In brief
LiveJasmin is a Hungarian paid video chat platform, launched in 2001, that grew into one of the most visited sites in its market: in the 2013 Alexa ranking it was 96th in the world and first among video chats estimate. Rare for the industry, the group's companies publish financial statements, and the press has taken them apart. The platform's revenue in 2020 was about €1.14 million a day, or roughly €417 million a year, with a profit of about 4.7%. The second part of the story is the structure: the licensing scheme became the subject of a VAT dispute with the Hungarian tax authority over 2009–2011, which went all the way to the EU Court of Justice, and in 2013 development and the licenses moved from Budapest to Luxembourg.
How it started (the founders)
The founder and owner is György Gattyán, a public business figure. The service, under the domain jasmin.hu, was running no later than April 4, 2001 (the earliest archive snapshot), and the December 1, 2001 snapshot carries the footer "© 2001 JMP & Jasmin Team." The date of November 12, 2001 in Wikipedia comes from WHOIS, not from a company document, and it is later than the first snapshot, so it cannot be the launch date. The first version was a local, Hungarian-language project; the domain livejasmin.com responds as early as March 28, 2002, and by June 2007 the menu had the sections "Affiliates," "Models Wanted," and "WebMasters Wanted."
The corporate shell took shape gradually. The company Jasmin Media Group made a profit of HUF 896 million in 2007, and from 2008 it took the name Docler Holding estimate. Also in 2008, DoclerWeb Kft. (hosting and data processing) was spun off from it estimate; by 2011 this Hungarian company had revenue of HUF 4.58 billion with 36 employees on average. Gattyán himself, around 2012–2013, ranked in the top three to five of lists of the richest Hungarians estimate.
Year-by-year timeline
- 2001-04-04: the earliest snapshot of jasmin.hu shows the service already running; the 2001-12-01 snapshot has a 2001 footer fact
- 2002-03-28: the domain livejasmin.com responds (the earliest snapshot); a snapshot from 2004-01-25 exists fact
- 2007: Jasmin Media Group posts a profit of HUF 896 million; the site menu has an affiliate section and recruitment of performers estimate
- 2008: Jasmin Media Group is renamed Docler Holding, and DoclerWeb Kft. is spun off estimate
- 2009-09-01: WebMindLicenses acquires the know-how and on the same day licenses it to Lalib, a company on Madeira fact
- 2009–2011: the tax years for which the Hungarian tax authority challenged this scheme over VAT fact
- 2011: DoclerWeb Kft. has revenue of HUF 4.58 billion and a profit of HUF 723 million; the press attributes to the owner tax on HUF 13 billion in dividends for the year estimate
- 2013-09: a report that the LiveJasmin business is moving to Luxembourg; officially for renewal and international expansion, according to the press also because of NAV audits; a third of ~1,000 employees are affected estimate
- 2013: filings of Docler Holding S.à r.l. (B180190) appear in the Luxembourg register estimate
- 2014-08: rebranding as Jasmin.com, TV commercials, NBCUniversal refuses to air the ad during the Emmys; a publication estimates revenue at about a million dollars a day estimate
- 2015-12-17: the EU Court of Justice in case C-419/14: an arrangement can be deemed abusive only if it is wholly artificial; the decision on the merits is left to the national court fact
- 2018 / 2019: group turnover of €351.4 million and €389.8 million according to a Hungarian press ranking estimate
- 2020: the operator's revenue is about €1.14 million a day, +14% over 2019; profit is about €20 million; on 2020-12-14 the new operators JWS Americas and JWS International are registered estimate
- 2022-06-16: a second EU Court of Justice case about the same Lalib: C-596/20 DuoDecad Kft., VAT for 2009 and 2011 estimate
- 2025-08-14: an agreement on cutting 115 people at the Luxembourg companies Byborg Enterprises SA and Byborg IP SARL, leaving just over 150 fact
- 2026-08: Similarweb puts the global rank at No. 213, with the US at 23% of visits estimate
Lesser-known but significant facts
- Out of every €100 of revenue in 2020, the platform kept less than €5. Profit of about €20 million on revenue of roughly €417 million, while €276 million went to the "other expenses" line (probably payouts to performers and licenses), which is 66% of revenue estimate.
- The money moves along a chain of royalties. The operating companies paid license fees to WebMindLicenses Kft., Docler IP, and Jasmin IP; for 2015–2020, Docler IP had total revenue of €1.8 billion, of which only €307 million came from the platform operator estimate. No consolidated financial statements for the group were found.
- Docler Holding shows no corporate income tax. In the reports for 2018 and 2019, Docler Holding has no amount on the corporate income tax line, and other taxes come to €30,000 and €4,815 estimate. Luxembourg, on the other hand, collects VAT from European customers, about €16 million (17%) estimate.
- The platform operator was reassembled. The previous operator, DuoDecad IT Services, was replaced by JWS Americas and JWS International, registered on December 14, 2020. Wikipedia gives LiveJasmin's legal name as JWS Americas S.à r.l.
- The company itself talks about the "Cash Cow." In 2023 the Docler Holding PR department told a Luxembourg publication that LiveJasmin is a "Cash Cow" and that the money goes to other products estimate.
Legend vs. the record
- Legend: webcam platforms do not disclose their financials. That is the usual thing said about the industry's private companies. The record: the Hungarian DoclerWeb Kft. published revenue and profit in an open database as early as 2010–2011; the Luxembourg DuoDecad did so six years in a row (2015–2020); and there are reports from Docler IP and Docler Holding for 2019. Verdict: wrong as a general statement, since the financial statements exist. What is true is something else: there is no single picture, because no consolidated reports were found, intragroup loans run to tens of millions of euros, and the operator changed in December 2020 estimate.
- Legend: the market is entirely American. The record: in 2015–2020 the US provided on average 40% of the platform's revenue, and 45% in 2020; 87% of revenue came from 13 countries, all in North America and Western Europe plus Australia. An academic description names the US and Germany as the main customers; Telex does not name Germany. The company itself is Hungarian and Luxembourgish. Verdict: wrong in both senses: the US is the largest market but not the majority, and the owner and development are European estimate. By traffic, the US accounts for 23% of visits (Similarweb, 2026-08); by 2020 revenue, 45%.
- Legend: they moved to Luxembourg for the taxes. The record: the press wrote in 2013 that the move was reportedly helped along by tax audits, while the company neither confirmed nor denied the claim and named expansion as the reason. The tax dispute is documented, but it concerns VAT for 2009–2011 and the licensee on Madeira, not Luxembourg: the authority assessed about HUF 21.2 billion in VAT, fines, and late-payment interest, and in 2015 the EU Court of Justice set the criterion of a wholly artificial arrangement and left the decision to the national court [amounts: estimate]. Luxembourg's place in the chain is as the recipient of royalties: consultants describe the scheme as a chain of a Hungarian company, a Portuguese license, and a Luxembourg recipient and a rate of 5.84% under the Luxembourg IP regime. The tax authority put the total of its claims at HUF 26.5 billion (about €75–80 million by the author's calculation), and the outcome, by its own account in 2025, was rulings by Hungarian and international courts in favor of the group company estimate. Verdict: the dispute is confirmed, but it predates the move and concerns VAT; the motive for the move is not proven by documents estimate.
- Legend: they make a million dollars a day. The record: a publication said in 2014 that it was nearly a million a day; the owner's own description on a TV program was 1.5 million, not independently verified; the 2020 financial statements show €1.14 million a day. Verdict: the order of magnitude is confirmed, but by the 2020 financial statements, not those of 2014 estimate. And this is revenue, not profit: about 4.7%.
The first growth lever
The documents do not show what exactly drove the first growth: LiveJasmin has no early figures of its own, and advertising came late, with the rebranding and TV commercials in 2014, 13 years after the launch and when revenue was already about a million dollars a day estimate. So the version of "advertising as the first lever" is not confirmed.
The best-documented side is supply. A performer gets a tiered share: 30% on earnings up to $250 per period and 80% on earnings above $30,000; in studios the performer gets 10–20% of the customer's payment, and the studios take 35–50%; Romania has about 5,000 studios, and more than 120,000 performers are registered on the platform estimate. Such a scale ties the most productive performers to a single platform and shifts recruiting onto the studios estimate. By 2007 the site was already recruiting performers, webmasters, and affiliates.
The paired story
The pair is iFriends (Web Power), a service of the Florida company WebPower, Inc.
- The shared plot: a webcam model in which the customer pays for time and the performer gets a share. For iFriends, a 50% share is documented (2001, 2003), along with a price set by the host ($2–9 per minute); for LiveJasmin, a tiered 30–80% scale was found, but from a description from around 2020, not from a document of the era. There is no direct comparison "in the same year" estimate.
- Years: iFriends is visible in the archive from 1998-11-11, LiveJasmin from 2001-04-04. That makes LiveJasmin roughly two and a half years younger.
- The contrast in structure: iFriends is the Florida WebPower, Inc., all 29 of whose trademarks are inactive, the last ones canceled in 2026, and the fate of the business is not confirmed; LiveJasmin is a Hungarian group that moved to Luxembourg, is alive, and publishes its financials piece by piece.
- Scale: iFriends claimed tens of thousands of sessions a day; LiveJasmin had €1.14 million in revenue a day according to the 2020 financial statements. These numbers cannot be compared: different years and different types of source estimate.
- Billing: for iFriends, per-second billing is not confirmed: the documents speak of a per-minute rate and a 60-second pulse. For LiveJasmin, nothing in the material collected covers the billing unit unverified: a user agreement from the era is needed. The episode should not attribute per-second billing to either company without a document.
- Shared people and deals between the companies do not appear in the sources found. The only link is the WAG Acquisition patent case of 2015–2019, in which the defendants were WebPower, Inc. and DuoDecad IT Services Luxembourg, the LiveJasmin operator at the time; WebPower being the same company as the owner of iFriends is estimate.
- Advertising as a lever: for LiveJasmin, it was the 2014 TV commercials; for iFriends, its own Click-Ca$h affiliate network. Different levers, not a shared one.
Parallels today (projects from the catalog)
- VerifiedMRR (
verifiedmrr): a single view of revenue across several payment providers and projects; Docler has the same problem on a large scale, with dozens of companies, mutual loans, and not a single consolidated report. The difference: VerifiedMRR builds its summary across payment providers, while the group would have to consolidate legal entities. view this project's dossier → - Publishing Performance (
kdp-amazon-ads-ai-saas): advertising as a managed paid channel with daily bid tuning; at LiveJasmin, advertising arrived in 2014 as a rebranding after the growth had already happened. The difference: there advertising is the main way of selling, here it was a late amplifier of name recognition. view this project's dossier → - PortaSale (
portasale): a marketplace where the seller's share is public (90%), while the performer's share at LiveJasmin is tiered at 30–80%; the mechanic is the same, with the performer's share as the main supply lever. The difference: the buyer pays for a digital product, not for time. view this project's dossier →
What a builder can take from this in 2026
- Figures in pieces will still get pieced together. The financial statements of dozens of companies let the press reconstruct revenue, profit, and geography.
- Make your payout scale tiered if you want to keep the best. 30% at the start and 80% on earnings above $30,000 is a retention mechanic; check where your own point lies beyond which the platform's share drops.
- Do not build the whole company on a single source of income. The "Cash Cow" pays for other products, but the platform's profit is about 4.7% with 66% in "other expenses": the margin rests on scale, not on price.
- A licensing structure is a risk, not just a saving. The VAT dispute over 2009–2011 went all the way to the EU Court of Justice, and the tax authority demanded HUF 26.5 billion. Contracts between your own companies need to be documented so that they hold up under an audit.
- Advertising after growth, not instead of it. The 2014 TV campaign came when revenue was already about a million dollars a day.
- Concentration by country is a business risk. 40–45% of revenue from the US and 87% from 13 countries: a change in payment system rules or regulation in one country hits half of revenue.
Discrepancies and what we could not verify
- The year Docler Holding was founded: 2008 versus 2011 in one and the same Wikipedia article; we go with 2008 estimate.
- 2019 revenue: €389.8 million for "Docler Holding" versus an estimate of about €365 million for DuoDecad; these are different perimeters, and there are no consolidated financial statements estimate.
- The amounts of the tax claims: €80.3 million versus HUF 26.5 billion; in the WebMindLicenses case, about HUF 21.2 billion: the order of magnitude matches, but the nature differs estimate.
- The outcome of the WebMindLicenses case at the national level after the 2015 EU Court of Justice ruling was not found: there is only NAV's 2025 statement that the rulings went in the defendant's favor, without case numbers; the link between WebMindLicenses and DuoDecad Kft. and the group rests on financial statements and consulting material, not on the texts of the rulings unverified.
- The Luxembourg register (LBR/RCS): only aggregators were read; there are no registration dates, members, or capital unverified. The holding's net profit figures for 2022–2024 come from an aggregator snippet rumor.
- Market share by revenue: there is no independent estimate; there are the 2013 Alexa ranking, 2019 traffic, and the Similarweb rank for 2026-08 unverified.
- The owner's statements about revenue in a Forbes.hu interview of December 12, 2021 are not openly accessible unverified.
Sources (primary first)
- Wayback Machine snapshots of the domain jasmin.hu from April 4, 2001, and December 1, 2001 (a text reference; no address given) — the service was running in 2001
- Wayback Machine snapshots of livejasmin.com from March 28, 2002, January 25, 2004, and June 19, 2007 (a text reference) — the domain and the affiliate and recruitment sections
- https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=ecli:ECLI:EU:C:2015:832 — EU Court of Justice ruling C-419/14, December 17, 2015; the second case is C-596/20 (ECLI:EU:C:2022:474), June 16, 2022
- https://telex.hu/g7/kozelet/2022/01/04/az-atlathatatlan-gattyan-birodalomban-csak-a-felnott-tartalomban-sejlik-fel-a-penz — an analysis of the Luxembourg and Hungarian financial statements, 2022
- https://hvg.hu/kkv/20120611_szex_biznisz_doclerweb — DoclerWeb Kft. according to the Ministry of Justice database, 2012
- https://www.penzcentrum.hu/karrier/20130906/eluldozte-a-nav-a-legnagyobb-magyar-adofizetot-1037594 — the move to Luxembourg, 2013
- https://privatbankar.hu/cikkek/vallalat/kozel-masfel-tucatnyi-ceget-tette-egybe-gattyan-gyorgy.html — turnover for 2018–2019, 2020
- https://mfor.hu/cikkek/makro/leszallt-a-nav-gattyan-gyorgy-cegerol-ezert-vegre-bezarhattak.html — the liquidation of DoclerWeb, the dispute with NAV
- https://mgi-bpo.hu/en/news/docler-group-vs-hungary-or-luxembourg-vs-the-world/ — the licensing structure
- observer.com — the rebranding and advertising, 2014
- https://en.paperjam.lu/article/docler-byborg-confirms-115-redundancies-in-luxembourg — the 2025 job cuts
- reporter.lu — the "Cash Cow" quote, 2023
- https://www.similarweb.com/website/livejasmin.com/ — rank and share of visits by country, 2026-08
- lefteast.org — the payout model
- https://www.pappers.lu/en/company/docler-holding-sa-rl-B180190 and https://www.northdata.com/Docler%20Holding%20S%C3%A0rl,%20Luxembourg/B180190 — the register (aggregators)