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Well there's another weekend gone by in a blur of ... well I'd like to say ‘fun and relaxation' but instead it went by in a blur of work. Next weekend will be different ... next weekend ... well next weekend has to be different because I'm already booked to go somewhere that there's no decent internet connection. I'm having withdrawals already and I can't back out of it.

Something we already knew but ...
It seems that a bank in South Africa recently discovered something that we already knew ... the picture of a pretty woman encourages guys to buy things far more than the picture of a handsome male.

It seems that they sent out direct mailing to their customers offering a loan. Some of the advertising featured a picture of a man and a very low interest rate while others feature a picture of a pretty woman and a much higher interest rate. Male customers who received the brochure featuring the image of a pretty woman and the higher interest rate were far more responsive than those who received the brochure featuring the image of a man and much lower interest rates.

Women who received the same brochures were no more responsive to the brochure featuring the female than they were to the brochure featuring the male.

So why should that be of some interest to us? Well obviously we already knew about the power a pretty woman has over men but these days ... when more and more females are buying memberships in adult sites ... what will appeal to women and encourage them to buy what we're selling?

If the bank's research is anything to go on then it may not be the picture of a handsome man or the picture of a sexy woman. However, as someone pointed out in a discussion I was following that was looking at the results of that brochure, perhaps women aren't as influenced by irrelevant photos as men are.

Does that tell us something about the type of images we should be showing women?

Is Second Life getting old?
Last year Steve and I had a little play in Second Life ... not for fun but to see what the marketing opportunities were like in there ... and I wrote about what we had found. At that time there were quite a few businesses ... and even a few Government departments setting up in the game and Steve and I thought that there could be some serious marketing opportunities for adult marketers in the game.

Since then we haven't been back but a very interesting article about Second Life appeared in one of Australia's leading newspapers late last week. It seems that the number of people here in Australia who are still participating in Second Life is dropping quite noticeably and may of the Australian businesses that set up in the game have basically walked away from it.

Even the big international brands that had set up in Second Life have also left the game and their sites in the game have become ghost towns.

Some of the reasons given for the decline in interest in the game include the slow response times here in Australia and the fact that many people experience frequent crashes when they're in the game. It seems that the game owner's own data shows that the game will crash for most users at least every one in four times they enter the game.

That last reason may well be the one thing that brings Second Life to an end if another someone else comes along with even a slightly better game that doesn't crash so often. If you see that game coming then be sure to jump in right at the beginning and stake a claim to some marketing space

The games are over
And now the Olympic Games are over I wonder if we will see an upswing in traffic and sales as people look for something else to amuse them. I don't recall ever seeing any traffic figures from past Games periods but it's possible there were upswings back then.

These days though I think it's more likely that a lot of people watch TV and surf the Net at the same time. Laptops have made that an easy task so if you're hoping to see your traffic numbers rise from today onwards you may be a little disappointed.

What do people search for?
The search terms that people use when they hit the search engines should always be something that interests you. I know it absolutely fascinates Steve and me and that's why some recent Hitwise data has us wondering if there isn't a few search terms out there that people use for adult related products that we haven't thought about before.

Hitwise was looking at what people were searching for when they were looking at hiring a car and the most important term had to do with location. I guess that's fairly obvious but the next most important term was price.

These days are people searching for terms such as 'cheap porn' or 'budget porn'? I don't know ... they're not terms that we've been playing with ... but it might be worth looking at.