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AdultFriendFinder has filed for an IPO

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Re: AdultFriendFinder has filed for an IPO

#21

Post by strlen »

unrealwh wrote: post #18
strlen wrote: post #13

AFF has been around for a while and had been one of the first personals sites (recently they were sold to Penthouse who planned to take them to IPO). When they were privately (and before being sold to Penthouse) they were still very profitable and paid generous bonuses to employees (although they had a fairly high churn rate due to the nature of their business). AFF, by the way, is a big Perl shop. I believe most of…

are you trying to tell me aff somehow predated yahoo? i'll file this story under "bs" and you should too

1) Is that hard to believe? Yahoo only incorporated in 1995, there were start-ups before that. Unfortunately, I can't find DNS records to back this up - FFN domains seem to be registered with non-Verisign registrar which wouldn't have been arround until 1998 (when third party registrars would have been available).

2) AFF's founders could have already been hosting sites before founding AFF (indeed, it would logically follow that he'd have experience running a site before launching a successful company).

EDIT: Here's some proof:

Conru.com is registered wih Verisign and on 03-NOV-94 (Andrew Conru is the founder of AFF and you can see the FFN address and name when doing 'whois conru.com'). Yahoo.com is registered 18-JAN-1995 (do "whois '=yahoo.com'" to check). Seems like it's at least plausible (Stanford is a small place).

Re: AdultFriendFinder has filed for an IPO

#23

Post by lnguyen »

jdavid wrote: post #4

this is good news, i think. not that AFF, is a great business, but simply adding to the IPO count will help others do the same. i am still of the opinion that a majority of the funds in the hedge markets had cash conserved during the down turn. if this goes well, then it will show that there is money out there. on another note, in down times, entertainment seems to do better and this might be the only time that an ad…

The problem is if it crashes and burns, it turns into some sort of referendum on how IPOs are "doomed" in this economy and possibly also for quite some time in the future. I'd rather see a better company and one that doesn't carry a stigma (rightfully or wrongfully) that could prevent wide public investment be that bellwether.

Unfortunately those companies are probably staying away from even thinking IPO at this time.

Re: AdultFriendFinder has filed for an IPO

#24

Post by mattmaroon »

I've always wondered how AFF can possibly maintain a number of users for long. Even average women can just walk into a bar/bookstore/coffee shop/etc. and find a man on any given night with very little effort, which means that site couldn't have much of a selection of females participating. I assume the same is largely true of gay men. So you're left with a large amount of straight men looking for women that probably aren't there.

So I could see how they could lure in a lot of straight men with the promise of casual sex, just not how they could keep the enormous churn rate down when they found they were barking up an empty tree. Maybe they just haven't burned through 100% of the population quite yet, and want to IPO so they can cash out before they do, or maybe just a lot of people have lower standards (even when sober) than I would have guessed. Or maybe AFF is nothing but a ruse to lure men into porn sites they own, since you'd probably prefer it to your options there.

Re: AdultFriendFinder has filed for an IPO

#25

Post by skmurphy »

unrealwh wrote: post #18
strlen wrote: post #13

AFF has been around for a while and had been one of the first personals sites (recently they were sold to Penthouse who planned to take them to IPO). When they were privately (and before being sold to Penthouse) they were still very profitable and paid generous bonuses to employees (although they had a fairly high churn rate due to the nature of their business). AFF, by the way, is a big Perl shop. I believe most of…

are you trying to tell me aff somehow predated yahoo? i'll file this story under "bs" and you should too

Andrew Conru had several web businesses that were contemporaneous with the start of Yahoo. I worked with him for few months at W3.com (not current owner of site but a company that built websites for Egghead, New Media Magazine and others) in 94/95. It was at the start of the first dotcom era in Palo Alto. I was not involved in AFF which he started later. Conru was in the Mechanical Engineering PhD program at Stanford and could well have known the Yahoo guys.

EDIT: here is a pointer to original W3.com products http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_/ai_17179339

Re: AdultFriendFinder has filed for an IPO

#27

Post by kingnothing »

Is adult friend finder even a legitimate business? I have always been of the opinion that the vast majority of the ads for women are fake in order to get men to sign up. After all, why would a woman post an ad on there when she can just as easily go to, well, anywhere and find a random guy to hook up with?

Re: AdultFriendFinder has filed for an IPO

#29

Post by Mazy »

jm4 wrote: post #6
vaksel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having something so crappy go for an IPO is news enough for me

I don't even know how to respond to that. What are you trying to say? That this should be some kind of inspiration to readers here? There's hope that one's startup can eventually go public if AFF can do it? A twelve-year-old casual sex meetup site is successful enough that they're going to start selling stock to the public. Stop the presses! Sex sells! I really don't see what this has to do with hackers, entrepreneur…

This is absolutely relevant to entrepreneurs and HN. This is a real web business with real revenue really going public.

Re: AdultFriendFinder has filed for an IPO

#30

Post by jbjohns »

kingnothing wrote: post #27

Is adult friend finder even a legitimate business? I have always been of the opinion that the vast majority of the ads for women are fake in order to get men to sign up. After all, why would a woman post an ad on there when she can just as easily go to, well, anywhere and find a random guy to hook up with?

Does the way people use your product determine if your business is legitimate or not? If you did much IRC back in the day then you know that no such site will need to make fake women accounts to get guys to sign up. There are enough people who get a kick out of pretending to be a girl just to prank guys.
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