The Story Behind The $1.5B Pornhub Curse

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, Sam, I want to play a game.
I want to start this with a game where I'm going to read you.
And you don't know this, by the way. You didn't know I was going to do this. I'm going to read you the most trafficked websites in the United States. And as a simple test, you're a business guy. You studied the business world. I want you to tell me, do you know who's the owner or CEO of these businesses?

**Sam Parr** (0:21)
I like this game.

**Shaan Puri** (0:22)
Number one, google.com.

**Sam Parr** (0:24)
Sergey and Larry Page. Sergey something and Larry Page.

**Shaan Puri** (0:28)
Correct. Next one, YouTube.

**Sam Parr** (0:32)
Chad H and Jared and one other guy, Steve Chen.

**Shaan Puri** (0:38)
Exactly. Correct.

**Sam Parr** (0:40)
Reddit. Huffman and Ohanian.

**Shaan Puri** (0:43)
Correct. Amazon.

**Sam Parr** (0:46)
Bezos.

**Shaan Puri** (0:47)
Okay. Number five. Now we're getting to the good stuff. So first, I think you'll get this one easy. Facebook.

**Sam Parr** (0:52)
Zuckerberg.

**Shaan Puri** (0:53)
Okay. Number six, Pornhub.
So this is the number six most trafficked website in the United States. Three billion visits in a month.

**Sam Parr** (1:19)
Is it called MindGeek or MindFreak or something?

**Shaan Puri** (1:22)
MindGeek is a name of a company that owned it.
However, the founding story is pretty crazy. I don't know if you're a sci-fi guy or a fantasy guy, but in many fantasy book series, there's this concept like in Lord of the Rings, there's the ring or in Harry Potter, there's the Elder Wand. It's an idea that there's these assets that are so powerful that people want to own it. But whenever you own it, your ownership is going to be very short-lived. It's almost like the item is too powerful. It sort of corrupts you and puts a target on your back and other people start coming for you.

**Sam Parr** (2:02)
It's a real sticky situation, one might say.

**Shaan Puri** (2:04)
This is like it's Game of Thrones, right? Everybody wants to sit on the Iron Throne, but when you're on the Iron Throne, you're not going to last very long.
And so this is a Game of Thrones style story for tech that I went down a rabbit hole. I want to share with you because I didn't know this story.

**Sam Parr** (2:18)
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**Shaan Puri** (2:49)
So let me tell you how it went down. Okay, so rewind the clock. We go back to 2005
Up until then, you know, internet's been out for roughly been semi mainstream for 10 years.
And of course porn was popular right away.
But the way that all porn sites worked was it was like Yahoo. It was a directory of links. So you would go to whatever, I don't know, jugworld.com and it would just show you 100 links to places where you could go watch videos.

**Sam Parr** (3:18)
Not the videos, but to the other websites.

**Shaan Puri** (3:20)
Links to other websites or links to other photos. They're mostly photos at the time. Wasn't even that much video.
So 2005, a big milestone happens, which is that YouTube launches.
And YouTube launches with a pretty simple proposition, which is we'll make it really easy to host a video online. You don't have to host it on your own servers. We'll host it on our servers. And then also instead of just sending somebody that file, you send them just a link and they can watch it here. And we'll just have all the videos here in one place.

**Sam Parr** (3:46)
Which was mind blowing.

**Shaan Puri** (3:47)
Sounds so obvious now, but at the time was different. And if you haven't read it, go read the Sequoia memo of his investment, both his investment in YouTube. If you want to see how like uncertain and how like small and non-obvious this was at the beginning.
So YouTube launches, it starts to get popular.
Now there's copycats that come out in the porn version of this. Red Tube, right? Just off of YouTube, Red Tube. YouTube, you poor, whatever, a bunch of these come out. And they're all flooded with pirated content. So they're just like kind of like LimeWire back in the day. They just take stuff that you're supposed to pay for and they would just upload it for free on here.