AFF has been around for a while and had been one of the first personals sites (recently they were sold to Penthouse who planned to take them to IPO).
When they were privately (and before being sold to Penthouse) they were still very profitable and paid generous bonuses to employees (although they had a fairly high churn rate due to the nature of their business). AFF, by the way, is a big Perl shop.
I believe most of their income comes from pornographic portions that they offer / affiliate programs (but I'd imagine the "adult personals" portion is what draws its audience).
A friend worked at AFF and has a curious story about it:
Once in the early day's, my friend's manager (the company's founder) had been asked by a former classmate if he could host a site for his start-up in exchange for stock options. The manager refused. That classmate's name was... Jerry Yang.
1) Is that hard to believe? Yahoo only incorporated in 1995, there were start-ups before that. Unfortunately, I can't find DNS records to back this up - FFN domains seem to be registered with non-Verisign registrar which wouldn't have been arround until 1998 (when third party registrars would have been available).
2) AFF's founders could have already been hosting sites before founding AFF (indeed, it would logically follow that he'd have experience running a site before launching a successful company).
EDIT: Here's some proof:
Conru.com is registered wih Verisign and on 03-NOV-94 (Andrew Conru is the founder of AFF and you can see the FFN address and name when doing 'whois conru.com'). Yahoo.com is registered 18-JAN-1995 (do "whois '=yahoo.com'" to check). Seems like it's at least plausible (Stanford is a small place).
Andrew Conru had several web businesses that were contemporaneous with the start of Yahoo. I worked with him for few months at W3.com (not current owner of site but a company that built websites for Egghead, New Media Magazine and others) in 94/95. It was at the start of the first dotcom era in Palo Alto. I was not involved in AFF which he started later. Conru was in the Mechanical Engineering PhD program at Stanford and could well have known the Yahoo guys.
When they were privately (and before being sold to Penthouse) they were still very profitable and paid generous bonuses to employees (although they had a fairly high churn rate due to the nature of their business). AFF, by the way, is a big Perl shop.
I believe most of their income comes from pornographic portions that they offer / affiliate programs (but I'd imagine the "adult personals" portion is what draws its audience).
A friend worked at AFF and has a curious story about it:
Once in the early day's, my friend's manager (the company's founder) had been asked by a former classmate if he could host a site for his start-up in exchange for stock options. The manager refused. That classmate's name was... Jerry Yang.