Advertising on adult sites pays out for one mainstream company
Eat24 advertises on porn sites - Business Insider
California-based food delivery service Eat24.com was looking to get the word out about its late-night meal offerings without breaking the bank.
Having accepted $0 in venture capital funding, Eat24 needed to find sites to advertise on that drew large traffic numbers, but wouldn't charge the company high rates to display its ads.
The answer, of course, was porn.
An industry leader like Pornhub brings in 14.9 million unique visitors monthly, according to the tracking site Quantcast. That's more than the websites for Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal combined. "A whopping 30% of ALL web traffic is dedicated to adult sites," the company claims.
The catch is that a brand that advertises on Bloomberg is probably unlikely to put their name beside X-rated content. In fact, Eat24 found that the only companies that advertised on porn sites were other porn sites and "natural male enhancement" sellers.
As a result, Eat24 said the advertising rates were dirt cheap. The company capitalized by pairing sexually suggestive banner ads ("BLT with your BDSM?") alongside video landing pages. The viewers that saw the ads were, naturally, not dressed appropriately to go out in public, and likely to have worked up an appetite. In short, they were the perfect customers to order delivery from the comfort of their own homes.
The campaign wound up being a whopping success. Eat24 said its adult site banner ads were able to get three times as many impressions as the ads they posted on Facebook, Google, and Twitter combined. And they did it at just 10% of the cost. What's more, the company said 90% of the visitors the banners generated were coming to Eat24 for the first time.
It remains to be seen whether other non-adult companies will follow Eat24's lead.
For other observations that are perhaps unsuitable for our website, check out Eat24's case study.
