[tbassetto]

A few months ago, we managed to get a former Lead Software Engineer of Manwin (YouPorn & Co) to give a talk at a Paris Hackers meetup. If I remember well, he told us that the amount of their funding has never been matched by a company covered on Techcrunch.

[manuelflara]

Seeing as there have been several $100M+ funding stories on TechCrunch, I have a hard time believing this.

[coldtea]

$100M+ might not be much in their line of work.

From wikipedia:

Manwin is the owner of many major pornographic web 2.0 websites including YouPorn, Pornhub, Tube8, XTube, ExtremeTube, JuicyBoys, Webcams, Mydirtyhobby, KeezMovies and SpankWire which between them generate some 16 billion visitors per month and consequently are believed to be among the most popular websites on the planet. Manwin also owns and operates a number of pornographic content brands such as Brazzers, Digital Playground, Mofos, MyDirtyHobby and Twistys.

So they control half (or more) of the biggest money maker on the internet. A far better investment than Instagram (with it's ridiculous $1 billion) ever was.

[manuelflara]

Wow, I didn't know there were that big. But 16 billion visitors? How is that counted?

[corin_]

People often have a hard time getting the terminology right. 16 billion visitors is synonymous with 16 billion uniques, so not possible - by quite some way.

If you load the site, then click a few links (say 4 pages in total), then close your tab/window, then load the site and click a few more links (another 4 pages) then you are 1 visitor, 2 visits, 8 pageviews.

From the wording I would imagine they mean visits, but from that number pageviews seems easier to believe.

Related: I blame Google Analytics for much of the confusion, as they are one of the few places (at least that I've come across) that refer to unique users as "visitors", and I've found that trips up many people when compared with "visits".

[prawn]

Could Incognito/etc inflate a user count dramatically? How does Analytics count those?

[corin_]

I would imagine the answer is no, but it's not something I've ever tested. Likely will do sometime soon now you've put the idea in my head.

The reason I think no is that Google are probably clever enough to fingerprint you in a hell of a lot of ways, but I could be wrong..

[ScottWhigham]

Me too. Besides, what makes me think that the "lead software engineer" (LSE?) for any company reads TC? Most LSEs wouldn't even know what it is. Seems a strange thing for him to have said.

OP - not trying to discredit you or be rude so I hope my comments don't come across that way. I'm just talking about the actual comment form the LSE.

[coldtea]

>Me too. Besides, what makes me think that the "lead software engineer" (LSE?) for any company reads TC? Most LSEs wouldn't even know what it is. Seems a strange thing for him to have said.

This does not even make sense.

Where do you see even the slightest incompatibility of being a LSE for a company and reading TC?

[ScottWhigham]

TC, at it's inception, was a company about and for the startup community. LSE at a large corporation is about as far from the startup community as you can get. As I said, most LSEs wouldn't even know what it is.

[coldtea]

Google is a large corporation. Apple is a large corporation. Yahoo is a large corporation. Still, I bet you their LSE know fully what TC is.

LSE's often leave large corporations to create their own startups. Or have created their own startups in the past (think Brad Fitzpatrick, for example). Or the want to move on to management (which is were knowing the market is beneficial, and TC helps).

Perhaps when you hear LSE you have some ancient, bureaucratic, enterprise, just finishing replacing COBOL with Java in mind, and mindless J2EE programmer drones. But not all --or even most-- LSEs are like that. And said company, Manwin, is as far from the typical bureaucratic old enterprise as you can get.