Attracted By 60 Million Visitors Per Day, Mainstream Brands Are Running Ads On Adult Sites

Last month, we told you how the food delivery service Eat24 used porn sites to advertise its offerings to the stay-at-home crowd without paying the higher advertising fees demanded by other publishers.

Now, Digiday reports that the adult video site PornHub is looking to expand its pool of mainstream advertisers.

If successful, the push for non-porn advertising dollars could inspire a similar trend across the adult video industry, which has struggled to generate revenues as people have shifted to piracy-fueled, free 'tube' sites like PornHub instead of paying for porn.

Earlier this month, PornHub ran pre-roll advertisements for the movie "Don Jon," the Joseph Gordon-Levitt film about a man who is addicted to porn. The ad buy, made by "Don Jon" distributor Relativity Media, is similar to the one Viacom made in 2010 for "Middle Men," another film whose plot centered around porn.

Corey Price, vice president of Pornhub.com, told Digiday that for more liberal digital advertisers, adult video sites can offer access to the same number of users as mainstream sites, at just a fraction of the cost. Though the vast majority of PornHub advertisers are other adult video providers, the website attracts up to 60 million unique viewers every day, Pornhub claims. (Quantcast says that number is considerably lower.)

"It's important to note that surfers who visit adult sites are no different from those who visit mainstream sites," Price told Digiday.

But while large portions of the population are clearly watching pornography online, the industry still carries a stigma that could make advertising on adult sites risky for mainstream brands, especially those that might come in contact with children and teenagers.

Last year, the anti-porn interest group Morality in Media launched a boycott of Groupon after the daily deal company offered coupons for discounted tours of a San Francisco porn studio. The group was successful in persuading Groupon to stop offering deals from adult merchants.