How to Advertise on a Porn Website | Hacker News Reader

How to Advertise on a Porn Website

blog.eat24hours.com

687 pointsdohertyjf114 comments

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That was actually a really interesting article. I think it really helps that they were able to come up with a really good set of ads that worked perfectly with the audience on the adult websites. That's always the goal, but execution is never quite as easy as it seems :)

And what is the audience of the adult websites? It is the same audience that reads NYTimes and WSJ and WaPo. Everyone on the internet watches porn - except some that prefer to read it.

They're definitely in a different context / mindset though.

That's because the "audience" is not necessarily defined by properties that are set in stone. Yes, they're the same people that read certain other sites/mags/newspapers, but they're different in that they are horny, and not distracted by the visual cues advertisers usually employ.

In other words: no, this is a different audience than the audience that's reading those sites; these are horny readers of those sites.

A big difference.

That's not necessarily the point though. While they did initially come up with the idea because pornstars are some of their brand advocates, they realized that it's much cheaper and cost-effective to advertise there as opposed to a NYT or WaPo that has just as many readers, but is also noisier.

That's the point this person is making. They're saying that by advertising on a porn site, they are getting readers from all those websites, because everyone watches porn at some point.

That's a very good point. I'm reading HN without my pants, as I usually do.

Those same ads would work here just fine.

Please, no ads on HN.

...and please put your pants on.

>>Everyone on the internet watches porn

kids watch/read porn.. grownups do the real stuff :)

The total reach of all porn is quite broad, but I strongly suspect that the number of impressions skews male, possibly by multiple orders of magnitude.

(Yes, I made that WAG up with no evidence whatsoever, so I'll be more than happy to see statistics or hear from anyone who disagrees.)

TFA says it is 1/3 female.

I read it pretty carefully. Unless I really missed something, what it says is that 1/3 of women "admit to watching porn," without specifying anything about frequency. It does not that 1/3 of overall ad impressions are served to women, and there is a vast difference between these two things.

Assuming that women watch mainstream porn video somewhere close to as often as men because both men and women like sex seems like the same sort of category error as assuming that roughly as many men as women read sexy romance novels under that same rationale.

"Of the total traffic generated by our ads, over 90% were first-time visitors to Eat24.com"

Or a large proportion are browsing incognito.

But what a great article!

Agree, great and refreshing article on HN for a change.

They say "Not only did we drive tons of clicks and app downloads, we were able to reach a whole new market affordably and efficiently," but I wonder how many of those first-time visitors ever came back? Or converted into paid accounts... Did the new traffic pay for the cost of the marketing spend?

Or perhaps that wasn't the point here and it was more a brand awareness campaign. If that's the bar, this sounds very successful indeed, particularly if you don't mind associating your brand with these types of images/ads. They didn't just stick a house ad in there, they embraced that community's ... appetite.

The article states that they get okay rates of the 'porn-acquired' customers returning.

Which is natural - for such services the big barrier is trying it out (instead of only considering the "default" takeout options that you already knew); if you get a good experience then you're likely to shop again at least occasionally.

Umm, as they do delivery and accept creditcards, then they can be rather sure which orders are from new users and which are repeated. Unless they have amnesia.

Just as Chrome says - browser incognito mode doesn't really work if you tell a website where you live and what name is written on your card.

"Total traffic" and "people who gave us credit card info" are two very different things, and they are discussing the former. They would only be able to disambiguate in the (presumably small) portion of people that went on to log in/sign up.

"already have my for-porn pre-paid CC out ... better use it for pizza as well"

just saying. ...never paid for porn.

But what a great article!

Yeah, I haven't ordered anything from them yet, but I do now subscribe to their RSS feed.

> Or a large proportion are browsing incognito.

How many people really use incognito mode? How many people (outside the unrepresentative minority that frequent Hacker News) even know about the feature?

I don't have the data to back it up, but my guess would be that incognito mode doesn't really throw off the numbers in practice.

I use incognito mode ... the last thing I want is redtube being a permanent fixture in auto-complete, most visited, or anywhere else Google decides to leverage that information locally or otherwise, especially with all the stuff Chrome syncs across computers/devices these days.

As a feature it's received tremendous publicity so I don't think it's safe to assume nobody uses or knows about it:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870346730457538...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/technology/personaltech/ho...

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/six-way...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2013/08/11/ways-to-he...

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/americans-go-to-gre... found most people tried to hide some stuff they were doing online.

why stop at incognito mode? You could run an entire vm in a jail'd process. Or make a hidden user account with its own home directory (if you use a unix), etc, etc.

I will when that stuff can be done as easily as shift-command-n or right clicking a link and selecting open in incognito!

Why? Incognito mode works fine, and all this extra work gets you nothing.

For me it's less about keeping embarrassing searches a secret and more about stopping my grandmother see it as a google search suggestion.

Why is there so little non-porn advertising on porn sites? If CPMs are low, and conversions are good enough, what's up with the ROI gap? Is this really the cost of social outrage? I'm really curious to see if anyone has any theories/answers...

A lot of it is "social outrage", but not necessarily actual outrage. I'm a marketing person, I enjoy porn, but I won't advertise on porn sites because a.) I don't want to position brands next to it and b.) Even if I did, people in companies I represent would raise the same issue. But there's no "outrage" from myself, for sure.

There are other reasons too. For example, porn sites are known for shitty advertising (popups, popunders, accidental clicks, etc.) so people like me who haven't researched it at all think firstly are these techniques required to get good results from porn sites (I don't want to use them) and secondly will my adverts be assumed to be shitty just by their placement next to other shitty adverts?

if you've spoofed your referral links, how would they ever know?

I don't lie to my clients about where I spend their money - and even if I wanted to, I wouldn't manage to do it without them noticing.

that's all good and fine on paper but seriously, how would they ever know that the new add for McDonald's new menu item appeared beside hurrdrurr.com/the-one-with-midget-horse-and-tall-lady.html

There's a lot of clever tracking tools in the world

There's a possibility that the client may be a user of the porn site where he advertises.

More likely he's referring to the services people use to see where on the internet their ads are being displayed.

but who would ever admit to it? Gee, I was trying to jerk off to some porn yesterday and I found our ad on the site.

yeah, I was thinking that too. Must be the fear of negative stigma (we're a bunch of puritans...).

Be kind of funny if a mainstream company (McD's) put a hilarious add that only showed on a porn site and suddenly everyone was talking about it in the office environment...

It's association risk. Coke, IBM, Citibank... name any corporation large enough to buy internet ad space at volume, and you can almost guarantee that the company in question doesn't want to be associated with pornography.

Maybe Coke IBM and Citibank are the wrong brands, but why not a brand that tries to eek sex, like Axe, or most beer companies?

Am i crazy for thinking that being loosely associated with sex/porn would be great for many businesses?

Couple things there: Axe is owned by Unilever, who also makes brands like Dove - they might not want the press of "owners of Dove advertise on shock porn sites" or whatever. Axe might be ok with being associated with "two sexy people going at it in a traditional way" type porn, but not "bunch of funny looking people having 'strange' sex" type porn, and discriminating between the two might not be worth their time and effort. Axe is probably bought, at least partly, by moms for their young teenage sons - who might not take kindly to actual sex being that tied to their advertising. Take a look at how they currently advertise - it's sex, but with a goofy/comedic slant. Think the ads with the astronauts - those are legitimately funny.

Because we still live in a sex negative society that likes to pretend that no one actually likes sex, and porn is only for people unable to find significant others.

A big reason, which the Eat24 article sort of delves into, is use case. If most porn viewers are watching between 7pm and 3am, those are fantastic hours for a food delivery service; they might be shitty hours for a lot of other products or services. (Though I'd imagine they would make great hours, and porn great ad inventory, for impulse-buy products).

As others have mentioned, brand association is another big factor. Probably the biggest factor. Most mainstream companies are extremely (ahem) anal about where their brands pop up.

I wanted to, but in my company case we cannot risk it at all, even 4chan was banned by the CEO...

We make games for children aged around 5 years old... If we advertise that at a porn site, beside probably missing our target market, we risk people making those huge outraged internet firestorms that after 4 republications by blogs and newspapers will result into people concluding I am a pedophile.

That was probably a smart call.

So.. why did you want to advertise your game for five year olds on porn sites?

Lots of visitors to porn sites have 5 year old children?

Most companies don't want to be associated with pr0n...especially big companies whose market base depends soccer moms and children

I was working for a bank and an ad slipped through our list of advertisers to be featured on a porn site. A journalist picked up on this and there was 'outrage' within and outside the bank. It was amazing seeing how upset people were.

We had to do a massive audit and white list all future ad sites we used. Personally I felt if you choose to be at a porn site why are you offended at a credit card being there? I'd be more embarrassed being caught watching a Sandra Bullock movie...which of course I've never done. I wished the bank put a tongue in cheek press release saying to the journalist 'what were you doing there'. But in the real world we apologise and pretend these sites don't exist.

Actually a bank advert offering [pseudo-]anonymous CC payment services would fit in the space well - from an advertising perspective - wouldn't it.

I say pseudo because I'm [paranoid and] almost certain that even if you pay cash then someone somewhere has your face connected to that transaction and it's only a security service select query and face-recognition pass away from being ID'ed as you.

It doesn't even need to be straight-up porn: while lots of 4chan is porn, a lot of it isn't, and they've had a hard time finding enough advertisers to keep the lights on.

I think (not sure) there are investor rules too. Like VC -> no link to porn.

Divorce lawyers and maybe holidays to places with presumed-available people might also be popular.

I skimmed 96 comments looking for anyone to say, "You know, this is pretty offensive and/or wrong." I found only two posts comprising one sarcastic attempt at pointing that direction.

No one's making the argument that porn's good, but a lot of people either genuinely assume so or want to signal that they're really pragmatic and modern and liberal. (If you think everyone's just bracketing the moral questions and that it's appropriate to do so, ask yourself how well a post on successfully marketing on white supremacist websites would fare.)

I'm not going to make an actual case that porn is evil either: it's clear we'd have to do a lot of work on finding common philosophical ground first, and I don't have the time. But in the face of apparently-overwhelming social acceptance of evil, it's better if someone says, "Hey, everybody, this is wrong," even if they can't convince people of it at the moment. Since I can't find much to upvote here, I'll be that guy:

Pornography is evil in concept and in practice. Building your business through it is considerably worse than, e.g., using huge email spam networks. It beggars belief that--in a community that can at least entertain the idea that it might be wrong to create a business by exploiting people's lizard brains with notifications, gamification, and misleading social ads--ninety-eight percent of comments on using porn to promote your business either avoid considering morality at all or go out of the way to indicate that everything's a-ok here.

Interesting, that's exactly how I feel about investment banking, as currently practiced in the US.

They've certainly taken a stance on porn that is opposite of, say, Apple.

Too bad you're being downvoted for expressing a different opinion on porn.

Comments which tries to appeal to emotion without any supporting facts should get downvoted. If one where to replace "porn" with "Microsoft" in midnightmonster comment, it would be a common microsoft bash comment. If you replaced it with Apple, it would become an Apple bash comment. As it stand, it is now just a porn bashing comment.

To examplify: "Microsoft platform is evil in concept and in practice. Building your business through it is considerably worse than, e.g., using huge email spam networks. It beggars belief that--in a community that can at least entertain the idea that it might be wrong to create a business by exploiting people's lizard brains with notifications, gamification, and misleading social ads--ninety-eight percent of comments on using Microsoft platform to promote your business either avoid considering morality at all or go out of the way to indicate that everything's a-ok here."

Comments that has that attribute should not reside on hacker news. It brings nothing to the table, and only tries manipulating the other readers with emotions, rather than with valid logic, to win an argument.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

> Pornography is evil in concept and in practice. Building your business through it is considerably worse than, e.g., using huge email spam networks. It beggars belief that--in a community that can at least entertain the idea that it might be wrong to create a business by exploiting people's lizard brains with notifications, gamification, and misleading social ads--ninety-eight percent of comments on using porn to promote your business either avoid considering morality at all or go out of the way to indicate that everything's a-ok here.

Kind Sir, you made my day. For a moment you had me going:D

Are you arguing that someone should say it's wrong/offensive?

I submitted the article. I found it fascinating as a marketer myself. However, I'm also a recovering porn addict. I haven't looked at pornography since 2006. Did I find porn harmful to my life? Absolutely. Am I going to say that others shouldn't have the right to look at it? Nope. Am I going to recommend that people not do it because it will skew their view, wrongly, about what sex is really like? You betcha.

That said, I'm not against this company building their user base in this way. They've gone to where the users are, whether we want them to be there or not.

Those pornstar tweets sure do look like paid promotions... article implies they are organic, but they don't look that way to me.

I have a feeling that pornstars know all about the "unsolicited, easily quotable backpat" trick. Enthusiastically edorse random things you like, and--if the recipient persoh/company understands marketing-industry SOP--you'll get endorsed in turn. (You can notice this in, for example, every blog post or podcast Patrick McKenzie has put out lately. It almost feels like he has a secret cabal he's colluding with to pass traffic between then, for all they mention each-other in shining terms--but it's just unsolicited praise. A war of gifts, you might say.

I understood they are quite clearly paid. Part of the campaign.

I could believe they are organic or at least not specifically bought (note the swag in one picture).

Fun fact: IANAL, but it might actually be illegal to have people tweet stealth paid endorsements on your behalf: http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus71-ftcs-revised-end...

Props for using I-ANAL in a porn thread ;)

One of those pornstars is wearing a shirt that reads "@eat24 is the official sponsor of my muchies." I'm not sure how that could be less organic without removing all the carbon.

If you remove carbon from an organic compound it won't be organic any more.

That's the joke…

I didn't get that implication, I assume they are paid in some way. Even if not on an outright per tweet basis.

This was one of the most interesting articles to pop up on hn recently. Kudos to eat24 for sharing that research.

What are some other things that could appeal to porn users? Travel? Legit online dating( ie match/eharmony)? Credit card savings? Subscription services (would dollar shave club do well?)

Adult traffic is pretty useless to most traditional affiliate marketing-ish offers. It's almost like the users just have this one, single thing on their mind and can't be bothered with anything else at that moment.

And yet, the stats presented in the post seem to suggest otherwise. After they finish watching the porn, users click the ad and convert. Even if they click and convert at a lower rate than traditional media the data suggests that the lower CPMs more than make up for this.

It's not great for brand advertising (potentially). But for affiliate type marketing this seems like an untapped goldmine.

that's what I was thinking. half the stuff sold from affiliate marketers isn't of name brand stuff anyway.

food makes sense after porn, you're appealing to humans base needs.

Except -- as the article states -- when they finish watching the video and realize that they've got another physiological need to fulfill.

After reading this I was thinking of advertising my nonprofit (I posted upthread) to capture 'other psychological need's.

On the other hand, people who are in an aroused state have a naturally lower threshold for resisting impulses. It's actually an ingenious way to market services, if your brand can stand up to it.

Google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

I get a 503, probably HN effect ;)

WP effect I'd say.

This was hilarious and definitely worth the read. The ads alone have definitely persuaded me to try out their service. The company seems like a breath of fresh air, considering how everyone else avoids associating with porn sites like they're the plague.

Their porn statistics are questionable: they say "2/3 of men admit to watching porn" and "70% of those men are between the ages of 18-24". This implies that at least 47% of all men are between 18 and 24, which is clearly wrong. Otherwise, good article.

It could mean "2/3 of the men who took the survey admit to watching porn" for w/e survey they had in mind...

You always have to read it like "2/3 of male psychology students admit to watching porn..."

I read this and it was really interesting. Here's a question, HNdom. Should I advertise my nonprofit* on porn? (I won't use nonprofit funds, I'll pay from my own pocket) Do you think the total nonsequitur will work? Is there any downside?

Sub question: If I were to do it, how non-sequitur-ey should it be? I could play it as "help save boobies" or just straight-man it "help cure cancer"

*we'll be crowdfunding to get an public domain anticancer compound through preclinical trials, it may be effective against triple negative breast cancer, and other other cancers.

It would be really interesting to see if you could play on (some) people's guild for visiting porn sites to coax them into donating.

(I realize putting it in those words makes me sound like a sociopath which I'm not, I promise :), it's just the least BS way of putting it...)

You don't sound like a sociopath, I was thinking the same thing.

Nothing like using porn to advertise your non-profit. Because porn sites don't exploit anyone.

while I generally find snark entertaning, I am somewhat serious about this informal poll, so I want to be sure I understand what you are saying: If I advertise on porn, I risk making the statement that my nonprofit condones exploitative behavior (versus merely lasciviousness). Is it any better if the purpose of fundraising is ultimately more virtuous? (that we are channeling exploitation that would have happened anyway - for a purpose outside the closed circle of more porn ads and ads for penis enhancers?)

Thanks!

I use snark because should I dare note that pornography is a largely exploitative business, somebody is going to tell you otherwise.

What does your non-profit do?

A lot of industries are incredibly exploitative. Industry itself is exploitative.

That's a side effect of the industries goal. It isn't the industry!

> Because porn sites don't exploit anyone

The one's you visit may do, but don't tar the whole industry with the same broad brush.

Ooo... I guess you got me good!

Excellent rhetorical technique - I give you 5 out of 5. Very weak on actual argument substance though. I give you 1 out of 5, with half a point to encourage you to try better next time.

I heavily depends on what your non-profit does (help people with cancer?) and on what porn sites you advertise, but in generall I think it is a bad idea.

For many people porn and fast food are BOTH "guilty pleasures" so food adds are a great idea, beacuse the audience is already in the right mindset.

People visit porn sites to get some exitment and relief, or to get into the right mood (Fk the rules / I need something to cheer me up/ Lets stay in bed).

Your add will remind the visitors of something they SHOULD care / worry about and will ruin the experience.

I think you're right. There might be a fun/playful way to do it, like "when you're done, come help save the boobies"... But I'm not sure I can get it quite right.

You know you're a hacker news reader when your first thought after reading this isn't "order food!" or "watch porn!", but "I wonder if any fast food delivery websites have affiliate schemes...."

Mine was "do they have an API?" and to my amazement, yes they do.

I find it fascinating that order sizes increased for people coming via the ads. Your pre-frontal cortex is the part of your brain responsible for willpower. It gets tired like any other muscle. The fact that you're watching porn is an indicator that your willpower is depleted and therefore far more likely to give in to the dessert as well.

I like this theory but hard to disambiguate from working up an appetite and the associations between the two forms of pleasure, perhaps the most overwhelming forms of pleasure in our biology.

That was quite an enjoyable article actually, they certainly had fun with it. Clever idea as well, they had a good chance of hitting their target market.

Genuinely ascinating article!

Pity their search threw nonsensical errors when I put in my home address. ETA: Ah, I see the problem. They can't seem to give a message as useful as "We don't provide service to that city/ZIP code/etc." and instead just say, "Oops, something went wrong" or suggest that the ZIP code is invalid.

At least their ad strategy is smarter than that.

I predicted that "Wash your hands" wouldn't work. I'm sure a higher percentage of porn visitors are dudes, and dudes don't want to click on other dudes, generally.

It wasn't the CTR that was the problem; though. It was the product not matching the advertisement. There are 9M LGBT in the US, alone. It's fairly likely that there is a demographic for this kind of ad, so why not have it available; not everyone is going to want to see a girl spread eagle.

Sure they do, if the ad is about getting a larger member or getting ripped. The role-model effect.

This is the first article on HN I actually had fun reading. The puns were terribly hilarious.

Unrelated question : But whats a good hosting service provider for hosting Adult content ?

When I needed to host adult landing pages, Rackspace indicated they had no restrictions on regular adult material. You might want to check what their limits are, but they're certainly OK with your run-of-the-mill hardcore porn.

A couple interesting things i'm considering from this.

1. Typically any business that supports even the concept of porn would get crucified in the media. It seems like because eat24 is a young internet startup that its users don't mind it being associated with porn. If the service becomes nationally recognized, will the small vocal minority eventually come out of the woodwork to protest? (I think yes) Other consideration: almost all food services are in some way family-oriented (families eat a lot of food) and thus would be more vulnerable to topics that are inappropriate for kids.

2. If somehow they find a way to keep their porn ads up while still bringing in users that are morally opposed to porn, could this create real social change? Could it eventually become socially acceptable to support businesses that support porn and alternative lifestyles? And towards that end (hehe I said end), should the company push for higher standards and more stringent requirements on the kind of content included in the porn? Could the company's ad push eventually improve the conditions and content of the porn industry?

If anyone is inspired by this article and feels adventurous, I'm currently trying to sell a 1.5M/day inventory that is mostly across porn sites. Hit me up at dr8ww@notsharingmy.info for dirt cheap CPM rates.

I also have a cheap lawn mover! Send me a pm! If you pm now, I will add 2 xxl size trash bags to the deal!

To riff of of AznHisoka, is the eat24 delivery man a new archetype for these sites?

Seriously though well done on their part identifying the opportunity and I hope it works out well for them in the future.

I always enjoy reading these interesting strategies for marketing to the consumer. However, it makes me a little sad that I can't really apply it to a b2b product.

Seems like the perfect advertiser for 4chan. A lot of traffic, the ads are ALWAYS for porn so people will notice, and the user-base never leaves the house.

They should bribe some of those actresses to make a movie with them, and give them 100% free membership for life :)

I haven't seen these ads anywhere before. REALLY.

And its a good reminder, instead of competing in places where everybody is already competing, while paying high and raising the price for everybody else. Find a new efficient strategy from a different niche.

Best creative I've seen in a long time.

Great article.

eat24hours is a shining example of a successful, bootstrapped startup that is in it for the long-haul and not out for a quick buck.

It doesn't hurt that they gave me a bunch of free credit for reporting a CSS issue.

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