I have a relatively scant understanding of the recent Dodd
| Frank legislation in the U.S. that has outlined how this
| _could_ happen in the U.S. - fortunately it outlines that only
| non FDIC insured assets can be seized by banks.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2013/05/03/the-cypr...
| doubleunplussed wrote:
| Funny. Other countries have inflated away their debt, which
| is essentially the same thing as just taking a certain
| fraction of everyone's money. Printing money to pay debts
| would also have the same effect (since it would cause
| inflation). The only reason Cyprus would have to resort to
| taking its citizens' money is because these options aren't
| available to it, since it doesn't control it's own currency.
|
| You'd never see the US do the same because there's no need -
| a country that controls its own currency should always be
| able to pay its debts.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| And then the Russians (with money in Cyprus) called Putin and
| Cyprus changed course.
| d33lio wrote:
| Interesting. Either HN is controlled by russian money or
| there are people who support bail-ins on HN? (re: my parent
| comment was downvoted?)
| epanchin wrote:
| Is Cyprus much different from Delaware?
| zinekeller wrote:
| > channel islands
|
| Your comment is spot-on, but technically the Channel Islands
| are two separate crown territories (Jersey, Bailiwick of
| Guernsey) with four sub-jurisdictions with its own rules on
| companies (Jersey, Guernsey proper, Sark, and Alderney), but
| there is some co-operation between the, uhm, governments (the
| best description I can use since the specific term differs
| between sub-jurisdictions).
| walrus01 wrote:
| I can't say that I've ever researched it in that much detail
| to know the legal and tax distinctions between the different
| channel islands. All I can say is that if I miraculously woke
| up in charge of a massive porno empire tomorrow, cyprus would
| be high on my list of places to start forming corporations..
| fy20 wrote:
| The Channel Islands (before Brexit) had this weird
| situation where they were not part of the EU (compared to
| Gibraltar which was), but were part of the customs zone.
|
| In the 2000s many CD and DVD retailers setup shop there, as
| they could sell items without VAT.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| For porn and "gaming" (gambling) there aren't many other places
| to register which is why you have these companies in places
| like Cyprus, Malta or Gibraltar it's not necessarily for tax
| avoidance (although they surely do that too) but primarily to
| avoid harassment and legal issues that can arise from being
| registered most other nations.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Putting my tinfoil hat on, i find it suspicious that companies
| like pornhub and onlyfans, which provide a safe income in
| pandemic times, are finding themselves in the spotlight around
| the same days when lawsuits against big tech & co are flying
| around.
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