A Write Up On Audiochan

Given the recent events going on in the audio erotica space, I feel it is prudent to do a write up with all of the information possible in order for creators and listeners alike to make an educated decision on whether to leave the platform or not.

In short, while Audiochan is a legitimate platform for audios and scripts, its lack of transparency throughout the recent controversies feeds skepticism.

Why?

As stated above, I think that given the recent fallout (specifically regarding AI use and untrustworthy/unprofessional behaviour) by the staff member(s) at Audiochan, an investigation of the company and its members is warranted in order to ensure the safety and trust of the community.

Updates

• Our intel regarding investors (or lack thereof) was true. Audiochan does not have any external investors - Andy put out an announcement on the Audiochan Discord explaining that what they meant by "investors" were actually close friends and mentors that they took advice from during the past few days. Statements regarding "angel investors" can be ignored. Given that that intel was true, take the rest of the document as you will :)
• They have memory holed a lot of stuff. ChanCaps and Andy's personal site are both down currently (lol). Weird to shut it down if you have nothing to hide. We have backups, but given as there wasn't anything very important on there, we aren't going to host the files. If anything else gets taken down we will try to get some backups going!

Audiochan is not profitable

Audiochan, in its current state, is not profitable. It has been stated numerous times (by staff members) that Audiochan does not do any compression on audio files whatsoever. If anyone reading this has experience hosting files, especially in larger platforms, this will get very expensive very fast.

This leaves us the question: How is Audiochan turning a profit?

They aren't. At least for now. In the recent town hall meeting, Audiochan staff described having "angel investors," but they very conveniently weren't at liberty to discuss this. That may be true, however I find it very suspicious. Update: see above "Updates" section.

As someone who is very well-versed in the startup, B2B, and SaaS ecosystem, investors need a reason to... well, invest. They are putting their faith in you to turn a profit, and in turn, make their shares worth more money. Given that Audiochan is not turning a profit on their site alone, the situation is one of two things:

• Audiochan is not the company being invested in (we will discuss this in a later section), but rather Audiochan is receiving funds from a parent company in order to keep functioning.
• Audiochan is a honeypot and the files being posted on the platform are being used for other purposes (AI?).

Now, I want to make one thing clear: both of these points are purely speculative. However, I can prove both of these options are plausible.

The Parent Company & Money

Audiochan has a parent company, "Boring+Ordinary." This domain serves Audiochan (and its other subsidiaries, which will be mentioned shortly) a Rybbit analytics script via the domain's API. This alone is more than enough evidence to prove that the two are connected; there is more evidence, however out of respect for the privacy of the staff at Audiochan, I will be keeping this information private.

Anyways, Boring+Ordinary is most likely where Audiochan is receiving their "investments" from. The lead developer of Audiochan, Andy, states in his personal website that he is "Investing in top secret projects at Boring+Ordinary." Furthermore, business records and filings from both Boring+Ordinary and Audiochan do not provide any proof that external firms are investing in either company. Given that in the town hall meeting, the Angel Investor topic seemed somewhat recent, the necessary documents could not be filed yet but typically this information should be disclosed by now.

To further my point of Audiochan not being profitable (and needing external funding to remain afloat), we have also discovered 2 connected merchandise platforms:

• ChanCaps
  • Receives a JavaScript file from Boring+Ordinary's API
  • "Chancaps keycaps also support Audiochan."
• AudioGirlie
  • "Maverick, creative director"

Both of these companies are registered to the same business address as Audiochan and have the same directors listed on their business registries.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with running offshoot merchandise sites and I'm sure that these are no mystery, but given that ChanCap's Terms of Service; Section 25 - CONTACT INFORMATION is not filled out (aside from email) and remains a stub is quite odd and possibly illegal under Canadian jurisdiction, where all of the aforementioned companies operate out of.

AI

Audiochan made their stance pretty clear on AI: they did not want AI generated audios or scripts, only promotional material (banners, images, etc.). They later backtracked on this and completely scrapped the idea of having anything AI generated on the site whatsoever which is good. However, there are a few other things worth mentioning.

• Boring+Ordinary has a HuggingFace organization. If you are unfamiliar with HuggingFace, it is a git-based large file storage platform mostly used to store weights for AI models. Companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft all use HuggingFace to distribute the weights for their open-source AI models. Andy, Audiochan's lead developer, also has a HuggingFace account. He also owns another HuggingFace account with model weights uploaded by himself.
• Boring+Ordinary's GitHub Organization also owns a few AI-related repositories.

That being said, this could all be a nothingburger. Companies using AI analytics tools, Claude Code, and other tools is pretty much unavoidable in this day and age. I think it's noteworthy that Boring+Ordinary owns a HuggingFace organization, but we don't know whether they are using it for Audiochan-related work or another child company's. I am not including this information to incite any more AI-related rage against Audiochan, I just think this information is worth keeping around.

Conclusion and Speculation

In the town hall meeting yesterday, the CEO "Maverick" said that he is stepping down, leaving Andy to run the company with the "investors." First things first, Maverick's real name is not listed anywhere on any of the Audiochan company registries as owning or controlling a large portion of the company or shares. He could be owning/controlling a small percentage or none at all and still operating as the CEO, but I also think this is worth noting. My thoughts are that Maverick says he is "stepping down" but will realistically continue running the company with Andy behind the scenes, as they are the only two listed anywhere on company documents.

I don't think investors are trying to have the Discord shut down. I think that Maverick and/or Andy would prefer the Discord be shut down so that there can be a layer of abstraction between them and the userbase (which should have been done from the get-go as to not develop parasocial relationships with your userbase...). As someone very familiar with this culture, and I can guarantee you that investors likely want nothing to do with an audio porn site. There is a reason why porn sites rarely have any investors - it's a liability. You cannot 100% control the content that gets uploaded, and shareholders do not want to have to do damage control when something bad happens (like CSAM getting uploaded). Either the investors are investing in Boring+Ordinary (or one of their other child companies which I'm not sure about either, as there are no investment filings for any of those either), or they are lying about having "investors" in order to have an excuse to shut everything down.

Audiochan flew a bit too close to the sun with this one. They have lost a lot of trust from the community and even the "CEO" is having to step down because of controversial behaviour. I personally think it is a shame because they have built a very good platform. Clearly Andy is very talented and knows what he is doing on the development side of things, but time will tell how he manages the platform. I will keep this updated with information if needed.

• your neighborhood osint investigator