technology it predecessor mansef manwin founded june 2004 ; 12 years ago 2004 06 1 2 headquarters luxembourg city luxembourg area served worldwide products pornographic films services content delivery online advertising streaming media owner david marmorstein tassillo feras antoon number of employees 1000 3 website mindgeek.com mindgeek is a global it company active in content delivery streaming media and online advertising 4 the company is a privately held conglomerate headquartered in luxembourg city with offices in dublin hamburg london los angeles miami montreal and nicosia . 3 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 . 5 contents 1 history 1.1 origins and early history 1.2 timeline of acquisitions growth and partnerships by manwin and mindgeek 2 adult industry 2.1 pornhub network 2.2 pornographic movie studios 2.3 global alexa ranks 3 advertising 3.1 malvertising 4 age controls and child protection 4.1 asacp 4.2 age verification in the uk 5 antitrust lawsuit against icm and icann 6 patent lawsuits 7 no on government waste committee 8 references 9 external links history edit origins and early history edit in the late 1990s german born fabian thylmann created nats next generation affiliate tracking software which was used for marketing pornography across different websites . 6 in 2006 thylmann sold his shares in the company that controlled nats and used the proceeds to purchase the privat amateure website . 7 between 2006 and 2010 thylmann bought three more web sites ; mydirtyhobby webcams and xtube . 5 the domain name manwin.com was first registered in august 2007 . 8 acquisition of mansef and webcams 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 . 5 9 thylmann also bought webcams.com in a separate deal during the same period . 10 manwin gets wall street loan from colbeck capital 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 . 11 mindgeek created through merger with redtube and management buyout in october 2013 thylmann sold his stake in manwin to the senior management of the company 12 and later in the same month the company s name was changed to mindgeek . 13 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 . 14 links to insider trading investigation 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 . 15 timeline of acquisitions growth and partnerships by manwin and mindgeek edit june 2010 manwin opened videobash.com . 5 september 2010 manwin acquired eurorevenue which owned various niche pornography sites . 16 november 2010 manwin introduced celebs.com . 5 december 2010 manwin entered into a partnership with wicked pictures to manage wicked pictures paysites . 17 may 2011 manwin acquired the pornographic video sharing website youporn . 18 june 2011 manwin bought all adult related assets of carsed marketing incorporated including twistys twistys cash affiliate program gaytube sextube and trannytube . 19 june 2011 manwin created 3dxstar in a partnership with funky monkey productions . 20 november 2011 manwin became an operating partner of playboy managing the brand s online and entertainment business playboy plus entertainment which operates a number of television channels and online services based in the uk and benelux . 21 playboy ceo scott flanders later described the deal as the biggest mistake i ve made at the company 22 saying that playboy should not have association with being in the sex act business . 22 in the spring of 2014 playboy took back control of playboy.com at significant expense 22 although mindgeek still retained control of playboy tv and playboy plus and mindgeek still owns the spice tv channels which were also bought from playboy . 22 november 2011 manwin launched legendary stats a service which aggregates multiple affiliate programs and is targeted at affiliate site operators with large traffic volumes . 23 january 2012 manwin signed a deal to acquire the assets of the american pornographic movie studio digital playground . 24 april 2012 manwin and miami based rk netmedia inc. filed a merger notification jointly authorized by manwin and reality kings with the austrian federal competition authority . 25 in september 2012 manwin completed the acquisition . 26 company documents show that following the deal in the autumn rk holdings gave a dublin company manwin content rk the right to use thousands of its pornography movies . 27 june 2012 manwin launched babes.com for its glamcore network . 28 july 2013 manwin filed a merger notification with the austrian competition authority to acquire redtube.com . 29 during the summer of 2013 manwin mindgeek acquired all of redtube properties from hong kong based bright imperial ltd. for an undisclosed sum . 30 in december 2013 the domain name redtube8.xxx was also transferred to mindgeek after a trademark dispute . 30 december 2014 mindgeek announced they had signed a deal to manage the online assets of really useful ltd. some of which include the websites bdsm.xxx casting.xxx czech.xxx danejones.com fakeagent.com faketaxi.com lesbea.com massagerooms.com mature.xxx mom.xxx orgasms.xxx publicagent.com publicsex.xxx teen.xxx and tubes.xxx . 31 april 2015 playboy plus and m7 group formed a partnership to launch reality kings tv in benelux and central and eastern europe on satellite tv services . 32 may 2015 mindgeek signed a distribution deal with pulse distribution one of the largest distributors of adult entertainment to distribute content from mindgeek s movie studios including content from brazzers and digital playground and dvds from babes.com men.com mofos and reality kings . 33 adult industry edit in 2013 the adult industry news website xbiz described mindgeek as the largest adult entertainment operator globally 12 34 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 . 35 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 . 36 pornhub network edit the pornhub network is a network of web 2.0 websites accessible through mindgeek s pornmd search engine . 37 mindgeek owns and operate all of the websites in the pornhub network which include gaytube 19 peeperz 38 porniq launched by pornhub 39 pornmd 40 pornhub 41 redtube 41 thumbzilla tube8 41 xtube 42 and youporn . 41 mindgeek used to own extremetube 41 spankwire 41 and keezmovies 38 but in october 2015 spankwire extremetube and keezmovies were sold to an undisclosed party . 43 additional citation needed 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 44 and a december 2014 article in adweek states that pornhub has 50 million daily visitors . 45 pornhub.com scores at alexa global rank 72 as of 19 december 2014 . 46 according to trafficestimate.com redtube.com generates over 90 million visits per month 47 and youporn.com generates almost 80 million visits per month 48 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 . 49 pornography for mobile devices mindgeek s mobile pornography websites handle millions of visits each day in north america 50 51 they were awarded the future mobile award for mobile adult services by juniper research in 2012 . 52 53 54 pornographic movie studios edit mindgeek owns the pornographic movie studios babes.com 28 brazzers digital playground reality kings twistys 55 and men.com 56 57 they manage the websites of wicked pictures 58 and really useful ltd. 31 and they established 3dxstar in partnership with funky monkey productions . 20 mindgeek also manage playboy s online and television operations although they no longer manage playboy.com 22 see history section above . 58 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 . 59 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 . 60 reality pornography mindgeek owns the reality pornography commercial pornography that emulates amateur pornography video websites mofos 40 mydirtyhobby 40 sextube 19 and webcams . 40 global alexa ranks edit alexa rank 61 27 april 2016 domain 65 pornhub.com 181 redtube.com 217 youporn.com 393 tube8.com 1578 brazzers.com 2230 pornmd.com 5145 realitykings.com 6513 thumbzilla.com 7023 digitalplayground.com 9035 mydirtyhobby.com 9683 men.com 10533 mofos.com 12787 gaytube.com 13546 babes.com 18675 twistys.com 57894 sextube.com 124783 porniq.com 140472 peeperz.com 152657 webcams.com advertising edit mindgeek host advertisements on their sites using their trafficjunky ad network which receives billions of ad impressions on a daily basis . 62 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 . 45 63 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 45 which would be likely to benefit pornhub since according to price it s still taboo to advertise on x rated sites like pornhub . 45 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 . 64 malvertising edit 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 . 65 66 the claims were made by security researcher 67 conrad longmore who writes a blog on malware spam and scams . 68 longmore s figures were collected using google safe browsing diagnostics 69 which looks for harmful content on websites and the statistics for two sites ; xhamster and pornhub were published by bbc news . 65 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 . 65 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