IamA high school student who built & run a popular porn site. I spend 4-6 hours a day staring at porn while balancing homework in between. AMA!

How frustrating was it waiting for your 18th birthday before beginning work on the site?

as much as it was frustrating to wait until my 21st birthday to consume my first sip of alcohol

What do you think your friends, family, school and potential universities would say to learning of your porn site?

• friends: "bro that's so cool omg i love porn look at me i have so much testosterone ARRRR"
• family: (wouldn't talk to me)
• school: (expelled)
• potential universities: (revoke admission)

I think you vastly underestimate the desire universities have to curate a diverse class. While that largely means racial/gender/whatever demographics diversity, it also means they love interesting people.

Yeah, if you're applying to BSU BYU it's a terrible idea to mention this. But certainly liberal arts schools might love this. Don't mention it in every application, but definitely do in a few. You'd be surprised how much they'll value your work ethic and initiative, even if it is in a more controversial field.

Also, props to a truly impressive accomplishment. Not many people have created something as well done as this.

thanks for the suggestion! and kind words :)

what do you find more arousing, a nice booty or a beautiful line of code?

a girl with a nice booty who can write a beautiful line of code ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

tabs or spaces though...?

tabs all the way

Haha, what a story Mark! By the way, how's your sex life? (Actually though, how is it? Does watching that much porn everyday affect it?)

it's gotten pretty desensitizing tbh. i actually recently added a "sanity mode" that replaces all the porn with random pokemon gifs: https://imgur.com/a/lgI6L

That's actually really smart and innovative thinking... damn your only 18 yet companies would pay a shit load to have you work for them. Seriously.

thanks! means a lot :)

If you were on Shark Tank what percent of your company would you sell for what amount of money? How would you use the investment to grow the business?

oh boy, so many things i could grow with that money besides just the business. idk, i don't really need outside investment per se but if i had to i would maybe take $50k and spend a lot of marketing

How do you actually get the word out? How did the site become popular and what would you say works best for promoting?

And by the way: awesome work!!!

Edit: guys I get that an AMA is a good marketing idea. I was thinking more about actual paid marketing possibilities :)

i posted it on some forums and it organically grew from there

At what point will infrastructure costs cause you to monetize the site?

Follow-up question, have you been contacted about your site being acquired? At what price point would you say “yeah that’s enough”?

it'd have to be pretty significant for me to get to the point of monetizing. the servers currently cost me around $250/mo. i wouldn't start until it hits past $2k+/mo.

in terms of the site being acquired, i've had one or two that reached out but i don't think i'd sell it anytime soon. development costs alone (considering my time spent on it) is well over $50K+.

How are you able to afford your servers as a high school student? Props for making it work bro.

i do some freelancing coding projects on the side

As a high schooler, you have access to $2k/month? How does that work?

i'd basically put all my income from freelancing gigs into it until i can't handle it anymore

Why are you doing all of this if you have to keep it secret for fear of backlash from colleges/parents/school as well as having to spend loads of extra time (on top of the actual time put into the site) to earn enough money to run the site?

Do you just enjoy porn? Enjoy making sites? Do you one day wish to sell the site? Use it on your résumé (not college)?

i just like building stuff. done it since i was super young and always will. i don't do it for the money at all.

How is it that you've made up the costs thus far?

selling weed^justajoke

How was cummingle.com not taken?!

ikr? i snatched it up right away

Two questions that I'm re-submitting as questions. (Thanks, moderator bot.)

Are you aware of this bug?

Just checked out your site on Chrome on a Samsung S7.

FYI, my "endless feed" under the Gay category stops after exactly 9 results and no more will load. (Similar result under the "Popular" category.)

Do you mind if I make a suggestion?

Check out the way pornhub and xtube allow users to toggle the content of the entire site to be gay or straight. You're not going to retain a lot of gay viewers with just one umbrella category for us. I like clicking on category headings like "feet" or "bdsm" (or "bears" or "daddies") and seeing only dudes. Currently, I see a lot of tits and only the most popular (ie, bland and mainstream) gay videos.

I know such an apparently simple feature might represent weeks of programming work, but you've already got a great site name that will get gay clicks. Would be a shame not to retain those users, especially if you plan to monetize this.

thanks for the feedback, it really helps.

• as of now there just hasn't been enough new content from gay subreddits recently. if you can suggest some more active tumblr accounts with gay content, i'll add that to the system and it'll start pulling more content
• i'll take your suggestion to heart and build out a gay version of the site that only shows gay content like you said.

How did you get started in programming?

I really wanted to build a game for iOS so just started messing around with tutorials on YouTube with no programming background at all. It's amazing how much free learning resource there is online. You can pretty much find tutorials to do/build/code anything out there.

That’s awesome. I’ve done some coding, and it’s not too hard. I’ve never tried programming apps or anything like that though!

Follow up question: do you plan on going to college for programming or computer type degrees?

yeah programming is super fun and useful for a bunch of stuff. and yeah i'm planning on majoring in either computer science or computer engineering.

Since you feel the need to keep it from your family, do you come from a liberal or conservative family? Religious?
Colleges might actually find your extra curricular activities as a positive, depending on the school and your planned major.

yeah i come from a pretty religious family. they'd kill me if they found out (not really but would be v mad). and ha, maybe but i don't think i'd take my chances with the colleges

Do you plan on or have you monetized the site? What are your thoughts on invasive advertising (pop-ups, autoplayed audio) and why or why won't you use those on your site?

I think intrusive, scammy ads ("grow your dick by 5 inches in 2 weeks!") are horrible and never plan to have those kinds of ads on my site. I understand why sites have them but I'm just focusing on keeping the quality of the site clean for now.

You're going to go far with this approach.

Side note, if you put ads on, put a friendly reminder asking users to disable Adblock and the ads aren't intrusive.

Personally this encourages me to turn my Adblock off rather than companies forcing me to turn it off as I'm just not going to visit their site if they do this.

well noted, thanks!

[deleted]

the porn industry is really old school and traditional brands and advertisers (say, like ZARA) don't want to ever get associated with adult entertainment. this leads to very little competition and low bids for clicks/impressions. low bids in turn attract scammy advertisers (say, like grow your dick by 5 inches in 2 weeks)

How do you get around copy right laws?

Cummingle doesn't actually host any of the content. They're all linked out to Imgur/Gfycat/Tumblr/etc. that have their own takedown processes for copyright holders.

You'd still have to have a procedure to remove infringing content even if it is automated. Just because you don't host but facilitate & link to copyrighted works means you have to comply with DMCA requests the same as Google. Otherwise Safe Harbor Exemption for not policing content same as if one of your scaped hosts contained child porn. You would have to remove it or face legal issues despite it not being on your site. On the other hand if you're hot linking of their servers I can't imagine they'll be too happy with you over time & may rewrite their API's to exclude your scrapping.

yeah i'm in the process of making a dmca takedown form on the website itself. should be pushed out soon.

Are there links to the source videos? Or just the GIFs?

it just links out to the actual source url of the videos since there's no way to tell where to actual source is from. sometimes you can find that in the description of the original gfycat (or tumblr or imgur) links

Have you had any close calls while working on the site when a family member happens to suprise you at the worst possible time?

haha i have a keyboard shortcut on my linux environment where it instantly switches my screen to something safe for work/family. a couple close calls though.

How were you like during school?

idk, i'm actually a perfectly normal kid at school. i hang out with my friends all the time, i pretend to pay attention in class, and teachers like me. it's just kinda boring and not stimulating enough imo so i'm just waiting to get to college now.

So fellow 18 year old coder, what was thought process to make this site?

• 1) watch porn like any other horny 18 yo
• 2) get sick of ads and sites with terrible UX
• 3) get high
• 4) design site
• 5) build site

Do you ever plan to tell your loved ones? It's a great accomplishment even if it's a bit controversial.

haha if i tell anyone then it introduces a chance of leaking. so no, i wouldn't.

Do you make any money from your site? And if so, what are your revenue streams?

I don't make any money from it. There is no revenue stream as of now. I want to keep the site completely ad-free for a while until it's absolutely necessary.

When would it become necessary?

Edit: I'm not discouraging him from putting ads on the site, I was just wondering :(

it would become necessary when server bills start going crazy. it's manageable right now but if it continues to grow then we might reach that point soon.

Would you have more time for school if you stopped jerking off so much?

i've actually done less of that since starting the site. i just see so much of it now that i've become much more desensitized to it.

Can you increase your Gay content ? I'm asking for a friend !!!

(answering for a friend) yeah, i'm building out an entire gay version of the site that replaces all the generic categories right now (i.e. hardcore, amateur) with gay sub-categories. stay tuned! xo

What made you choose to go into the porn industry? Do you still find porn exciting now that you're working with it all day?

i didn't choose the porn industry, the porn industry chose me ;)

Do you plan on telling your friends and/or family about your site? If so, when will you and how do you think they'll react?

no, i can't afford to let this information leak at all.

Do you have any tips on learning how to code in this way?

youtube is such a great resource. i would start with interpreted languages like python and javascript to begin with!

How long did it take to build this project ? Where do you host it ?

the first version was super simple and took me less than a week. i've since spent much more time adding onto it. it's currently hosted on heroku.

Anyone you know use this site?

not that i know of personally, since i haven't told anyone i know

What's your tech stack like?

react frontend node/mongo backend

2 questions. Before them, just wanted to say you are one of my idols now.

1.- Does the website track any sort of user-activity (most searched, time, etc.)? And if so, what are some of the most popular or common things people do?

2.- Has your website been acknowledged as competition by other porn companies? Heck, have they tried to buy it or the algorithm you use?

• For now I don't track user activity for the sake of privacy
• Haha not yet! I'm just trying to build the best porn site that I personally would use

How do you feel about the nofap community condemning porn and making others feel bad when they watch porn?

to each their own!