Calcalist, the Israeli version of the Economist, exposed that Muly Litvak, a former CEO of a publicly traded company and Professor Rafi Eldor of IDC are behind one of the world’s largest adult content networks.
In the heart of Tel Aviv, sits Sobonito Investment Group, a company registered in Limasol, Cyprus who owns Cool Vision. Cool Vision’s business model consists of selling pay-per-view subscriptions for live webcams content, featuring naked women, primarily in Eastern Europe. The company shares some of the revenue with the ‘stars’. Cool Vision also provides white label platform services for adult websites – the services are provided by some of the 100 employees in Israel.
It tuns out that Cool Vision owns more than 40 sex websites, which bring in about $150 million a year. One of the sites is imlive.com, driving 5 million unique users a month, according to Compete. Together, the network of 40 sites attracts tens of millions of users, making it perhaps the most viewed Israeli owned websites online.
In 2005, Cool Vision was sued for breaking spamming laws in the US, but it’s worth mentioning that company is not doing anything illegal – they comply with the rules of each of the countries they are active in, and it verifies that participants are 18 or older. According to a former employee of the company, the pay was excellent “almost twice the salary paid by high tech companies”.
From the company’s values page:
CoolVision Ltd. espouses and implements values of excellence, diligence, innovation and creativity. The firm sees its management and its employees as active partners with a personal sense of responsibility for goals and missions, encouraging them to dare, be original and take initiative.
Muly Litvak owns 98.5% of the shares in the company and is a serial entrepreneur. He started his activities in 1995, when he founded TargetMatch.com along with his sister Anat Litvak – a former banker in the World Bank. TargetMatch operated a series of websites including Datingclub.com, Jobmatch.com and Travelmatch.com. The company went public in the peak of the bubble in 2000 but quickly declined in revenues and was finally taken private again by Litvak.
Litvak’s porn activities started in 1999, when he asked one of TargetMatch’s dating editors to also edit the adult site Fantasymatch.com. In an interview to the New York Times that year, Litvak denied any connection to adult entertainment – he was running a project called “Newlife” which connected sperm donors with receivers online.
What amazes me in this story is the number of top people that Litvak has been able to attract. I’ve studied with Proferssor Rafi Eldor (owner of 1.5% of the shares) while I lived in Israel. He’s the author of numerous books on Finance.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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