Owner of adult site, Adultfriendfinder.com, raking in "$100s of millions"

November 1, 2006 | Matt Marshall

Andrew Conru, owner of profitable sex site Adultfriendfinder.com, sits in leafy, relaxed Palo Alto.

Yet few people know how well his company is doing. There’s a notable story in the Mercury News today.

Adultfriendfinder.com is just one of 40 sites run by Conru under the holding company, Various, which is raking in “hundreds of millions of dollars” in annual revenues.

Yet venture investors have shied away from him, in part because of “sin clauses” in their contracts prohibiting investing in adult companies, according to the Merc, which suggests this is a problem.

However, we’re left with some questions. We’re not sure why Conru needs the cash if the company is profitable and raking in so much revenue. The article also says Adultfriendfinder alone is the 58th most popular site on the web, just behind Facebook, but it cites Alexa web-measurement data. Alexa data is notoriously unreliable — especially when it is used to compare something against Facebook . Alexa can be seriously gamed, because it relies on software downloaded by relatively small number of people to track traffic patterns.

Or perhaps there no one else willing to track this area?

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About the Author, Matt Marshall

Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.