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Looks like another example of porn companies pushing the envelope with technology. They were accepting credit cards online before virtually anyone. In fact, I

• swalsh 10y ago
  Ah the classic MVP
  • spacemanmatt 10y ago
    I regret that I have but one upvote to give to this post. But it's completely true that those are the classic 3.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • ethbro 10y ago
    There are so many definitions of that in this context.
  • erelde 10y ago
    I knew Microsoft was involved somehow.
• takdi 10y ago
  Not really. Pornhub is very late in tech. Their website is a lot buggy. A lot of thumbnails don't load. They were very late on HD. And you can't even pay with bitcoin. It would be perfect for pornsite. And their is still no Netflix equivalent for porn which is very expensive when you compare to a normal show which is a lot more expensive to make
  • user5994461 10y ago
    How could there be there be a NetFlix for porn??? Everything is already available for free.
    • 7Z7 10y ago
      Just like TV shows..
      • user5994461 10y ago
        Nah. TV shows can be hard to find (especially right after release) and of variable quality, plus the sites can be very shady with worse ads/adware than all porn sites combined [not to mention that they tend to be closed or ISP blocked fairly often]. Porn is reliably served by many _respectable_ sites.
        • EpicEng 10y ago
          'hard to find, as in, ' two second search on TPB or opening popcorntime'?
    • takdi 10y ago
      Not at all. Nothing is available in full HD. Torrent are hard to find and die quickly. But everything for movie and TV show is available for free easily but still everything is working great for Netflix.
      • icebraining 10y ago
        Not at all. Nothing is available in full HD. Torrent are hard to find and die quickly. Actually they are available - including 4k, even VR - just not on public trackers :)
    • shams93 10y ago
      Yeah the free sites are owned by the same German company, they basically jack your material as soon as it hit DVD, now that doesn't happen because they destroyed 90% of the industry.
    • SixSigma 10y ago
      If you can't compete on price, you compete on service and quality
  • ryan-c 10y ago
    I'm sure they don't allow payment in bitcoin because they want recurring subscriptions.
  • temp 10y ago
    >And you can't even pay with bitcoin. Sounds like a good thing to me.
  • cerrelio 10y ago
    Pornhub doesn't generate most of their money from subscriptions. It was never their primary business model to do that. It's mostly ad and referral revenue. I also think most tube sites run on thin margins or even at a loss. And like a commenter below mentioned, you can't do recurring payments with bitcoin. It's strictly a push payment, and even if there were a third party or service that could effect a recurring payment model, it would be too risky. A good chunk of porn site revenue comes from rebills to people who forget to cancel their subscription after they've joined at 2am Saturday morning, drunk/high, needing to pound one out before passing out. (This is literally the description of a typical customer a porn studio manager gave me.)
• AnkhMorporkian 10y ago
  > military, video games or porn. If only we could get them to all combine their powers. Sort of a DARPA-Psyonix-PornHub merger. I'll bring it up at the next G8.
  • Raphmedia 10y ago
    Wait until PornHub get big into robotic. The army might be pushing big bulky robots but I bet that it's the porn industry that will get us great androids that will end up being used for everyday life.
    • mentalpiracy 10y ago
      think I can get YC to accept me based on a deck pitching a joint venture between porn and biotech on artificial skin?
      • komali2 10y ago
        I don't know but I accept you.
      • erichocean 10y ago
        > biotech on artificial skin I've got a bunch of projects on that kicking around. Wish I had more time.
    • throwaway1974 10y ago
      > Wait until PornHub get big into robotic Westworld springs to mind
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    • akerro 10y ago
      > Wait until PornHub get big into robotic. The army might be pushing big bulky robots Imagine... World War of Dicks.
• cerrelio 10y ago
  I worked for a porn company for 2 years. I can say that the engineers and ad people there are probably some of the best I've worked with in my career. The company I worked for several years ago was eventually acquired by MindGeek (formerly Manwin) after I left. It was one of the only companies where I truly felt that they would let their engineers experiment and grow. If an idea sounded like it could bring more traffic or increase the quality of traffic, they'd let you do it. If that idea didn't pan out in a short period of time (~3 months), then it was canned and they tried something new. I work at a very large global corporation now and I'm shocked (and bored) at how drawn out their development cycles are, and at how little license they give their engineers to be creative. The risk averseness makes it almost impossible to bring anything into production. I'd go back to porn if it weren't for the fact the industry as a whole seems to be very secretive and mafia-like.
  • takdi 10y ago
    Why is it mafia like?
    • ianai 10y ago
      It's a fringe of society so people get abusive. I thought once you worked for a porn company you would almost never get out of the industry.
      • cerrelio 10y ago
        Usually. There were a lot of lifers there. I left the company about a decade ago and I'd say about 80% of the people I worked with are still there. However, my particular skill set is very adaptable and I found better pay elsewhere. Regardless, I very much miss the engineering culture I experienced there.
    • Raphmedia 10y ago
      I know that some companies are very secretive about it. One big company here in Montreal never advertise that they develop pornographic products. You kind of know it from word of mouth or it's a surprise during the interview. They also change name every other year. They don't want they employees to be stigmatized for it, I would guess.
• malchow 10y ago
  This is a really clever way to effect this result, but still presents the two classic issues with anti-adblock methods: 1) distorts the ad marketplace, resulting in impressions that may be paid and not seen, or seen and not paid, and; 2) anti-consumer experience, as the consumer expects no ads. Disclosure: Years ago I cofounded a company that offers a private ad exchange to large sites, and recently released a Subscriptions service that is able to blank out ads with good technical hygiene for paying subscribers. [1] [1] http://subscriptions.publir.com/ http://subscriptions.publir.com/
• uw_rob 10y ago
  It appears that this isn't one of those cases. On June 27th, someone pointed out in the Chrome bug tracker[0] that an ad network called RevDefender started using WebSockets to deliver ads. [0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353#c57 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129353...
• hackerboos 10y ago
  Like that time they chose HD-DVD over Blu-ray.
  • hackerboos 10y ago
    The idea that the porn industry was the first to process credit cards online is a laughable fable peddled by the industry itself. The first online orders were processed by Netmarket[1][2] which had nothing to do with the porn industry. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetMarket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetMarket [2] - http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shoppers-internet-is-open.html http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shopper...
• Excluse 10y ago
  > In fact, I think most innovations in technology come from either the military, video games or porn. Also, finance. Machine Learning for trading algos, Bitcoin/Blockchain etc.
  • DashRattlesnake 10y ago
    And mainframe-driven batch processes.
  • lima 10y ago
    Also a large portion of the data science stack. Finance heavily contributed to the Scientific Python ecosystem for example.
  • riskable 10y ago
    Yeah, finance "innovated" itself into a recession. Bitcoin is the exception, not the rule. And the machine learning in finance isn't very innovative at all. In fact, working in the industry I'd say they really don't know what they're doing! They just try stuff and see what works (at a glacial pace no less).
• hammock 10y ago
  Porn company also invented the little video preview that pops up when you hover over the timeline of a YouTube. (sorry no source handy on mobile)
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• nodivbyzero 10y ago
  Also, those company invest their money into VR tech.
• alvil 10y ago
  Certainly. As described here http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.com/2016/01/tcltk-vs-web-we-should-abandon-web.html?m=1 http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.com/2016/01/tcltk-vs-w...
• guessmyname 10y ago
  > [...] porn companies pushing the envelope with technology. I used to work as the lead developer of a big adult online store and its associated social network website, at the beginning I was ashamed to talk about it with my non-coworker friends because talking about porn and sex toys is not well seen in my home country because there is a lot of religious people. It was not until at year later that I realized that I was gaining more experience as a software engineer with the challenges in this project than in previous jobs. Now I am very proud of the work I did there, and although HR people still cringe every time I talk about it during interviews I always end up seeing a face of amusement when they hear about the challenges that my team had to face. If it weren't because finding the careers page in these websites is difficult I would happily apply to work there. I understand that working in the sex industry is still a taboo (either as a model, manager, developer, etc) we have to agree to what my grandfather used to say: Sex and Food, that's what sells.
• cetak11 10y ago
  Yup. I worked at a telecom hardware company a decade or so ago. Most of the telecom hardware boards that run today's call centers, were built in the early days to support phone sex lines.
• JoblessWonder 10y ago
  I wrote a longish (15 page) research paper on how pornography has driven/chosen new technologies since ancient times! It was interesting to see the many, many examples of it throughout so many different aspects of everyday life.
  • avinassh 10y ago
    Is there anywhere online I can read your paper? Thank you!
• tombone12 10y ago
  While I'm sure there is some perverse way of defining "innovation" that can muster up enough factual basis to count as a half truth for some drunk in a gutter, I suggest you consider the less extreme position that technological development is driven by a multitude of factors and towards equally diverse goals. First off, we can dispense both porn and video games as important technological drivers since both are realms of extremely narrow focus compared to the breadth of the military; neither can for instance be credited with driving development of automatic telephone exchanges. The military has much more diverse needs, and could therefore plausibly drive "innovations in technology" over a large enough breadth of technologies to count. Still, the technology the military directly develops or pay for being developed is of a decidedly military nature, and as we all know the civilian sector of society is quite sizable and contains a multitude of technology unique to it, none of which are directly developed by the military. Frankly, the fact that the Board of Longitude lead to portable timepieces does not mean the military can be credited with all advances in timekeeping henceforth.
• mindingdata 10y ago
  The whole "mouse over a video and see 5 stills taken from the video" is a crazy good innovation first seen on pornsites (AFAIK) and it always blows me away.
• EGreg 10y ago
  Don't forget virtual reality. Used by military, videogames and porn!
• phusion 10y ago
  Ahhh "Middle Men" -- if you weren't thinking of that movie with this comment, I must suggest that everyone watch it. It's about (Hollywoodified) the two guys who created credit card processing over the Internet-- according to the movie, parts of their system are still in use today.
• rz2k 10y ago
  Could that just be fun to say, though? Why not extend the category to intoxicants? For example, the steam engine coming from refinements to distillation. My point being that you can see technological innovation from the perspective of pursuing 'base' desires or as an outgrowth of intellectual curiosity or basic research, and make a good argument either way depending on what other points you want to make. Your friend the chemist might seem to enjoy explosions a lot, but also be systematic and detail-oriented.
• samsonradu 10y ago
  They really did push the envelope, but not always in a good way. I think it was not Wells Fargo that invented recurring cross-sales, adult sites have been efficiently doing it for ages. It s just that it s so tabu that people don t really talk so much about it and just swallow it.
• daveheq 10y ago
  The three greatest drivers of the human psyche, fighting, fun, and sex.
• Corrado 10y ago
  Yea, I've been thinking lately that another avenue for Adult entertainment would be to create legitimate long-format (3-5 minute) commercials. Get sponsors and show products and actually make a good video with a script and actors and everything. - Guy grabs a Magnum Condom and proudly puts it on while girl smiles. - A couple have a picnic lunch in the bed of a Ford F150 pickup truck and end up having sex - etc... I'm sure you couldn't get a deal with every company (McDonald's probably wouldn't buy in) but there are quite a few adult companies that would work. As long as you could accurately track views across distributors you would be golden. :) Just an idea.