Walking down the streets of your favorite city today, the last thing you’d expect is to get a text alert on your mobile device about a special rental offer at the adult video store around the corner. Extend that notion to pictures and video, and the prospect seems even less likely. With the Internet having become the ultimate place to match anonymity with sizzling pictures and video, it might be hard to believe anyone would want to take their porn habits mobile. Yet with the proper marketing, U.S. webmasters can get their cut of a market that shows no signs of slowing down and is, in fact, exploding with potential.
Research firm Strategy Analytics puts the estimate of global adult entertainment revenues at $4 billion by 2008, of which they estimate only $500 million will be generated on the standard Web. While this may seem a bit overly optimistic and also includes offline porn, just visit any European or Asian country and the picture becomes clear. The best part is that you can cash in today regardless of where you or your surfers are with a bit of know-how and creativity.
One commonly held misconception is that if you operate your business from the U.S., you are better off focusing on the standard Internet and waiting for wireless technology to catch up. The fact is that you can profit from wireless adult content from anywhere in the world. "In the next few years, Europe and Asia are going to remain significantly ahead of the U.S. in mobile adult," says Todd Allen, president of wireless content enabling firm Wirerunner. "Fortunately, the world is connected now, so you can still make money by selling into countries where mobile usage is higher. It's actually a great fit with U.S. webmasters’ existing sites, because the very people who are least likely to buy their main site are the most likely to purchase a mobile offering. Offer people what they want, and you will make money." Essentially it comes down to the basic principle of targeting your market, reaching your prospects wherever they may reside with the goal of maximizing profits and ROI, and wireless marketing will work anywhere you can effectively reach your target market—the world is literally at your fingertips.
Would you like fries with that?
Given the potential, the obvious question becomes how best to cash in, and the old-fashioned up-sell appears to top the list. "What we focus on is building a feedback loop of sorts," explains Allen. "If a surfer comes to your site and isn't sure they want to pay full price, sell them a mobile subscription on the cheap. Then they at least get a taste of the content and may come back for more. At the very least you have made some money, and if you have good content you might make a lot more.
"It goes the other direction also," he continues. "For example, depending on the members management system used, you can up-sell from the mobile back to the main site. The user can pay again via SMS purchase and get access for a certain period of time. Then you have made a few dollars from the mobile subscription, and a few more from the full site up-sell. It all adds up." Other industry players seem to be in agreement on the power of the up-sell technique.
"Up-selling content and services to existing adult-verified customers has proven the most profitable route for us," explains Tony Hales, director of U.K.-based wireless adult content and delivery firm One Mobile Media Limited, whose company offers more than 28,000 polyphonic ring tones, 8,000 wallpapers, 600 games, 3,000 animations, and 4,000 real tones (actual voice or human sounds), both mainstream and adult. "Good quality content specifically created and edited for mobile is essential. Wrapping content together and using vehicles such as mobile magazines accessed via a subscription and up-selling customers premium content including video and wallpapers as part of that service has been very successful. We up-sold our new adult mobile magazine iShag and generated over 1,000 subscribers paying 4.50 pounds per week from one chat operator in just over two weeks, with more up-sells to premium content and services."
Another successful example of the magazine format is found at Pocketgirls.com, owned by Yankscash, which focuses on the solo girl niche. The content is formatted to look like a mini-magazine with images, jokes, and stories along with a bio of the model. As Allen explains, "It's far more interesting than just a single image, and surfers don't feel like they’re being robbed. They can sign up for recurring billing and get a new magazine every week." Hales notes that this is a great way to make use of existing content adapted for mobile. "Softcore adult products in the mobile space work well, and glamour-based images, strip games, and moan tones (adult ring tones) are an easy way to capitalize on existing content when packaged into subscription mobile magazines," he says.
Like a Virus
Of course, any discussion of wireless marketing must address the inherent viral nature of the medium. Wireless has redefined viral marketing in a way no Web marketer could have predicted, with millions of SMS and MMS messages being exchanged worldwide every day, not to mention the pass-along nature of images and ring tones. One Mobile’s Hales has used the technique with great success. "We give free samples of our content away and allow customers to forward it onto their friends, which creates a viral opportunity for us and allows immediate customer feedback," he explains. "Each piece of free content has our service advert on it along with how to access it via a ‘short code’ the user enters on his or her phone. We also send an ad for our other services as part of the messages that customers receive when they sign up."
Anil Malhotra, vice president of marketing and alliances for leading wireless content delivery firm Bango.com, adds, "Adult content providers should be creative in using viral techniques to promote sites. SMS campaigns (subject to opt-in marketing rules) seem to return a higher-than-average rate of user spending. Content providers seem to target midmorning and midevening for peak returns on SMS campaigns." He also notes that a "send to a friend" device, where an existing user can forward a link for an adult site to a friend’s handset via SMS, has been quite effective.
In addition to or combined with viral marketing, capitalizing on foreign traffic is a great way to make money in wireless. "If you are talking about a webmaster who is more traffic oriented and doesn't own [his] own content, I'd suggest joining an affiliate program that offers mobile," Allen explains. "It's a great place to send your European traffic, and you have a chance to sell a mobile subscription or make a full-site subscription. Europeans are far more mobile-focused, and just having a mobile option will make them take a second look. Add on the fact that Europeans don't generally use credit cards, and you have a great way to convert surfers that you could never have captured before. It beats a dialer hands down."
In fact, the inherent nature of the Web goes hand-in-hand with this technique. "Mobile services are relatively easy to bill for, so many content providers use a ‘web trigger’ to promote their mobile site off of the Web site," says Malhotra. "This technique enables the user to enter their cell phone number into the Web page, which causes a mobile site link to be pushed to their phone." Thus, a whole new way to target foreign markets is born.
No-marketing marketing
Other marketing techniques are also effective, and as is often stated in connection with marketing, a little creativity can go a long way. One example is the wireless site Voooyeur.com. Owner John Delano explains, "We receive hundreds of images sent in by phone users via MMS or email every month. We select the best ones and post them on our site. The most voted ones each month win a cash prize. We started with the idea almost two years ago with virtually no marketing, and the amount of traffic and send-in content has not ceased to grow ever since." Delano cites another marketing triumph done with his site Mooobile.com, which allows surfers to enter their email addresses and phone numbers to receive access to a "happy hour" in return—free access to the site’s WAP premium content once per month, which has proved highly successful.
Additional wireless content and marketing types are on the horizon, but they are still in the early stages. Services which offer webcam access from mobile handsets are starting to become popular, as are mobile portals, search engines, and blogs, but they don’t offer the best marketing opportunities at present. Another opportunity lies in adult 411, or location-based, SMS messages to help users find local adult establishments, but the practical – and profitable – implementation of the concept is still several years away.
In the offline world, print advertising seems to be effective. "In terms of alternative advertising, you have opportunities with mobile that you don't have on the standard Internet," states Allen. "Print advertising is highly effective when SMS billing is involved because you get the impulse purchase." Malhotra adds, "Our experience in wireless has shown that print advertising of short codes is a great way to increase your visibility. Remember, these are mobile people, they don't always need to be in front of the monitor." Any offline or grassroots marketing you can do is beneficial, provided you are reaching a receptive audience.
On the larger scale, the importance of partnerships cannot be overlooked. As Hales sums up, "It’s essential in this business to build the right relationships and routes to market. Pick each partner for their strengths—good quality content well shot and specifically edited for mobile, robust delivery and payment mechanisms, and an existing customer base to sell mobile content and services to. Above all else make sure that you trust your partners!" Any involvement you can get with a phone company adds great exposure, but this can be difficult to set up, not to mention the possible barriers to adult content acceptance, but more of them are catching on.
"The mobile is like the VCR of the 1970s: a recorder for personal entertainment, which is quite often of an adult nature.," speculates Delano. "We therefore call the mobile the ultimate sex machine for personal portable pleasure." Adopting this view today rather than a "wait and see" approach is what will separate future successes from future failures. Depending on whom you ask, the optimism is certainly there, as Hales can attest. "Adult mobile services will, I think, prove to be more popular and produce more revenue than Web-based adult sites in the long run," he says. This, of course, all depends on you—and whether a bit of marketing ingenuity goes along for the ride.
