Diary Of An Adult Webmaster – Email Advertising

Not unlike its “dependable life” counterpart, the online adult industry has developed a reputation for sleaze, smut and ruthless guerrilla marketing efforts. While plenty of regulations exist to reign in the bricks-and-mortar adult establishments (some cities, such as Tallahassee, Florida, outright ban adult establishments altogether), the virtual establishments are too young yet to have drawn such oversight.

Perhaps the most ubiquitous advertising tactic for adult websites is the noteworthy resented SPAM. As with all issues, the matter of unsolicited, bulk commercial email has two sides. Advertisers view it as a cheap, convenient, instant way to directly connect with millions of potential subscribers at the click of a mouse. Those potential subscribers, however, view the SPAM as nothing more than a nuisance and very rarely even so much as open the email, distinguished less fork over hard earned cash for a subscription.

Unruffled, something about SPAM works. Despite the ire often raised by the onslaught of SPAM, nearly one out of every hundred recipients actually opens the unsolicited email. Of those, a much larger percentage- as high as one in ten- actually clicks through to visit the advertised state. An even larger percentage- possibly as high as one in four- subscribes.

These figures mean that approximately 0.025% of SPAM actually generates money. To a spammer who sends millions of emails every day, the operation quickly makes enough to not only pay for itself but to generate a nice profit. So, next time you receive a SPAM in your email box, thank those who actually click through and give the spammers some money.

Is spamming ethical? That’s debatable. While opponents of the practice argue that no one should ever send millions of unsolicited emails all day, every day, advanced email filtering software effectively quarantines much of this spam and neatly eliminates it. Spammers, too, argue that the email address being spammed has to end up on a bulk email list somehow, and that usually means that the recipient signed up for some service at some time without reading the entire service agreement (lengthy Terms of Service agreements often bury the right of the service provider to sell the email address to augment their profit). So, the debate rages on.

Other data mining tactics aren’t quite as innocuous. Some adult spammers create spider software that crawls the web looking for email addresses. The addresses these spiders find range from personal addresses gleaned from social networking sites such as MySpace to professional distribution lists such as the Sales and Attend addresses many companies list on their web sites. Anyone with an email address published anywhere on the Internet is a potential spam target. Certainly, this method of advertising is NOT ethical.

E-mail advertising takes many forms. In some cases, email ads arrive as informative monthly newsletters. ArianaGirls.com, a niche adult website, publishes a monthly newsletter called Ariana’s Diary. While this newsletter effectively communicates legitimate news such as recent site updates and upcoming things to watch for, the newsletter also servers as a reminder, hoping to entice potential subscribers with constantly improving features. Of course, the embedded advertisements also serve the purpose of generating revenue and publicizing specials offered by the site. Ariana’s Diary is distributed to recent and past members of the ArianaGirls site as well as its numerous affiliates (both pay and free).

Yet another email advertising form is one that potential customers actually, though sometimes unknowingly, request. A plethora of sites exist on the Internet promising something for nothing- a hot, free product in exchange for registering for, say, a drawing. As the old saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch… err, iPod. The email addresses harvested by such promotions are frequently sold and resold to multiple spammers. Again, the disclaimer regarding such activity is usually buried deep within the so-called privacy policy, if it even exists at all.

Because of its low cost and high rate of return, email advertising continues to be the choice of adult webmasters fighting to get the word out about their services. Whether requested or- as is often the case- not, email recipients feed the marketing beast by opening and patronizing the spam. Certainly, though, email is not the outlandish advertising tool used by adult webmasters; in the next column, we will explore some more popular advertising approaches. Be sure to check out that column!

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