Why aren’t brands being advertised on adult sites

*This post was originally posted on my personal blog thedigitalrookie.com on 28/10/2014.

When was the last time you entered an adult site? I’m sure that you’ve noticed the numerous surreal ads that appear on your window.

This made me think about adult sites dynamics. Are they a great place to advertise yourself? Is your audience there? Does it cost much? And why is it considered such a taboo for Marketeers?

Everyone assumes that people love porn, but when someone looks at the numbers, then we’re talking about an advertising gold mine. About 30% of the TOTAL web traffic worldwide is for adult sites. Actually, when you’ll have finished reading this sentence, about 197,806 users will have seen porn on the internet (you’re included in that as well, I can see that incognito tab).

eat24’s infographic is about the USA’s audience, but it still displays the adult sites’ huge dynamic:

Popularity of websites in the United States | eat24

Seeing those sites on the top spots, someone would consider that advertising costs would be huge. Right? Wrong! If you observe the ads on these sites, you’ll see that 99% of these are about more porn, and about 1% remains untapped for brands like eat24, which compared the CPM with that of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and presented the results of this research below:

Cost per 1000 impressions | eat24

On adult sites, it was gaining as many impressions as the 3 biggest channels together, for the 1/10 of the cost!

The porn industry should be treated with the same way as any other network by Marketeers. That is, based on the fact that not every network is suitable for all brands, and to raise your campaign’s conversion rate, your ad has to be relevant in style/structure/content for each site, in terms of Native Advertising. I’m talking about ads like those made by eat24, a food delivery company:

Following that rule, the taboo that your brand would be tarnished will be removed. In the end of the day, each network requires a targeted and relevant ad. The first objective when building a marketing campaign is to raise the action’s ROI, while minimizing cost.

Is there a Greek Brand that has run an ad campaign on an adult site?

Read eat24’s complete case study on the following link.

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