The search industry is at the dawn of a new era, one that is changing the way we use the Internet. We are on the brink of personalized and highly targeted search results that use more than just your search query to find the right results from the plethora of content on the Internet. This new era is just one of three that have affected—or will affect—the search-engine world.
The first period reaches from the beginning of the Web to the end of ’90s. The period was dominated by Net directories and fairly simple search technologies. Building a successful online presence in adult back then was simple enough: Just join the few major directories, and—voilà. You have users. Some directories did not list adult sites, but most of the major ones could not ignore the presence of the highly sought-after content. Some companies, like Amazon.com, are even rumored to have chosen their domain name based on the fact that certain directories (in this case, Yahoo!’s) were sorted alphabetically.
It was a simple period, to say the least.
For the adult industry, the battles were basic: Get your site listed, make sure you have a billing system that allows adult sites (I recall a certain American Express debacle), make sure your site has some keywords on it, and join all the directories and search engines you can find. At that time, Web indices still were small, algorithms were simple, and spamming worked pretty well, too.
The second period—the one in which we find ourselves now—is significantly more complex. Beginning around the turn of the millennium and lasting until the current milieu, it is the era in which text-based search is the central hub for most Internet traffic. Indices went from listing millions of sites to listing billions of sites. Thanks to the invention of pay-for-placement text advertising by Goto/Overture, the Web became profitable, and Google helped out everyone except the adult industry by creating AdSense, the no-brainer way to make money off your website.
Since AdSense does not allow placement on adult websites—and both Overture and Google have fairly bad reputations for a quality experience in the keyword-buying market—the adult industry had to evolve to survive. The industry standardized some of its own revenue models—affiliate marketing, traffic arbitrage, and gallery sites with banner ad spots—just to name a few. These models do not rely on search as the only component, but it certainly is an important one.
However, while traffic from other adult sites is valuable, some studies show conversion rates as much as five times higher for major-label search referrals on membership and product sites compared to rates from generic traffic. That simply serves as a reminder that search traffic, although a site can survive without it, is worth a lot of money. That is not going to change.
So, what is the next era, and what will it mean to the adult industry?
The next era is personalized search. Major search engines are allowing advertisers to control not just on which keywords to focus, but also which users to target. Currently, geography is the main option for advertisers, but demographics and other qualifiers are not far behind. General search technology never is too far behind ad technology. Expect features like Yahoo!’s MyWeb and other customizable engines like Google Co-Op and Microsoft Live Search, which allow users to make their own custom-tailored search boxes, to include variables based on demographics, location, and perhaps other criteria.
Simply put, search functions on the Web are going to get more personal, considering how much the meta-data sites can gather. This should improve overall user experience on the Web by taking users to content they want faster and easier than ever before. However, it also may be detrimental to things like traffic arbitrage in the adult sphere, because generic “clicks” are going to be increasingly less valuable in comparison to more qualified search-engine traffic.
What can the adult world do to get ready? Simple: Know your audience and who you are missing, just like any other market out there. The ability to increase the amount of targeted traffic for this industry likely will continue to drive valuable leads directly to your door.
