Capture The Australian Adult Entertainment Classifieds Market

The site

abouttown.xxx

A full featured Adult Entertainment portal. Local adult services, webcams, articles, employment opportunities. It has been running for approximately 12 months. It is stable and complete with all of it's core features completed about 3 months ago. A roadmap exists for future development but the real work needed now is promotion, marketing and advertising.

Background

The site is owned by a registered Australian company. I am the technical cofounder. The concept for the site was put forward to me by An American living in Australia with some experience in the adult industry in the US. She recognised the opportunity for an adult entertainment directory to cater for Australian service providers similar to offerings in the US. Up to a 50% equity stake is available if the right deal can be negotiated. Revenue share and work for hire arrangements are also possibilities.

Existing Users

We have 153 Advertisers (Here is a link which shows a breakdown of advertisers by city: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4-...hteE9MTDQ/view)
Current traffic to the site has not yet exceed 1000 a week but marketing and Lead generation campaigns have only just begun.

Reputation

The brand and site has been advertised largely in local community newspapers in NSW and QLD. In total 50 publications. There is some recognition on social networks like Facebook but more more is needed to build a social presence.

Revenues

Basic listings on the site are free for adult service providers but they can opt in for premium features to make their listing more prominent. These features are taken up by approximately half of new listings to the site. The site makes some cpc revenue from display advertising. The money this makes depends on traffic.

Average sale are about $10 in premium advertising features. It ranges from $4 to $30 per sale (Our rates are heavily discounted compared to competitors. The focus is on obtaining market share for the first year or two). The site has some pay per click advertising. Adult Ad serving networks don't pay as much as mainstream ones like adsense. But with a lot of traffic the click fees could add up.

Distribution channels

So far we have the website and some print material. The site is fully responsive and supports all devices and platforms. Future channels could include a mobile app, more print material, adult phone lines, online display advertising and widgets.

Hotness of industry

1000s of new adult entertainment ads go online every month just in Australia (The site is designed to be able to support multiple countries). Escorts are opting to advertise their services online as opposed to soliciting on street corners and working for agencies. New people enter the industry all of the time. There are always new people putting up ads. Should we capture these or even a percentage of these advertisers, have a lot of potential clients on the site browsing and responding to the ads, the business will be successful.

The adult industry is considered to be recession proof. People do not stop using adult services during the bad times. This is the main reason I became interested in the project initially.

Marketing Efforts To Date

We have been advertising the site in community newspapers and sms marketing to adult service providers encouraging them to join. This has been effective. We are now focussing on organic search, social and content marketing. Ideally we would like to expand our advertising and marketing budget to include display advertising, magazine ads, even late night tv ads.

I know that we can approach adult service providers directly and a percentage of them will sign up--and some of those will pay for premium features. If we can build up a steady stream of relevant traffic to the site and provide leads for the service providers they will stay with us and keep paying for premium features. I have an automated solution that mines classified sites for adult service provider's contact details in order to prospect to them. Usually I get a mobile phone number not an email address.

Search rankings are not great for the site. I am working on a link building and content strategy that should fix this but it will take time. Currently I have commissioned an SEO consultant to go through a list of 3000 top ranking relevant sites and trying to get links on those. I am also planning on generating lists of those sites who link to top ranking sites and soliciting them for back links. I have a database of keywords that are popular and of course they are used on the site. Adwords is not an option. They don't support adult content.

Competitors

Backpage (An online classifieds site) are the largest competitor. Some sources say that they make Ten million dollars a month from adult classifieds (Hold the Backpage | The Economist).
Locanto (another online classifieds site) are a distant second competitor.

Point Of Difference

ABT is more high tech than it's competitors with features such as gps search, phone number protection, email protection, comprehensive analytics, automation, light weight & responsive with video introductions.

Compared to Backpage

We are adult specific. We moderate our ads ensuring compliance with state legislation. We verify the contact details for all of our listings. Backpage recently came under attack from US activists and politicians for not moderating their ads to filter out underage advertisers. Of course most adult services are also illegal in the US. Mastercard and Visa cut them off. Backpage now have to take bitcoin.

Compared to locanto

Our site is better organised and structured. We moderate our ads ensuring compliance with state legislation. We verify the contact details for all of our listings.

Hey we should SKYPE I have an adult membership site I recently bought site I believe around 5 years old has 1400 members.If nothing else like to swap backlinks and maybe banner ads. contact Mark
mark.martin133

OP let me know your skype ID through pm...I would be interested in working with you in the adult niche...

Hey might like to partner or work something out! my site is worldwide searchable database for escorts, strippers, exotic dancers escort agencies and strip clubs at Escorts and Strippers.Net

In Australian market, digital marketing of adult website may be legal, but in Indian Market, it is illegal. But although in India market, adult sites and escorts sites getting more popularity also more dependable. So her to promote escorts sites, what strategy we need to take.