Manwin Licensing

Type:	Privately held
Industry:	Information Technology
Founded:	2007
Founder(s):	Fabian Thylmann
Headquarters:	Luxembourg City
Country:	Luxembourg
Employees:	700
Email:	info[at]manwin.com
Website:	www.manwin.com
Key People
Fabian Thylmann,Founder & Managing Partner

Manwin is an information technology and licensing company which owns and operates adult oriented trademarks and websites. The company's main office is located in Luxembourg with offices located in Hamburg, London, Los Angeles, Nicosia, and Montreal.

Background

Manwin was founded by Fabian Thylmann, a geek from Germany who specializes in search engine optimization. He started developing codes for porn sites at the age of 17. Thylmann learned that porn sites gain high web traffic with good profitability so he started acquiring small adult entertainment sites such as PrivatAmateure, MyDirtyHobby, XTube and Brazzers. Manwin became the official name of the company when it expanded and acquired several porn sites for over 140 million.

In November, 2011, Manwinn entered a partnership agreement with Playboy Enterprises, Inc. to manage the operations of Playboy TV worldwide, including its non-branded adult television and online businesses. During the same month, the company also introduced Legendary Stats, an affiliate aggregation product website which allows users to access all of Manwin's products using one log-in.

Services

The company provides the following solutions to its customers:

• Web Application Development
• Search Engine Optimization
• Customer Relationship Management
• Website Optimization
• Business Intelligence

ICANN & Lawsuits

On November 15, 2011, Manwin and Digital Playground filed an anti-trust lawsuit against ICM Registry and ICANN. The company claims that ICM and ICANN conducted anti-competitive, monopolistic conduct, price gouging and unfair practices. The complainants asked the court to issue an injunction order on the .xxx sTLD, order ICANN to open a re-bidding process for the sTLD, and to require price constraints for ICM. The legal charges were filed at the United States Central District Court of California. Following the lawsuit, Manwin also requested the International Centre for Dispute Resolution conduct an Independent Review Proceedings (IRP) with regards to ICANN's actions. An interesting aside is that Manwin is only the second company to ever file an IRP with ICANN, the first was filed by ICM Registry after the ICANN Board initially approved then denied the .xxx extension after the 2004 round of gTLD expansion. Manwin's IRP was aimed mainly at .xxx, but raises questions of legitimacy for the rest of ICANN's 2012 new gTLD program.

In January, 2012, Manwin acquired Digital Playground, another corporation engaged in lawsuit with ICM Registry.

Independent Review Process