Internet is for porn.
You may have noticed that I am posting banners of porn sites in posts, and I will do it for about a month, because I'm trying to understand why Google, Facebook & co are so fierce in the fight against porn.
Let's understand, these companies follow, like all American companies, a single logic that is the economic one. It is useless to think that they do it "for children" or for "morality": companies of that size are completely amoral, and as for children, if they paid them money they would eat them au gratin in the company canteen.
The real point of the struggle between OTT and porn, therefore, must be economic. Following the logic of "follow the money", the problem is that the OTT live (as they say) of advertising. So the money to follow is here.
So, I asked myself: if porn is the Great Enemy of the big OTTs, is it possible that it is their strongest competitor when it comes to advertising?
And then I asked myself how. There are two ways to compete with google & co.
- Offer advertising on porn sites at a lower price. I rejected this because not all companies have a target that accepts advertising on a porn site.
- Pay more for renting spaces. This is important, because in fact Facebook and Google, but in particular google, lives a lot of advertising managed by them (through the CDN) which is then inserted into the Apps, blogs, etc.
So I wondered if porn sites pay more or less than Google, for example programs like Google Ads. So I'm making a comparison.
I have two blogs: one in Italian and one in German. In the German one, also because of some restrictive laws that are here in Germany: filters are already found in home routers, https://www.bundespruefstelle.de/bpjm/meta/en but only if you enable them, for example following this procedure on the Fritz !: https://avm.de/service/fritzbox/fritzbox-5490/wissensdatenbank/publication/show/8_Internetnutzung-mit-Kindersicherung-einschranken/ :
So, in order not to introduce an uncontrollable factor, I put Google Ads on the German blog and HUB Traffic on this. This is the reason for here you are around banners like these:
After that, I'm comparing the proceeds, counting it for traffic equality and bounce rate. (these are measures on the effectiveness of traffic).
Since I entered the banners I started to have the analytics of the incoming money, and I must say that there is no comparison.
In the same time frame (now 4 days), with a fairly similar number of clicks and "bounce rate", the result was $ 19.45 on the German site (Google Ads) and $ 43.24 from porn. Obviously a few days of traffic are not enough to give a statistic, so I want to keep the experiment up for some time.
Another thing that I intend to verify is the punctuality of the payment, since HUB traffic pays on a paypal account and pays immediately arrived at the threshold (it should not be long for HUB Traffic, I set a threshold at 50 $) while google has this thing that pays you with a bonus to buy advertising for you: so I want to see how the two will behave.
If both behaved well paying due with punctuality and without apology (Google is known to "demonetize" things with extreme ease) my hypothesis would be confirmed: the battle against Google & C porn is not due to moralism or the protection of children, but simply the fact that porn threatens space.
If I needed, that is, to keep advertising on this blog (I don't think I will do it, at the end of the experiment), in fact, I would certainly not choose Google. Apparently, at least with my audience, it looks like the porn PAY BETTER and you pay MORE.
Obviously it is a deduction from the very beginning, in the sense that a site like Repubblica cannot certainly place ExtremeTube as a banner:
let alone as a background.
On the other hand, though, porn could enable many independent bloggers to live on porn. If in fact I did TWO posts a day I would almost reach an Italian entry level salary, or a German mini-job with a few extra hours, which obviously would not replace my current income, but would be interesting for students, retirees & co as integration .
In reality, the point is that porn advertising could take away most of the small independent blogs from Google (apart from those frequented by Catholics and bigots, which are a small amount of traffic) and … the apps.
Why to this day when you make an app and you put the monetization using advertising, you usually use a google library that allows you to insert the google advertising on your mobile. But be careful, because this is not mandatory: as these are very normal HTTP calls, no one would prohibit the apps producers from inserting, more or less obfuscated (to bypass google checks) the advertisements of porn sites.
And this happens already, if we think that HUB Traffic already offers banners optimized for mobile phones:
therefore, someone is already using these banners on mobile devices, in the face of Google and Apple.
So, so far I have established two things:
- Porn pays, as an advertiser MORE than google in terms of clicks and bounce rates.
- The porn would allow small independent bloggers (and programmers of independent apps) to have much greater revenue, showing a tasty market segment to Google, Facebook & co.
I therefore begin to find the first confirmation of my "follow the money" theory:
the big OTTs try to filter porn because the porn site advertising industry is too competitive with them, and they risk contending for advertising space.
Before closing: what will I do with this money?
So, with the money "earned" so far thanks to your clicks on the banners, when they arrive, I will buy one of these:
Essentially I already have a gaming Razer, but it's USB, so I need one to stick on tablets, cell phones & co. What if more money arrives?
No, I will not donate this money to charity: all those who work for NGOs and other charities always say they are disgusted by porn, so I don't really see the reason to pay them money, which I am sure they suck . Never let me contaminate their moral money with very expensive anal gangbang money. I am sure that they will be grateful for this.
As a result, if more money arrives, I will buy very tasty things IT, but I will be a fervent defender of the morality of charity: I will never dirty their bank accounts, which are so moral and virtuous.
Obviously, I am NOT asking you to click: just click if you would have done it anyway, because I want to continue to have a "double-blind" experiment, that is, I would like to see how this blog behaves "normally". If you normally wouldn't have clicked, please don't do it now.