TechCrunch Upskirt: Why Michael Arrington Blogs about Porn

In 1970 porn was a 10 million dollar industry. Today, the porn industry pulls in close to a billion dollars. According to Alexa, four of the hundred most trafficked sites on the web are porn sites. Additionally, Google has a monthly volume of over 100 million porn related searches and that number is only increasing. Needless to say, the saying holds true on the web: sex sells. But the results in the x rated SERPs are not all what you might think. Amidst the porn stars and production companies, you will also find thousands of TechCrunch articles.

site:www.techcrunch.com intext:porn

In the last year alone, TechCrunch made over 550 blog posts with the word porn in body of the post. In some cases the articles addressed popular, newsworthy stories such as the much talked about iPhone porn app, but in a number of cases the stories were a bit more of a stretch. Newsworthy or not, TechCrunch blogs about porn when they have the opportunity. And though the porn related articles they write typically don’t top the SERPs, they do rank on the first 1-3 pages for a number of high volume porn related queries, including terms such as ‘youporn,’ ‘you porn,’ and ‘iphone porn.’

What does this mean for TechCrunch’s traffic? Well, based on monthly search volume, if you assume industry average SERP click through rates, it’s not unreasonable to estimate that TechCrunch generates over a quarter million visits a month from x rated queries.

TechCrunch also optimizes porn posts for users, not just search engines. Often they do this by including mildly risque above the fold images in blog posts. In addition to having a positive impact on decreasing bounce rates for first time visitors who arrive from porn queries, these thumbnails likely have high click through rates when articles are picked up on Techmeme and other news aggregators. And like other TechCrunch blog post images, these risque images are not hyperlinked, which encourages more clicks on the c column advertisements.

Ad Revenue — What does porn blogging mean for TechCrunch’s bottom line?

1) 1st Time Visitors: Assuming 3 page views per visit, with 286,625 visits, TechCrunch would receive just under 900,000 page views per month. And to take this a step further, assume TechCrunch earns $2.00 per click (which is simply a guestimate for contextual ads on a site serving their own ads), this would mean TechCrunch is making tens of thousands of dollars each month by doing their Ron Jeremy-esque SERP countdown.  

High Estimate:

Low Estimate:

2) Return Visitors (subscribers): If TechCrunch made their money selling crafts, porn traffic would do little to their bottom line. But they don’t. They make their money off ads. And the more page views they have, the more impressions and clicks they get. And nothing drives page views and engagement like return visits from blog subscribers. So unlike other sites that could blog about porn and not acquire any new customers from the traffic, TechCrunch, who caters to a tech geek demographic, is uniquely positioned to profit from PHP privy porn perusers.

In TechCrunch’s defense, they are not alone. Wired also does their their fare share of porn blogging, but these two seem to be outliers compared to other tech news sites. If you look at pages containing ‘porn’ as a percentage of total pages on the site in Google’s index, there is a clear line indicating that TechCrunch and Wired each have a higher percentage of porn related content than other popular tech news sites.

What about you? Are you leaving revenue opportunities on the table? Would your site drive conversions if your posts ranked on high volume, porn related search terms? Perhaps there is tremendous opportunity here for you? Even if there isn’t, at least there is never any shortage of online marketing boobs and SEO anal-ytics tools to blog about.

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