Making Money from Trends
Posted On: 2010-08-19
Yesterday over on Porn Resource I talked about using data to help you make marketing decisions. As I pointed out in that column mainstream marketers get plenty of great marketing information that's published regularly and they can use that information to help them make money while here in adult we get very little information like that.
In our industry the people who do have the data that could help us increase our sales are the sponsors and they always seem a little reluctant to share any of it. So adult marketers are left to their own devices when it comes to making important decisions about what to promote ... when to promote it ... and even how to promote it.
That doesn't mean that we have to bumble along blindly for some of the data that mainstream is so eager to share can be of help to us because there are some synergies between mainstream and adult marketing. We can also look to Google to give us some help with trends ... both long and short-term ... even though some of those figures can be a little misleading.
Just this week a mainstream marketer pointed out that if you're doing keyword research then you shouldn't be relying too much on the data that Google's Adwords Keyword Tool gives you. It seems that Google actually combines some of the numbers that appear when you use that tool from a variety of sources and not all those figures relate precisely to the term you're researching.
It looks as though Google's Search-based Keyword Tool is possibly a more reliable tool to use if you want to do some keyword research for it appears to rely only on searches done using the Google search box.
That's all well and good for general keyword research but it can be very helpful to know something about the times of year when people are more interested in the niches that you're promoting because there may be times when the interest in your favorite niche is down while other niches are more popular.
I've never seen any data released by paysite owners that could help you with the seasonal popularity of niches but there is a Google tool that can help you. It's called Google Insights for Search and you can find it at google.com/insights/search/#
It will give you some interesting data on the times of year when terms are most popular, the countries where a particular term is popular, how that term rates for volume measured against all the searches made in Google and it will even give you an idea of how the popularity of a particular term has changed over time.
For example, if you use the tool to do a search for the term 'mature porn' you will see that it was most popular during 2006 and the number of people searching for that term has dropped off since then. Google suggests that the term has a score of 30 out of 100 in the United States and some Arab countries but only 29 out of 100 in Canada, Russia and Australia. In Japan it only rates 12 out of 100 so perhaps the Japanese are looking for something else when it comes to porn.
Now let's compare those figures to what the tool will show us for the search term 'teen porn'. According to Google's trend tool interest in that search term has been steadily increasing since they started keeping records. There have been some minor dips in September 2008 and February 2009 but they were relatively minor and lasted hardly any time at all.
The major countries where people search for that term are South Africa - 82 out of 100, New Zealand - 71 out of 100, Canada - 65 out of 100, the United States - 62 out of 100 and some Scandinavian countries too. But once again teen porn is not a popular search term in Japan.
I also looked at the search term 'anal porn' and interestingly that is slightly more popular than 'mature porn' but a lot less popular than 'teen porn'.
So what does all that show us? Well I'll let you do those searches yourself because you can dig down to a more granular level than I can cover here and that will allow you to see some great data that will give you something to think about.
But one interesting thing I noticed was that while we might see a decrease in our traffic over the summer months Google doesn't see that at all. In fact some of the search peaks for 'mature porn' were during the summer months in the northern hemisphere and some of the slowest months for searches for 'anal porn' were during the northern hemisphere winter months.
However I want to leave you with a word of caution. It's quite possible to read too much into data like this. Just because more people are searching for teen porn than mature porn doesn't necessarily mean that you will make more money by building teen related sites.
I've made far more money from some of the more way-out niches ... niches where searches are a lot less than the more popular terms ... than I ever have from selling memberships in teen sites and that could be your experience too.
And what sort of porn turns the Japanese on? I haven't got a clue.