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CROSSOVER: MARKETING TO WOMEN 2005
by CJ, Purve.com and CelebrityBling.com
It's been over two years since I've written about my favorite subject, marketing adult entertainment to women. Lately I have been asked a lot about what ever happened to 'that site for women' I used to run. So, I thought it was time to update webmasters with what I've learned in the past two years.
While I am still dedicated to the pursuit of the ideal adult site for women, I've been looking more into the value of the 499 women who don't join the Purve.com subscription paysite than focusing on trying to impress an already jaded trial subscriber whose value to me is $30 a month.
Marketing is the process of grouping people into stereotypes, making 'niches' so we can target their similar qualities ... but one thing we miss is that by only targeting one market specifically, we may alienate all the surrounding markets by assuming a group of people are all exactly the same because they share a common interest. In the case of marketing to women, the entire market only shares one thing in common - a vagina - and it's not exactly a popular women's interest, unless you are in the market of selling tampons!
Most adult sites now feature a 'for women' category, but most of the sales from women come through the other traditional 'men's' niches like lesbian or softcore ... or from gay targeted content - because women, like men, are interested in a variety of niches. The standard templated adult site features a set of niches which will be of interest to women even if the site isn't 'perfect' for them - because no site is really perfect for anyone ... it's usually just 'close enough.'
The adult entertainment industry places too much value on the standard set of top level niches which have been assigned to certain 'interests' - for example: teen, amateur, mature, breasts, anal, blowjobs, for women - so as a result, a high converting site may get one visitor in every 100 who is ready to spend money on that particular niche. The other 99 have either disliked the site and left immediately, browsed it and found nothing of interest, milked it for all the free content they could, or simply not liked it enough to pay for it.
Then & NOW...
To summarize the progress of Adult Entertainment for women online since the launch of Purve.com in 1998, here are some of the main changes in developing a successful site for women...
Content:
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Anything! There were hardly any sites on the Internet at this point, so if you had something original with a few pages of content you could keep members in paysites purely for the novelty value to the surfer of having access to four frames per second live feeds. The most popular content was voyeur cams of men's showers - interestingly, before the reality TV fad began.
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Everything and then some! To keep a surfer for more than a few minutes these days your site has to be jam packed with multimedia, interactive and entertaining content - and that's just the free sites! The subscription model still works, but you have to be prepared to update regularly, be able to present your content creatively, and offer something nobody else has.
Design & Functionality:
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Well ... in 1998, design was fairly limited - anything graphical was impressive, and if you managed to carry a clean brand throughout your site, then ... hooray! If you had stuff that moved and flashed, that was considered really cool - even if it was ugly (remember the blink tag?). The design of the site was not really relevant to the end satisfaction of the customer, although some experienced designers were starting to create the beginnings of online style. Women's sites were pink, shades of purple, and did we mention ... pink?
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In 2005, we've almost come full circle in terms of design. In the last seven years there have been some amazing advancements in style along with flash sites and all the bells and whistles you can imagine. In all the fuss, most of the time surfers just want a simple clean and convenient surfing experience, and sites have settled into standard templates which are familiar to surfers. Colors are bolder and pink is less relied upon to define a site as a women's site.
Branding & Corporate Identity:
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Large corporations were fairly slow to jump on the Internet bandwagon, with sites for Coke and McDonalds looking as if they were created by confused print designers outputting brochures from word to html - although Microsoft Word didn't actually do that back then. Little guys had a chance in 1998, because everyone was new to the virtual community. Our Purve brand was as valuable to us as any established print magazine - hype is a wonderful thing for generating traffic!
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The big corporations have been sitting back for the last few years, learning from their Internet losses the first time around - but now, they are here to squash the little guy so LOOK OUT! The biggest threats to the women's market are the numbers of established, exclusive content organizations like Cosmo, Playboy and Penthouse - and eventually, with everything they are throwing at the fan, something is bound to stick. These companies, and all of mainstream as well, bring with them content AND logos that are recognized by women and programmed into their brains. Playboy has made their intentions clear to target products for women heavily into the next decade.
Traffic & Marketing:
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The mantra for 1998, build it and they will come ... I don't think it could be called marketing back then, because traffic was everywhere and craving ways to use the new technology. There were still only a few million adult sites, a few hundred big traffic sites, and a handful of live feed providers and affiliate programs.
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If your domain has been online for a long time and maintained decent content, it will be listed in a lot of search engines - but there are more sites now than there are surfers, so getting and keeping good traffic is a challenge. The formulas for getting traffic have become more traditional. Paysites are generating their own traffic with affiliate programs becoming a less profitable venture as time goes on. Free Hosted Galleries give affiliate programs the ideal way to close down an affiliate program and still keep the affiliate traffic.
Affiliate Programs:
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An affiliate program from 1998 had a few pages - program details, rules, sites and a sign-up page ... you provided a webmaster with a bunch of generic banners, a couple of paysite tours, raw/unique and join stats - that was it! A webmaster purchased their own content, built their own galleries and submitted their sites by hand.
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The Affiliate Program of 2005 is a grossly interpreted version of a reseller or sales force business model, but affiliate program owners have allowed webmasters to dictate how they should market their sites - meaning the surfer becomes irrelevant in the transaction. Program owners pay the webmaster a huge portion of sign-ups plus give points for prizes, throw big parties and give away lots of their content for free. Programs have 100s of crappy templated tours that all look the same, and the Internet is saturated with the same hosted TGP galleries featuring 100s of referrer IDs. A handful of programs have added sites for women, treating an entire 50% of the Internet population as a single 'niche.'
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A standard porn site usually chooses the titles of niches based on reasons that have nothing to do with the surfer ... for example: how many words fit into the design, how many niches are being featured and how much content or how many sponsors are available for that niche. If a site covers enough niches and provides enough material for a wide audience, the traffic will respond by purchasing products or services from the site. In the last few years, portals have become the one stop solution for mass blocks of traffic, as they provide something for every surfer in every mood.
Marketing adult entertainment to women has been an area I have focused on extensively. In six years we have survived solely on the basic subscription paysite model, but I have always known there were bigger opportunities for female traffic than trying to sell one in every 500 women a porn site subscription. In the commercial market, 499 female eyes is worth a lot more than one subscription purchase, no matter how many ways you crunch the numbers ... so with that in mind, we've taken a change of direction, merging our celebrity projects with our women's sites to create a '1 stop entertainment shop' for women.
As a side project to expand our audience using existing content, we have partnered with BoyModelsAustralia.com to create PurveModelsAustralia.com, a monthly e-zine aimed at gay men and straight women, and all the interests they share, from men to fashion to television shows and including Hollywood celebrities. To double our potential market audience, all we had to do was select from our extensive archive of women's and celebrity content and only include features most appealing to both markets. There is no limit to the potential content features for straight women and gay men using two main elements - hunks and celebrities.
So if you are looking to build a site for women, research how you can make your site suitable for both straight women and gay men, by choosing from the content you already have. A site featuring photos of naked men could potentially be of interest to both gay men and straight women - but if the site features a photo of a poo-hole, it immediately eliminates the female audience ... or if it features a pic of a straight couple having sex it eliminates the gay male audience. However, if you shuffle the content around and present it creatively, you can avoid offending any audience and potentially gain more traffic and members.
The direction of everything online has changed dramatically since July 1998 when Purve was launched, but the Internet is only now just settling into a standard - surfers expect more from a website, don't stay very long and spend much less ... on porn that is. Women are bargain shoppers - rarely will their need to 'get off' be urgent enough to settle on the first site they see; one of the many advantages of not having a penis. Women browse and store the images and build them into fantasies, while men see, become erect, and wank immediately - then head off to watch the football!
All sorts of companies market to Women extensively with budgets bigger than any of us could ever hope to earn, so it's not necessarily that they don't like porn, there are just way better sites entertaining and satisfying women online. While women control 70% of household spending, online it's on items for the home, family, leisure or information - rarely for entertainment ... which is why a subscription site converts at 1/500 these days as opposed to 1/100 when the Internet was new. The amount of free entertainment online for women puts even the adult TGP movement to shame - women buy stuff, so their eyes are valuable to advertisers - valuable enough to provide endless entertainment for free.
At some point in the last couple of years, I made a choice between two types of marketing adult entertainment to women, which is the first step if you are looking at making some money from your female surfers ...
Adult Entertainment For Women Type 1
P r i v a t e - Some adult entertainment is pure porn, enjoyed privately ... it's usually X rated, so it can't be published anywhere but the Internet. A lot of women will enjoy X rated material, usually made for men, but will rarely admit it to anyone else. The fantasies that a woman takes with her from porn to her bedroom, that get her to the peak of orgasm and beyond are private entertainment.
Adult Entertainment For Women Type 2
P u b l i c - Turn on the TV or eavesdrop on women talking and you'll hear how often sex comes up ... all the subjects they are talking about are public adult entertainment. When a group of girls get together the week before a wedding, they buy sex toys, naughty novelty items and hire strippers - that is public adult entertainment for women and you only need to witness a strip show for women once, to understand what mass hysteria means, and visit the merchandising stand at the end of the show to see what lots of money looks like.
Purve has always been Type 1, aimed at the private time a woman spends at her computer, but when I saw the Wasteland site sssh.com I realized it was an area I wasn't prepared or equipped to compete in. When I launched Purve, it was intended to be a site where women could go to 'look at hot men' (for those who missed it, Purve means to look at someone with sexual interest or intent), but the site grew into a mixture of everything, based mostly on webmaster feedback rather than on surfer feedback. In general, webmasters who market to women focus on what women want rather than what women will pay for - a very important distinction to make.
Women are eager to talk about what they want - ask a woman about porn and she'll have three opinions ... the one she shares with you, the one she shares with her girlfriends, and the one she keeps to herself. With this said, how do you understand how to market to a woman? Its simple ... you DON'T. A woman changes her mind, mood and desires every minute of every day - the only way to keep up, is to change with us.
But don't despair ... my latest favorite saying is "People's worst qualities are often also their best qualities" - so what makes women difficult, also makes us easy to target. Everything you need to know about marketing adult products to women can be learned in a half hour episode of Sex And The City ... so sit down, tolerate it if you aren't a fan (how is this possible?!) and watch for the topics of conversation, the commercials, and the reactions of any women watching with you.
To assess how to market to a target audience, it is only 50% effective to ask the audience for their opinion - especially if it is asked in a non-confidential environment. Women still aren't always comfortable discussing their private sexual fantasies and acts, only half of us are like the SATC girls! Marketing is an attempt to trigger something sub-conscious, so the target audience might not always know or think of all the things that may interest them if presented to them.
The term CFNM is a perfect example ... it stands for "Clothed Female, Nude Male" - lots of women would admit to wanting to do naughty things to the stripper at their last bachelorette party, but there are some clubs (and girls!) who just take turns sucking the stripper as he dances around the tables. Our members love our CFNM features, but they would never have thought to ask for them because who would have thought chicks just give strippers blow jobs in rooms full of people!?! It's the brits ... the women are all sex starved and horny!
CFNM is a term like MILF - it was a term that got some media attention, a few people started to type it into search engines, next thing its a major niche for anyone looking for sexy guy content. The bulk of the members generated from CFNM features would be curiosity from women who have never seen anything so blatantly ... British!! Don't be afraid to invent your own niche, you just build a content feature with a few pics and stories and see how popular it is - just like you do with every site you build for men.
My main advice for Marketing to Women in 2005 is "Take it Mainstream" - don't ignore the surfers that don't buy subscriptions - the traffic is worth something to someone ... and rather than trying to make everything into a stereotype of the viewer, it should be a niche based on the content - for example, not 'for women' or 'gay' ... instead 'hunks,' 'shirtless guys,' 'straight sex,' 'gay sex,' etc. Build a few sites with some generic hunk content, fill it with some Will & Grace quotes, and you have a site for both markets - and a site that can be listed in twice as many places!
When in doubt... keep it simple! That part hasn't changed...
CJ started in the industry over six years ago in '98, launching Purve.com, the first adult subscription site for women. Since then, CJ has launched and managed the affiliate program SexHit, and has since used her affiliate management skills to crossover into promoting many products ... from Casino's to Paysites … Bra's to Vitamins. Most recently CJ launched CelebrityBling.com and a network of celebrity paysites designed to bridge the gap between adult and mainstream.
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