Three Canadian entrepreneurs from Montreal, John Phillips, Craig Hensley, and Amy Ambrose, wanted to fix what was wrong in porn. As you can imagine, their site – which I’ll link to after this so you don’t have to be polluted by its influence – is amazingly NSFW. Luckily, it’s also amazingly cool.
Phillips programmed the site and Ambrose is the lead multimedia designer. Hensley is the money man. Luckily for them, Montreal is home to Manwin and Gamma, two huge porn companies and is also the spot online gamblers go to open accounts due to restrictions on U.S. online gaming. Before we get into functionality, let’s let Phillips tell the funding story.
“Porn is a very small industry – an oligarchy, really – so we don’t want to adversely affect our perceptions by announcing the amount of funding,” he said. “However, the source of our funding is much more interesting: We are funded exclusively by the best high-stakes heads-up poker players in the world. Several of them grouped together and invested in Paint Bottle. This is their first investment in a startup. We met them through Craig, who opened their Canadian bank accounts when Black Friday happened to poker, resulting in a mini-exodus in which many top players moved to Montreal.”
Luckily, it’s not all about Casino-style backroom deals. The technology behind the site is solid and it’s surprisingly pleasant to use (and I’ve used a few of these, let me tell you.)
Primarily, PaintBottle (Seriously: NSFW. If you’re offended, why are you still reading?) is a discovery engine. To look at videos you simply scroll through a curated, filtered list. All of the content I saw is, shall we say, first rate, although arguably I grew bored after about three minutes of browsing. Best of all, the interface offers ability to fast forward through movies, Dish Hopper style, to various “positions” in the film. You can also filter by film types, although the filter is fairly limited right now. The interface is simple and easy to use with, ahem, one hand.
The company has seen about 20,000 visits so far after a bit of coverage on Hacker News. They have also noted that their average time on site is 40% higher than the time on site at other “tube” sites. While competitors usually see an ATOS of seven minutes, PaintBottle sees 9.25 minutes, which either suggests more stamina or the positive influence of the site’s clean design and curation.
Philips notes that the site will feature no huge banner ads and is dedicated to sourcing good content.
“All content featured on Paint Bottle is fully licensed through content partners; we will never accept user-submitted videos nor do we “crawl” videos from other sites. Consequently, the studios respect what we’re doing because our solution, while expensive for us, eliminates the piracy issue. We also have a vastly improved user experience that doesn’t make you feel ashamed e.g. no silly video titles, and the complete opposite of the typical grungy porn aesthetic.”
“Half of the Internet-connected populous watches porn. That’s more than the viewership for Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO, Amazon Instant Video, and all other forms of TV-on-the-Web entertainment combined. Yet, Internet porn sites are still shameful artifacts of a decade past — from when the Internet was a collection of websites featuring low-resolution images and oversized banner ads. Worse yet, Internet porn sites are still ideologically stuck in a decade past: From top to bottom, they’re designed for a campy male viewership – specifically, for a macho-man ideal of a male that reacts gleefully toward misogyny and sexual buzzwords. Yet, as cultural taboos continue to erode and Internet access becomes increasingly omnipresent, porn viewership is skyrocketing among women,” he said.
In short, the team wants to bring porn out of the 1980s. I would agree that they have, at the very least, brought it into the 2000s. While their business is obviously a bit risqué, Phillips is proud of the business.
“For over a decade now, we’ve lived in a digital world where everyone is watching porn, yet the experience has remained awful. Paint Bottle is designed to finally change that. This marks the end of browsing through 500,000 VHS-quality adult videos to find something worth watching, and the end of wading through pop-ups and giant flashing banner ads.”