MindGeek
 |
|
| Privately held | |
| Industry |
Adult industry Information Technology (IT) |
| Predecessor | Mansef, Manwin |
| Founded | June 2004 (as Mansef) |
| Headquarters | Luxembourg City, Luxembourg |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
| Products | Pornographic films |
| Services | |
| Owner | David Marmorstein Tassillo, Feras Antoon |
|
Number of employees
|
1000+ |
| Website | mindgeek |
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.
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.
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Wikipedia