PornHub has proven time and time again that it is attuned to its audience’s needs. From saving the Sperm Whale and the Bees, giving America wood and now, helping with those in self-quarantine. The adult site is a fine example of how you can accomplish a lot even within the boundaries of your audience if you’re willing to think outside the box.
Perhaps it’s easy when your audience is one-dimensional, people visiting PornHub are usually there for the same reason. However, PornHub’s traffic seems to increase when they pull on the heartstrings of their audience.
Recently the brand has offered free premium subscriptions in Italy to help the massive amount of people in self-isolation. In a blog post posted on Friday, the adult site showed that “as the Coronavirus spread around the world, Pornhub’s traffic did grow.” They continued, saying, “perhaps more interesting, we found that people were choosing to visit Pornhub at different times.”
“Italy’s traffic changed over the last few weeks, growing by 9 percent on March 9, 11 percent on March 10 and 13.8 percent on March 11,” the company wrote.
But this isn’t the first time the company has connected with its audience on a more, emotional level.
In 2016, the site launched the initiative to ‘Save the Sperm Whale’.
“We’re asking our community turn their attention to – and help save – a different type of blowhole,” the company wrote.
Also in 2016 Pornhub, launched “Beesexual”, a philanthropic awareness campaign with the express (and pun enabling) purpose of raising awareness around the declining bee population, as well as raise funds for conservation efforts. Because nature is beesexual and in order to reproduce, it needs bees.
Each view of a video on the Beesexual channel resulted in a donation to bee charities such as Operation Honey Bee and The Center for Honeybee Research.
In 2014, the site announced that it would “Give America Wood”. The site’s pledge was to plant a tree for every 100 “Big Dick” videos viewed. The “wood for wood” campaign generated 300 unique views for each video in this one category in just one week.
Last year the site did something a little more interactive rather than just trying to increase video impressions and once again the task of saving the world, even in a minute and ultimately futile way, falls on the shoulders of Pornhub with the ‘Dirtiest Porn Ever’ video.
Pornhub produced a video starring a pornstar couple that has them engaging in sexual activity on one of the world’s dirtiest beaches. As the video progresses, a clean-up crew picks up trash to slowly reveal the couple that had been previously obscured by the garbage.
Hopefully, they recently received their tetanus shots. Each view of the video will result in a donation to Ocean Polymers, a nonprofit that specializes in solutions to collect and process plastic waste from the world’s oceans.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for what PornHub has done in order to bring global issues to its, rather tunnel-visioned, audience.
Yet the site obviously knows its core audience, and in doing so can then alter their offering to meet different standards, while also still keeping up with their ultimate goal – video impressions.
Although everything they do has philanthropy at its heart, all initiatives drawback to video views, as that’s ultimately what increases advertising spend. It’s a clever way to get an important message across while still drawing back to your core purpose. Jackin’ it.
And although not everyone’s audience will be as easy to please (or as hard in this matter) as horny 18-35-year-olds, there is still a lesson to take from the behemoth of a website, and how even in the midst of global panic, they can switch up strategies and cater to new requirements.
