One in Three Porn Viewers
Posted On: 2007-05-28
Not all that long ago while writing in another place I mentioned that many women were just as interested in looking at porn as most men were. I know that lots of guys find that hard to believe and perhaps even a little threatening. And I know that lots of webmasters think I'm being delusional when I suggest that women are interested in porn ... but it's a fact.
Women like to look at porn. Women have always liked to look at porn and since the explosion of adult content onto the Internet women have had even more opportunity to look at porn than ever before ... and they're grabbing it with both hands.
Several years ago one regular recurring member of my old amateur site was a woman. When I first started the site and ran it as an AVS one of the regular viewers of my hardcore cam shows was a woman who watched the action with her husband and then chatted with me after the show.
So women do look at porn on the Net but it's never been quiet clear just how many women look at porn. Now though we do have some figures to go on since the findings of a major survey here in Australia have been released.
This survey revealed that one third of Internet users here in Australia visited at least one adult site during the first three months of this year. Analysis of the data showed that 4.3 million Australians (we only have a population of a little over 20 million) looked at pornography or visited a “sex-oriented matchmaker site” on the Net in those three months.
The figures on a month-by-month basis were interesting too. They showed that 2.7 million Australians visited adult sites during March and that was an increase of 23 percent on figures obtained 18 months ago. The figures also showed that the wealthier someone was the more likely they were to have looked at adult content online.
The local adult industry looked at the figures and found that women are the new growth market for online adult products - whether that be porn, toys or lingerie - and one in three porn viewers here in Australia are now women.
So carry those percentages across to the big markets of the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom and what figures are you going to see there? There's no doubt that 33% of the market is going to mean that we're dealing with big numbers here ... so what are you doing about tapping into that market?
What are you doing to encourage women to look at more of what you're trying to sell?
One of the biggest problems that we face when selling our product - whether it be to men or women - is the perception by the market place that what we're selling is something that's tainted ... dirty ... and perhaps even degrading to women. Hell we even reinforce that perception by the way we advertise our products and that just means we're going out of our way to help those who are against us.
There are plenty of people out there who want to tell people that our product is as unhealthy as the perception people have of it. Studies have found that pornography can have a destructive impact on couple's sex lives, women's self-esteem and sense of trust ... and perhaps it does. Even just a sniff of something like that being caused by porn is enough to bring out the religious nutters who want to take advantage of any hint of porn being bad.
But what if porn can have a positive impact on people? You might be surprised to know that it really can have a positive impact and that's supported by another recent study from the Queensland University of Technology. That survey looked at 1000 'self-selected pornography users' and 58.8% of those people said that looking at porn had a positive impact on their attitudes towards sex. Only 6.8% said that porn had a negative impact on them.
So if you want to market your products to women then think about stressing the positives. Look at your marketing techniques and see if you really are focusing on the positive aspects of your product; it could be that subconsciously you're stressing the very things that make people think that looking at porn is wrong, wicked or sinful and that means you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
Whatever you're doing, if you're not at least spending some time focusing on women then you're obviously leaving a lot of money on the table. When you potentially have one in three surfers being women you would have to be crazy to let all those potential sales escape you.
But then there are a lot of adult marketers out there who can't handle the fact that women can and do like to see porn. Those marketers who can adapt to the idea of selling porn to women will be the ones to cash in on the latest growth market.