https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/18/23837670/pornhub-parent-company-mindgeek-rebrand-aylo
MindGeek wants a “fresh start.”
Pornhub’s parent company is changing its name to total nonsense::MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub and other adult entertainment websites is changing its name to Aylo as it looks to get a “fresh start.”
With "total nonsense" I expected something like ZyAbct328 or some crap, like a name you can barely find to stay under the radar.
But Aylo? Wtf is The Verge doing?
Aylo is only "nonsense" because you're not used to it. What about Sony? Nike? Lego? Cisco? Adobe? ...
Just because I was curious: Sony comes from sonos, sound in Latin. Nike is the Roman Greek God of victory. Lego is is a Danish abreviation for "play well". Cisco comes from San Fransisco. Adobe is the name of a Creek near the founders house.
Of course they have origins, but that is pretty much true of any name. If I look up "Aylo" I find:
A user from Morocco says the name Aylo is of Portuguese origin and means "someone who's easily attached to someone".
A submission from New York, U.S. says the name Aylo means "One who sees seeds" and is of African origin.
A user from Canada says the name Aylo means "Loving"
Lmao at 'One who sees seeds' Anybody on pornhub is sure to see lots and lots of 'man seed'
I can tell you the first one is total BS — there is no word in Portuguese that even sounds close to that one. Source: am a Portugal.
Adding to that as a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker, no word I'm aware of comes even close to that one either. Our words don't really use Y like that to begin with.
Nike is the Roman god of victory.
To be pedantic, Victoria is the Roman version. Nike (Νίκη) is the Greek version of the goddess.
Aylo sounds like the name of the finance company. It is boring and generic in that it doesn't really mean anything. The perfect name.
Where is MindGeek always makes me think of a manufacturer of cheap crappy toys, like novelty mugs that change colour when you pour hot liquid in them and small remote control cars that stick to the ceiling. You know the kind of tat that's always been sold off in the centre aisles of shopping malls.
You're thinking of ThinkGeek which was an online store that used to sell all that stuff, but they couldn't compete with Amazon.
I don’t know a thing about adult industry financing but are there investors? Are the moneybags telling them to clean up their image?
seriously, how bad must it be to change name to clean up their image? We all expect this industry is controversial.
The only recent thing I remember about Pornhub is the current blocking in certain states as protest to the age verification requirement. That seems like a plus in my book that they stand up for privacy and internet use. Changing the name seems like it might dilute their stance.
They had huge scandals about revenge porn and child porn in the past. It was so bad, that they deleted a substantial amount of their library, just to be sure.
BTW the brand is still Pornhub, but the company using that brand gets renamed. Hardly anyone knew that name anyway.
It'll be hard to hire engineers, managers, and office workers if they said they worked at Pornhub. But if they worked for mindgeek (or Aylo), it's understood.
People think it's all about dicks and orgies at pornhub but imagine the technical requirements serving millions of videos to visitors a day? There's so much tech behind the scenes that even YouTube started stealing features.
Silicon Valley had a good episode about it. Can't find the exact clip but here is the promo for the episode (slightly NSFW). There's a speaker presentation in it that kinda talks about how porn has pushed technology (to comedic effect).
They actually have a really interesting GitHub. And they contribute a lot to open source projects.
Although the actual company side is kind of dodgy and they do some pretty awful things.
Yeah, it's incredible that the workers there find the time to get the technical stuff done and still make it to the afternoon orgy. Any company that has the opportunity to hire a former pornhub worker should jump on themthe opportunity.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company says the rebrand represents “the need for a fresh start,” as reported earlier by the New York Post.
“The decision to rebrand the company as Aylo, comes in response to the need for a fresh start and a renewed commitment to innovation, diverse and inclusive adult content, and trust and safety,” the post reads.
“The new brand identity will be implemented across all company communications, marketing materials and digital platforms.”
Even with a total rebrand, it might be difficult to forget some of the major controversies MindGeek has faced.
The company faced severe moderation issues for years, including the presence of child sexual abuse videos.
Visa and Mastercard stopped offering payment services on Pornhub in 2020 due to the presence of “unlawful content” on the platform.
The original article contains 232 words, the summary contains 128 words. Saved 45%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I keep trying to upvote comments lol. I'll get use to it. Yes whatever. I feel this is like Google's parent company becoming Alphabet. I don't care and it doesn't make any difference to my day to day usage. I'm pretty sure I learned just today that the company is Mindgeek.
These kind of rebranding moves serve a specific purpose. They announced to the marketing universe a change of name and in turn the marketing universe adopts this new name thus pushing out the old name from relevance in search results or news articles.
This serves the goals of the marketing universe by being fresh and marketable, and serves the needs of the business by allowing them to shed their reputation like a cast-off skin.
The general public loses out because information is now fractured and the continuity is broken.
Aylo, rhymes with "heyo", as in what you say after making a lewd joke.
"Your Mom changed her name to Aylo ... Heyo!"
Everybody is still going to know it's them, and I don't think they can get respectable engineers to work for them. There really isn't any prestige in working there.
They should at least expanded to have another site up for general SFW video content to compete with youtube and produce originals, since they clearly have the tech for it.
I had a meeting with MindGeek. Beautiful building, lots of great people. I'm not sure that your personal prejudices reflect the reality of the situation.
It's not a personal prejudice, I personally have no problem with the people there since I don't even work in the same field, and I thought their video tech is great even though their content isn't my thing.
It's the sentiment I've heard from the tech people I know from big tech that they would never even consider working for Mindgeek no matter how much they pay, because they REALLY don't want to be associated with working for PornHub.
Dude, that's akin to, "I wouldn't touch her with a 10 foot pole" when you know full well they would touch her with a 4.5" penis.
They have great tech and are well funded.
great tech
That's not what the glassdoor.com reviews say, at least last time I checked a bunch of employees complained about a horrendously out-of-date PHP stack.
Looks like my previous info was a bit out of date, but that's further proof of my point that that they couldn't get great tech talent to work for them.
You can work on a porn site without seeing any porn. IIRC Pornhub's test site doesn't contain any porn so their engineers can work normally, just like those engineers who work on CSAM detection and reporting system never actually see any CSAM themselves.
I started a personal lubricant webshop about a year ago. It's called Ayola. Sounds like I was close.
I feel like they need broaden their portfolio a bit, I still wouldn't work at one of those companies cause soon enough it will be just like mindgeek in the public's eye. I don't have an issue with adult content. The only issue I have with mindgeek is their push to on device age verification via secure enclave tech meaning it would WEI all over again and you can't verify your age on custom roms or Linux.