MindGeek

MindGeek is a privately held Canadian company that focuses primarily on pornography. It owns and operates many popular pornographic websites, including video sharing services Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn. It also owns adult film production companies Brazzers, Digital Playground, Men.com, WhyNotBi. com, Reality Kings, and Sean Cody, among others. Though legally registered in Luxembourg, it operates mainly from Canada with headquarters in Montreal.

About MindGeek in brief

Summary MindGeekMindGeek is a privately held Canadian company that focuses primarily on pornography. MindGeek owns and operates many popular pornographic websites, including video sharing services Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn. It also owns adult film production companies Brazzers, Digital Playground, Men.com, WhyNotBi. com, Reality Kings, and Sean Cody, among others. Though legally registered in Luxembourg, it operates mainly from Canada with headquarters in Montreal and additional offices in Dublin, London, Hamburg, Bucharest, Nicosia, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Diego. It is a member of the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection and uses the \”Restricted To Adults\” label to identify its pornographic websites. Its structure has been described as mostly a way to avoid corporate tax. In December, 2020, a Financial Times expose was published, listing Bernard Bergemar as the main owner of Mind Geek. In March 2013, Mindgeek’s co-owner Feras Antoon and his brother Mark Antoon were cited alongside the CEO of gaming technology giant Amaya Inc. and various of its own senior officers and stakeholders. The Quebec Market Authority investigated Amaya’s executives for trading on privileged information, although some of them were not major players in the information leak ring. In October 2013, Thylmann sold his stake in Manwin to the senior management of the company for USD 100 million, and later in the same month the company’s name was changed to Mind geek.

This took place as Manwin and Redtube, a very large porn tube site not in its network, merged. In April 2011, Manwin raised US$362 million in financing from Colbeck Capital, which Thylman used to buy other pornographic companies such as Playboy TV, Digital playground, Twistys, youPorn, Red Tube, and Gaytube. In November 2013, the company changed its name to MindGeeks. The company has been listed as a de facto Canadian company with subsidiaries in Ireland, Curaçao, Cyprus, Canada, the British Virgin Islands, Germany, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. It has also been identified as a holding company of several companies that have been listed in Luxembourg and all of them have been identified by the Financial Times as holding companies in countries such as the UK, Ireland, Canada and Cyprus. It was also identified as the holding company for several companies in Cyprus and Canada that have all been listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange. In August 2013, it was revealed that the company had a complex structure that included multiple holding companies, some of which were based in Ireland and others in the UK and Canada. In January 2014, it announced that it would be closing its offices in London, Dublin, Hamburg and Bucharest to focus on its operations in the U.S. and other European countries. In May 2014, Mind Geeks announced it was closing its London office and moving its operations to San Diego, California.