Feras Antoon

Feras Antoon is a Canadian pornographer, and the co-owner and CEO of MindGeek, the world's largest pornography company, which runs sites including YouPorn and Pornhub. An engineering graduate of Concordia University, he created his first porn website in the early 2000s before co-founding Brazzers, which specialized in the MILF segment of porn distribution, which depicts sexually attractive older women. He and David Tassillo later bought Manwin (MindGeek) from Fabian Thylmann.

Feras Antoon
NationalityCanadian
Alma materConcordia University
OccupationBusinessman
Known forCo-owner, MindGeek
TitleCEO, MindGeek
Spouse(s)Nicole Manos

Early life

Feras Antoon earned a degree from Montreal's Concordia University.[1]

Career

In the early 2000s, with four other recent Concordia engineering graduates, he created his first porn website for Mansef Productions.[2] The company was run by Stéphane Manos, and Antoon would become his brother-in-law.[2]

Their first porn company, Brazzers, was set up in about 2005 by Ouissam Youssef, Youssef and Stephane Manos, Feras Antoon and Matt Keezer, with the company name being an allusion/homage to their mainly Middle Eastern origins, and their pronunciation of "Brothers".[3] Brazzers focused on the sexualization of MILFs.[4] According to Antoon, "At first, they focused on busty women, because the big tits niche was so cheap. They realized that the MILF niche – the older-women niche – is even bigger. And they became masters of the big-tit-MILF niche".[4] Further expansion led to sites including YouPorn, before all the businesses were sold to German businessman Fabian Thylmann for an estimated $140 million.[3]

In January 2011, commenting on paid and free ("tube") porn sites, Antoon said, "I personally have one or two memberships, and I still go to the tubes. I get my appetizer on the tubes, my main course on one of the sites."[5]

Following his extradition from Belgium to Germany in 2012, on charges of tax evasion, Fabian Thylmann, the owner of Manwin (which changed its name to MindGeek in 2013) sold the company to its two senior managers, Antoon and COO David Tassillo, for a reported €73 million.[6][7] Antoon is the CEO of MindGeek (formerly Manwin), which in 2014 was described as a "porn monopoly".[7][8]

By 2016, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) in Montreal had executed search warrants and obtained cease-trade orders for 13 people, with allegations of insider trading including Antoon, David Baazov, Josh Baazov, and John Chatzidakis.[9]

Personal life

Antoon lives in Montreal, Canada.[10][11] He is married to Nicole Manos, the daughter of George Manos and Louise Laberge Manos (1952–2017).[2] His brother Mark Antoon is a vice-president of MindGeek.[12]

gollark: Anyway, while this is at least better than passing all data through entirely unauditable serverside filters, I don't think it's very good.
gollark: Fascinating.
gollark: Four dots? Wow.
gollark: Even if you reverse-engineer where it gets the hashes from and how it operates, by the nature of the thing you couldn't work out what was being detected without already having samples of it in the first place.
gollark: Anyway, the generality of this solution and the fact that they'll probably keep the exact details private for "security"-through-obscurity reasons also means that, as I have written here (https://osmarks.net/osbill/) in a blog post tangentially mentioning it, someone could just feed it hashes for, say, anti-government memes and find out who is saving those.

References
  1. Pailliez, Caroline. "Les rois de la porno sont des Montréalais". Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  2. Pailliez, Caroline. "Une entreprise familiale, mais pas pour la famille". Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  3. "March 2012 Archives – 10/10 – Philosophy for life". www.philosophyforlife.org. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  4. Nancy Jo Sales (23 February 2016). American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-385-35393-9. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  5. Benjamin Wallace (30 January 2011). "The Geek-Kings of Smut". NYMag.com. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  6. "Germany's 'Porno King' gives up empire". The Local. Berlin, Germany: The Local Europe GmbH. 21 October 2013. Archived from the original on 5 December 2013. Retrieved 21 December 2014.
  7. "How a (Canadian-founded) company you've never heard of took control of the porn industry". 24 October 2014. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  8. "Executive Profile: Feras Antoon". Bloomberg LP. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  9. "How Amaya CEO David Baazov went from high school dropout to running the world's biggest online poker room". 23 March 2016. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  10. "'2016 will be our best year': How the geeks took over Montreal's porn industry". 2 September 2016. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  11. Lemco, Tyler (21 October 2016). "Forget LA: Montreal Is North America's Porn Hub". Retrieved 14 June 2018.
  12. "How Montreal Went from Sin City to Porn Hub". 30 November 2016. Retrieved 14 June 2018.
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