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For some reason I always imagine porn sites to be run by guys in cheap suits and lots of hair gel. Then I realize that in order to run a site with the kind of t

For some reason I always imagine porn sites to be run by guys in cheap suits and lots of hair gel. Then I realize that in order to run a site with the kind of traffic that some of them have, you really need to have some decent engineers on staff.

antirez 15y ago
Sure, not only there is huge traffic, they also generate tons of money, so porn sites are definitely not second citizens in the web from a technical point of view.
jwr 15y ago
You'd be surprised if you went to meetings with porn business companies in Japan. Stylish offices, elegant suits, great manners, no hint of actual porn anywhere. In fact, you could easily confuse the office with an investment bank.
- arethuza 15y ago
  I once had a surreal meeting with a hotel chain where they mentioned they had detailed management reports on stuff like the average time films are watched for and that they had a graph showing how long porn movies are watched for. This was all being discussed in the context of a fairly formal business meeting.
  - geoffw8 15y ago
    I used to work with a company who provide most of the network/software/hardware for hotels/airports/tran stations/lobbies around the world. Some very interesting insights from the hotels side of things.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - DavidChouinard 15y ago
      Care to share?
      - geoffw8 15y ago
        Wish I still had the data on hand - as you would imagine - mostly porn.
  - nooneelse 15y ago
    Ok, I'm feeling rather naïve and waking up slowly this morning. Why do they care to know that? I mean, what about their business does that help them improve? Because, I think we can take it somewhat for granted that such information probably isn't something which the individuals involved, their customers in this situation, enjoy knowing is being collected about them. "Hey, you know that activity you probably consider rather private, we like to record everything about it we easily can, because umm... customer service." If I kept track of the porn watching habits of my neighbors, that would be considered strange and maybe rather pervy. And I don't see how it makes a difference in that evaluation whether they are or aren't renting the tv they use from me.
    - simcop2387 15y ago
      It probably lets them know how long the movies they produce should be. If it's too long before any action is in there then people move on. If it's not long enough then the customer doesn't get what they want. Optimizing this means that they can take a single 8 hour shoot, that'll produce maybe an hour and a half of good footage (just pulling numbers out of my ass) and make more than one video of the right length to get the most profit out of it.
      - nooneelse 15y ago
        Ok, thanks, I'm restored to cynical now... and the business advantage to be found here is that they can go even further than just optimizing length to match what people want, they can make them just a bit shorter than more people would like, so people will buy two instead of just one.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 15y ago
      It's probably an extra-cost service to the hotel guest. The hotel wants to know how much/how often the service is used so they can optimize it for their needs. No sense paying for more bandwidth than you need. In any case, they probably have no need for individual statistics: the aggregated watching habits of guests is enough to provide useful information.
- borism 15y ago
  Well, they almost ARE an investment bank. They've commoditized sex and are now trading it.
  - pjscott 15y ago
    In that sense, a company that makes any commodity, like toilet paper or aluminum cans, is "almost" an investment bank.
rplnt 15y ago
Some time ago I've read an IAmA on reddit with staff member of some big porn portal. It was quite interesting but I don't remember what porn site it was and don't want to blindly trying to google it as I'm at work. Writing this in case anyone knows and would post it here :)
- zalew 15y ago
  http://sl.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/htn7x/i_run_porntubecom_4tubecom_among_others_ama/ http://sl.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/htn7x/i_run_porntubecom... the guy from pinklab http://www.pinklab.com/reddit.html http://www.pinklab.com/reddit.html talked around there, but can't find the link. there were also some others, even a guy who ran a 2g1c kind of site.
- thamer 15y ago
  An ex-PornHub developer did an AMA a few months ago; they were using Redis as well: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kf4be/nsfw_iama_former_lead_developer_of_pornhub_amaa/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kf4be/nsfw_iama_former...
- Mikushi 15y ago
  I did this IAmA couple month back : http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kf4be/nsfw_iama_former_lead_developer_of_pornhub_amaa/ http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kf4be/nsfw_iama_former_... And i am happy that my months of lobbying for Redis at the office paid :D
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
clu3 15y ago
First off, I am not saying that youporn guys are not decent but IMHO, people shouldn't get too excited about this. Youporn is somewhat quite a simple site I'd imagine. It's just categorized videos with a bunch of stats (views, related video...), and users. There's almost no social interaction between users (i've just registered an account just to confirm that). That's a very clear (and good) reason why 100% redis suits for this website, apart from the goodness of redis like sorted sets are perfect for the "top rated" or "being watched" sections Imagine the site now wants to add a little bit of social interaction, like allowing users to post video, follow each others... I'd say 100% redis wouldn't work any more
- raphman 15y ago
  Imagine the site now wants to add a little bit of social interaction, like allowing users to post video As far as I know, Youporn is all about users posting videos (whereby amateur porn is probably only a small part of all uploads, I guess)
- asto 15y ago
  Imagine the site now wants to add a little bit of social interaction, like allowing users to post video, follow each others Follow each other? I'm not sure you know what the point of a porn website is.
  - clu3 15y ago
    I'm pretty sure i know what I'm looking for in a porn site. There's many things youporn can do to help me watch better stuff. Say I'm a fan of a porn star XXX and I'd like to see a simple notification that there's recently a new video tagging her. Same thing if I like some particular user's taste for porn and would like to get noticed if he/she has posted a video. Basically if it gets more social, my wall or dashboard or whatever, would be more sorta relevant.
- CWIZO 15y ago
  You would imagine wrong. I'm running a video sharing page (think FB&youtube mashed together with a dash of blogger) with about 800k unique/month users and it's no picnic.
thomasbachem 15y ago
The owner of YouPorn (and many others) is Fabian Thylmann, and he is actually a geek at heart: http://nymag.com/news/features/70985/index4.html http://nymag.com/news/features/70985/index4.html (article) http://www.cnbc.com/id/45989405/Meet_the_New_King_of_Porn http://www.cnbc.com/id/45989405/Meet_the_New_King_of_Porn (photo)
- Uchikoma 15y ago
  I still talk about your excellent open PHP presentation in Hamburg, I'm still impressed #smallworld
- rayhano 15y ago
  Looks like YC needs a new Request For...
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Alex3917 15y ago
"For some reason I always imagine porn sites to be run by guys in cheap suits and lots of hair gel." Pretty much the exact opposite actually. Porn industry guys tend to be 30 - 40 on average and super cool and laid back, though in an LA sort of way. I'm sure there's a lot of crap going on beneath the surface, but at least from the outside it seems like a much nicer work culture than silicon valley.

antirez 15y ago

Sure, not only there is huge traffic, they also generate tons of money, so porn sites are definitely not second citizens in the web from a technical point of view.

jwr 15y ago

You'd be surprised if you went to meetings with porn business companies in Japan. Stylish offices, elegant suits, great manners, no hint of actual porn anywhere. In fact, you could easily confuse the office with an investment bank.

arethuza 15y ago
I once had a surreal meeting with a hotel chain where they mentioned they had detailed management reports on stuff like the average time films are watched for and that they had a graph showing how long porn movies are watched for. This was all being discussed in the context of a fairly formal business meeting.
- geoffw8 15y ago
  I used to work with a company who provide most of the network/software/hardware for hotels/airports/tran stations/lobbies around the world. Some very interesting insights from the hotels side of things.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - DavidChouinard 15y ago
    Care to share?
    - geoffw8 15y ago
      Wish I still had the data on hand - as you would imagine - mostly porn.
- nooneelse 15y ago
  Ok, I'm feeling rather naïve and waking up slowly this morning. Why do they care to know that? I mean, what about their business does that help them improve? Because, I think we can take it somewhat for granted that such information probably isn't something which the individuals involved, their customers in this situation, enjoy knowing is being collected about them. "Hey, you know that activity you probably consider rather private, we like to record everything about it we easily can, because umm... customer service." If I kept track of the porn watching habits of my neighbors, that would be considered strange and maybe rather pervy. And I don't see how it makes a difference in that evaluation whether they are or aren't renting the tv they use from me.
  - simcop2387 15y ago
    It probably lets them know how long the movies they produce should be. If it's too long before any action is in there then people move on. If it's not long enough then the customer doesn't get what they want. Optimizing this means that they can take a single 8 hour shoot, that'll produce maybe an hour and a half of good footage (just pulling numbers out of my ass) and make more than one video of the right length to get the most profit out of it.
    - nooneelse 15y ago
      Ok, thanks, I'm restored to cynical now... and the business advantage to be found here is that they can go even further than just optimizing length to match what people want, they can make them just a bit shorter than more people would like, so people will buy two instead of just one.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 15y ago
    It's probably an extra-cost service to the hotel guest. The hotel wants to know how much/how often the service is used so they can optimize it for their needs. No sense paying for more bandwidth than you need. In any case, they probably have no need for individual statistics: the aggregated watching habits of guests is enough to provide useful information.
borism 15y ago
Well, they almost ARE an investment bank. They've commoditized sex and are now trading it.
- pjscott 15y ago
  In that sense, a company that makes any commodity, like toilet paper or aluminum cans, is "almost" an investment bank.

rplnt 15y ago

Some time ago I've read an IAmA on reddit with staff member of some big porn portal. It was quite interesting but I don't remember what porn site it was and don't want to blindly trying to google it as I'm at work. Writing this in case anyone knows and would post it here :)

zalew 15y ago
http://sl.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/htn7x/i_run_porntubecom_4tubecom_among_others_ama/ http://sl.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/htn7x/i_run_porntubecom... the guy from pinklab http://www.pinklab.com/reddit.html http://www.pinklab.com/reddit.html talked around there, but can't find the link. there were also some others, even a guy who ran a 2g1c kind of site.
thamer 15y ago
An ex-PornHub developer did an AMA a few months ago; they were using Redis as well: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kf4be/nsfw_iama_former_lead_developer_of_pornhub_amaa/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kf4be/nsfw_iama_former...
Mikushi 15y ago
I did this IAmA couple month back : http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kf4be/nsfw_iama_former_lead_developer_of_pornhub_amaa/ http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kf4be/nsfw_iama_former_... And i am happy that my months of lobbying for Redis at the office paid :D
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

clu3 15y ago

First off, I am not saying that youporn guys are not decent but IMHO, people shouldn't get too excited about this. Youporn is somewhat quite a simple site I'd imagine. It's just categorized videos with a bunch of stats (views, related video...), and users. There's almost no social interaction between users (i've just registered an account just to confirm that). That's a very clear (and good) reason why 100% redis suits for this website, apart from the goodness of redis like sorted sets are perfect for the "top rated" or "being watched" sections Imagine the site now wants to add a little bit of social interaction, like allowing users to post video, follow each others... I'd say 100% redis wouldn't work any more

raphman 15y ago
Imagine the site now wants to add a little bit of social interaction, like allowing users to post video As far as I know, Youporn is all about users posting videos (whereby amateur porn is probably only a small part of all uploads, I guess)
asto 15y ago
Imagine the site now wants to add a little bit of social interaction, like allowing users to post video, follow each others Follow each other? I'm not sure you know what the point of a porn website is.
- clu3 15y ago
  I'm pretty sure i know what I'm looking for in a porn site. There's many things youporn can do to help me watch better stuff. Say I'm a fan of a porn star XXX and I'd like to see a simple notification that there's recently a new video tagging her. Same thing if I like some particular user's taste for porn and would like to get noticed if he/she has posted a video. Basically if it gets more social, my wall or dashboard or whatever, would be more sorta relevant.
CWIZO 15y ago
You would imagine wrong. I'm running a video sharing page (think FB&youtube mashed together with a dash of blogger) with about 800k unique/month users and it's no picnic.

thomasbachem 15y ago

The owner of YouPorn (and many others) is Fabian Thylmann, and he is actually a geek at heart: http://nymag.com/news/features/70985/index4.html http://nymag.com/news/features/70985/index4.html (article) http://www.cnbc.com/id/45989405/Meet_the_New_King_of_Porn http://www.cnbc.com/id/45989405/Meet_the_New_King_of_Porn (photo)

Uchikoma 15y ago
I still talk about your excellent open PHP presentation in Hamburg, I'm still impressed #smallworld
rayhano 15y ago
Looks like YC needs a new Request For...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Alex3917 15y ago

"For some reason I always imagine porn sites to be run by guys in cheap suits and lots of hair gel." Pretty much the exact opposite actually. Porn industry guys tend to be 30 - 40 on average and super cool and laid back, though in an LA sort of way. I'm sure there's a lot of crap going on beneath the surface, but at least from the outside it seems like a much nicer work culture than silicon valley.