Advertising On Porn Websites
It has long been a mystery to me why more mainstream products that are sold to porn-watching adults are afraid to advertise on porn websites. Porn advertising is dirt cheap, and so you’d think that any brand that’s not afraid to admit its customers also like porn would be all over the porn website world with huge ad campaigns. Whiskey and cigarette advertisers used to buy endless full-page ads in PlayBoy and Hustler back in the day; why don’t they now?
Thus I was both heartened and pleased to see that one of the online food-delivery startups has not only taken to porn site advertising, they’ve blogged in detail about why they did it and how well it worked:
This got us thinking about porn websites. Are they a good place for us to advertise? Will we hit our target audience? Can we afford it? And why is everyone always shaking their head at us when we bring it up?
We decided to seriously look into it and what we found was boobs. A lot of them. But, we also found an advertising gold mine. We always assumed that a lot of people love porn, but when you look at the numbers, the proof is in the hot tub full of pudding. A whopping 30% of ALL web traffic is dedicated to adult sites. In fact, by the time you’re done reading this sentence, about 197,806 people have looked at porn on the Internet (including you. We see that incognito tab).
So where does America like to spend its time on the Internet? We took a closer look at the top websites by traffic in the United States. Leading the charts are Google, Facebook and YouTube. Duh. No news there. Moving down the list, we couldn’t help but notice that many of the top 100 sites in the US are pornographic.
Considering these numbers, you’d think it’d be pretty expensive to shove your brand message in the face of such a large, captive audience. Right? It probably costs an arm and a third leg, right? Wrong!
We compared our average CPM across major ad publishers such as Google, Twitter and Facebook and found we could get more impressions via porn sites than the big three combined, and at roughly 1/10th of the cost (!) High traffic sites with cheap ad space?? Did we just see a unicorn?
If you ever take two seconds out of your naughty time to glance at the ads on porn sites, you’ll notice that 99% of them are for more porn. It’s a world where no one besides male enhancement pills and adult friend finders have dared to go. Not a single mainstream brand advertising there. We could be that 1%.
The evidence was in. Porn advertising is an untapped market, and our mission was clear:
Tap. Dat. Ass.
