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Why Porn Sites Spam You With Shitty Ads
By Paul Fidika • 6 years ago

Upon visiting PornHub and clicking on a video, you are immediately greeted with a pop-up ad, an ad underneath the video window, two ads to the right of the video window, and an ad over top of the video itself. Scroll down a little and you're greeted with a cam-model ad and another banner ad. That's 5 external ads and 2 ads for premium services offered by PornHub.


But why?


Google is currently valued at $815 billion, and Facebook at $543 billion. They're making billions of dollars selling ad-space, without  resorting to spamming their visitors with garbage-ads. So why does PornHub suck so much?


Simple: because no one wants to buy ads on their site. Check out the data below:


CPM - the cost of running 1,000 ad-impressions on a site:

              -Instagram ads: $6.25

              -Facebook ads: $11.17

              -Google Adsense: $5.00

              -PornHub: $0.27

              -ExoClick: $0.10


TrafficJunky (PornHub's dedicated ad network) and ExoClick are two porn-ad services we've been using to advertise Doujins.com. We've been collecting data on the ads we run, and comparing it to averages from other marketers who advertise on mainstream online ad networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Google. As you can see above, PornHub has to show 3,700 banner ads simply to make $1. That means PornHub has to show 18.5 times as many ads as Google to make the same amount of money. But it gets worse:


Click through rate - percentage of viewers that click on an ad:

              -Instagram ads: 1.5%

              -Facebook ads: 0.9%

              -Google Adsense: 2%

              -PornHub: 0.26%

              -EcoClick: 0.23%


In other words, Google is very good at getting visitors to click on its ads: 1 in 50 of its visitors click on an ad when they see it. While PornHub has to show an ad 385 times to get a single click. Worse yet; in our experience, PornHub traffic has a 63% bounce rate, while ExoClick has an 82% bounce rate, compared to our site's normal (organic) 42% bounce rate, meaning that 2/3rds of PornHub visitors who click on an ad simply leave rather than interacting with the site. And PornHub is one of the more expensive porn sites to advertise on; this problem only gets worse for smaller sites.


If ad space is so cheap, why don't more brands google up that cheap porn ad space? Because brands are very protective of their family-friendly image; you could imagine the Twitter headlines if Nike was caught running ads next to circle-jerk videos. Without these big-budget advertisors, visitors are left viewing tons of untargetted, irrelevant ads; the only brands interested in advertising on porn sites, are, ironically, more porn sites, along with scammy dating / penis-enlargement sites.

So how much money does PornHub make off of advertising? According to PornHub's own numbers, they get about 81 million visitors per day, with 7.4 page views per visitor. With 5 ads per page, and cutting that number in half to account for people using ad-blockers, that's about $400,000 in revenue per day, minus whatever their server and administrative costs are of course. Not a bad haul for being the #17th most visited site in the USA.