Media: Sex search is gateway to traffic for Women's Sites

-Digiday

Most advertisers are turned off by sexual content, but mainstream publishers still benefit from porn by using articles about sex to boost search traffic, including women’s lifestyle publishers.

Sex-related terms are among the most popular keywords driving search traffic to women-focused sites like Refinery29, Bustle, Teen Vogue and (perhaps less surprising) Cosmopolitan, according to comScore reports pulled by two ad buyers requesting anonymity. On the high end, six of Refinery29’s top 20 search terms — from “porn videos” to “xxx” to “Pornhub” — were porn-related.

“It’s highly likely this strategy gets them clicks, which makes sense for a publication that makes its money on ad impressions,” said Chris Penn, vp of martech at Shift Communications.

Porn is more frequently searched for on the internet in general than the beauty, fashion and politics coverage that these publishers tout on their sites. Across the internet, three of the top 10 search terms on Google over the past six months were about porn, according to a study by SEO firm MondovoThese publishers are reputable and have decent page speed, so their sex articles are likely to appear at the top of some popular searches and increase traffic, said independent SEO consultant Mark Robertson. The comScore reports don’t show how much of the publishers’ total traffic comes from search, but SimilarWeb data reveals these publishers get about 63 percent of their traffic from search on average.

“If someone is on a mission to look at porn and gets distracted by a publisher’s article, I guess that’s a win for the publisher,” said one of the ad buyers requesting anonymity.

(Disclosure: I have written articles about sex for a few of the publishers mentioned in this article.)

Some popular sexual keywords can be traced to specific articles on the women-focused sites. Teen Vogue and Cosmo are still getting search traffic from viral explainers about anal sexthey published several months ago. “Anal sex” was Teen Vogue’s third most popular search term and Cosmo’s fourth most popular search term over the past three months, according to the comScore reports. A Google query for “anal sex” places Cosmo’s and Teen Vogue’s anal explainers as the first and third results, respectively.