Some time ago, I suggested (probably not alone) that the real danger to adult entertainment was not piracy but rather, user-generated content. As a web guy (I’ve ever worked in adult or anything), it was clear that a site like YouPorn would be a major threat to adult entertainment. What’s YouPorn? Think YouTube, for porn.
I am at the Paid Content shindig and I got a chance to meet some folks from Portfolio. What does Conde Nast’s $120M project Portfolio have to do with smut? Well, Portolfio has a fantastic piece on the site.
Turns out all of that porn could be yours for $20M. That’s how much the founder of the site, Stephen Paul Jones, wanted to sell it to Vivid Entertainment for.
Who knew? Other tidbits:
- site is growing 37.5% per month
- ad revenue is $120,000 per month
- Just nine months after going live, in September 2006, YouPorn was on pace to log about 15 million unique visitors in May, 2007.
- World’s #1 rated adult site when measured by traffic.
Turns out size matters, but not that much, Vivid passed on the deal. But this is more about Portfolio.com than YouPorn. Unlike so many of the stories in business media that are rehashes of press releases or simply a mouthpiece of management team members, this article really goes beneath the surface.
“It turns out there is a Stanford alum named Stephen Paul Jones. But he’s fortyish, not 27, and he lives in South Lake Tahoe, California, not Newport Beach.”
Read it all on the Portfolio site.
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