Porn is the internet’s unlikely master. Stop your snickering; adult websites are websites like any other, only in a lot of cases they’re much, much better. Much better than even the biggest names on the web, in fact. They have to be – there’s so many of them, so the need to be the best is paramount. Sound like a familiar situation?
Question is, then, what real, useful insight can you learn from the virtual smut peddlers? Lots, as it turns out.
Porn sites embrace changes in tech, are pioneers of (ahem) ‘engagement’, and know more than a thing or two about how your filthy, filthy brain works. And they need to: they take care of around 30 per cent of daily worldwide web traffic – about 29 Petabytes monthly.
Thankfully, a good fistful of the tactics that keep the porn industry thriving can be lifted straight out of their smutty settings and applied to a myriad of online publishing styles. So let’s do just that.
Note: If you happen to be our mums, we have never once looked at porn. Never. Honest. Stop looking at us like that.
1. The value of thumbnails
Video is a moving medium. While we all enjoy a good bit of fine cinematography, it’s a generally accepted idea that it’s a touch tricky to sum up a piece of film with just one image. It’s bizarre then, that YouTube – some seven years after its birth – still hasn’t seen fit to improve its thumbnails. Even in the face of obvious leaps and bounds elsewhere.
And that’s sloppy, because the porn industry unravelled the key to doing thumbnails properly some years back. Upload a video to YouTube, and it’ll let you choose the thumbnail you think is best from a randomly generated series of about four or five.
In the world of adult entertainment, the system is radically different – mouse over the tile, and it’ll cycle through a chronological slideshow of thumbs taken from the clip in question.
So that’s handy. But the handiness doesn’t stop there. Oh no, Sir. Some sites, such as the hilariously frankly-named ‘Spankwire’, marks these thumbnails with subtle icons that act as hyperlinks to that part of the video. Now, obviously as a site owner you want users to spend as much time on every page as possible.
You’d therefore think that letting people jump to the middle of a video is bad, but they’ll generally stick with you longer anyway if the site is a usability masterpiece (more on that later).
This is something Youtube still hasn’t figured out, despite its success.
2. Getting in bed with mobile
The porn industry is no newcomer to tech. It has habitually been the driving force behind emerging standards, as it’s forever looking for new and enticing ways to drag you in. Blu-Ray? 3D? Mobile video? Porn, porn and porn, we’re afraid.
That last one’s key. Seeing how the porn industry has weaved and worked its way around the various constraints of mobile has been awe-inspiring in its speed. HTML5 is the most obvious adapt-to-survive example from the past few years. When Apple started slinging ‘Yo Mamma’ jokes at Adobe Flash, there was a major fallout. This resulted in a fragmented web – one that wouldn’t work on some mobiles but would on others.
The answer was to move fast and adopt whatever the hell future technology would take Flash’s place, on an almost ‘overnight’ timeframe. The porn industry did so almost too quickly. “We are waiting for browsers to catch up,” said Digital Playground founder Ali Joone in 2010. “As soon as they are ready, we will move everything to HTML5.”
It was a move that most porn sites have since made, for the sake of letting iPhone and iPad owners everywhere get their rocks off without hitting any barriers.
Necessity is the mother of invention, but it’s also the mother of some seriously rapid workarounds – the likes of which you don’t tend to see outside of the porn industry. As it stands, the porn industry will be remembered as a key stalwart champion of HTML5’s evolution.
3. Adapt to survive
Sometimes, it’s not just enough to change tactics. Sometimes you have to make huge changes to the fundamentals of your business. More than enough companies have faded and died because they haven’t seen that point come and go, but the porn industry has managed to succeed, or at the very worst limp on in difficult times thanks to its willingness to roll with the punches.
The outbreak of ‘Tube’ sites, which ape YouTube with gratis streaming on demand, was a kick in the porn industry’s teeth. Up until then, the web had been kind to the sex peddlers. It’d been a window to a world of subscription-based profiteering without the need to muck about with costly videos, DVDs or magazines.
Porn Bunker blueprints revealed
When the free sites came crashing in, though, things buckled. And when faced with such extreme competition, you’ve got to change your ways. So that’s what they did. Pornhub (one of the biggest studios in the game) decided on an ingenious three-way attack:
First, it made shorter versions of its content to divvy out for free, and uploaded them onto the Tube sites itself as a way of luring people into the premium subscriptions. Then it got all cosy with those streaming sites by way of ads heading in both directions – to and from the streaming sites.
And then it opened its own: YouPorn. To top it off, Pornhub now boasts its own content partner program, which pays dividends for producers uploading exclusively through Pornhub’s channels.
That all took place over the course of about a year. For any such large company, that’s an unprecedented change of business model, but when needs must, it’s another example of how porn sites across the industry don’t fuck about. They just change to fit the current climate. And they do it fast.
4. Keep me here
Xvideos, YouPorn, Tube8, and Pornhub all make Facebook, Reddit and Google look like minnows, but it’s not just the 4.4 billion page views Xvideos garners per month that’s impressive; it’s the length of time users spend on porn sites in general.
Porn sites keep people within their sinful gates for three to five times longer than any other type of site. How? They hammer related content and tempting next steps down your throat, often at the expense of parts of the page that other sites traditionally value more.
User comments for example, are hidden one click away on a lot of the web’s biggest porn sites, such as Youporn and Redtube. This sounds like an engagement nightmare, but here’s the logic: if people are compelled to comment, they will comment. Commenting itself is an effort, so one extra button click isn’t going to drive anyone to despair.
Moving people from one piece of content to the next, however, is difficult. Whether it’s porn or not, users who think they’ve had their fill – who’ve got what they came for – are inclined to bugger off. It’s your job to make sure they don’t.
And the way you do that is to make the rest of your content overwhelmingly available. If you can tear your eyes away from the video at hand, you’ll notice that every major porn site classes related and suggested videos highly enough to give them pride of place – to the side AND at the bottom of the video. Comments and the like are secondary.
By contrast, YouTube offers only a side-panel of related items, which is a sparse enough smattering to make people blind to it.
Oh, and the porn gurus also starting to learn where’s best to share. While the idea that the normal porn viewer will want to share their tastes in adult culture on Twitter is still laughable, the Reddit alien has started to filter into that mouse-over ‘share’ space, and that’s a much better fit – people on Reddit are anonymous and, often, a little bit rude. Again, it’s about adapting to your audience’s needs.
5. Content first
And that brings us on to the single biggest thing you can learn from porn: put your most important content first, and slam it in the most obvious place. Every one of the web’s biggest porn vestibules refuses to muck about when it comes landing pages, and it’s for good reason.
True, it’s an audience looking for instant gratification, but… Well, that’s every audience online, isn’t it? The attention span of web users is akin to your average celebrity marriage – it’s measured in the nanoseconds. Porn pushers know what works here: making people do one click more than is necessary will irk them. Making them hunt for videos is a mistake. In many ways, the average porn site is better designed than Google’s YouTube.
Since YouTube’s recent redesign, its suggested content is strung out on the homepage in one long vertical line. Finding anything engaging is difficult – you have to know what you want to find. The result? Youtubers land there to look for something specific, rather than to look for inspiration.
Porn sites uniformly employ a grid design that gives the user instant access to 20-40 videos on one page, all without too much scrolling. It tells you what you want to look at before you know yourself.
Its call-to-action techniques and labels are brutally obvious, too. Where YouTube has the weak-sounding ‘Recommended’, ‘Trending’ and ‘Browse Channels’, its pornographic equivalents have ‘Most viewed’, ‘Videos being watched’ and pinned lists of the most popular search terms (we’ll let you imagine what these are).
This extends to the adverts you see plastered about the place, too; they’re brazen. It’s not that porn ads can innately afford to be straightforward, though. It’s that they choose to be. An advert that reads ‘Fuck Date’ tells you what it’s offering and acts as an invitation with just two words. The imagery obviously, well… stands out, yes, but not mincing your words goes just as far.
The climax…
The world of online porn is, in numerous ways, streets ahead of the web’s biggest non-sexual names. It has had to be to survive, but it shows that nimble innovation, adaptation and tailoring your content to your users is possible even when your operation is big enough to suck petabytes of bandwidth.
So what excuses do you have?
