{"id":2020,"date":"2007-12-12T16:51:13","date_gmt":"2007-12-12T21:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/12\/penthouse-insert-social-network-joke-here\/"},"modified":"2007-12-12T16:51:13","modified_gmt":"2007-12-12T21:51:13","slug":"penthouse-insert-social-network-joke-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/12\/penthouse-insert-social-network-joke-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Penthouse: Insert &#8220;social network&#8221; joke here"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The double entendres pretty much throw themselves at you when you come across news like this: that the media group behind Penthouse is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thealarmclock.com\/mt\/archives\/2007\/12\/penthouse_seduc.html\">buying the company<\/a> that runs the Adult Friendfinder service (among other things) for half a billion dollars. Various Inc., which runs a wide variety of other websites &#8212; including BigChurch.com and GuanXi.com &#8212; has reportedly been shopping itself around for some time, but investors tend to shy away from the adult-entertainment market. <\/p>\n<p>The company isn&#8217;t getting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/12\/12\/technology\/12penthouse.html?ex=1355115600&amp;en=f03c66d46164de60&amp;ei=5088&amp;partner=rssnyt&amp;emc=rss\">much of a premium<\/a> for the deal either, since it has annual revenues of about $200-million, or about 5 times what Facebook had last year. There was a fascinating profile of the founder of Various, a guy named Andrew Conru, in Business 2.0 magazine <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/magazines\/business2\/business2_archive\/2007\/04\/01\/8403370\/index.htm\">earlier this year<\/a>, which described the nondescript industrial mall the company operates out of and Conru&#8217;s unremarkable background.<\/p>\n<p>Penthouse also has an interesting history &#8212; a Porn 1.0 company founded by legendary party animal Bob Guccione as a more crude competitor to Playboy, it became a media and entertainment giant. Like many of its non-porn counterparts in media, however, the company failed to adapt to the digital age and eventually filed for bankruptcy (there were apparently some other <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Penthouse_(magazine)\">backroom shenanigans<\/a> as well). <\/p>\n<p>With the Adult Friendfinder purchase, new owner Mark Bell &#8212; a Florida real estate developer and former owner of an Internet hosting company &#8212; is obviously trying to create a Porn 2.0 empire in its place.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The double entendres pretty much throw themselves at you when you come across news like this: that the media group behind Penthouse is buying the company that runs the Adult Friendfinder service (among other things) for half a billion dollars. Various Inc., which runs a wide variety of other websites &#8212; including BigChurch.com and GuanXi.com &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/12\/penthouse-insert-social-network-joke-here\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Penthouse: Insert &#8220;social network&#8221; joke here&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}