Pornhub moves into YouTube and Twitch territory: a marketer's view

Pornhub is moving into YouTube and Twitch territory. And from a marketing standpoint, it makes perfect sense!

It looks like soon you will be able to do more on Pornhub than just relax: you could learn to cook dinner, repair a car or play through Minecraft. 😁

The platform has officially announced a large-scale push to bring in creators of mainstream content: video games, sports, travel, cooking, podcasts, comedy and educational programmes.

Creators are offered access to a huge audience, monetisation of ad views, short vertical videos called Shorties, and the chance to promote paid subscriptions and attract sponsors.

And the most interesting part: according to Pornhub itself, the site is visited by more than 130 million users every day.

My view as a marketer

I believe this move is perfectly logical.

Pornhub already has what other platforms spend billions of dollars on: a huge flow of visitors, brand recognition and a regular audience that arrives with a specific intent.

In marketing, acquiring a user is one of the hardest and most expensive tasks. And here the traffic already exists!

Now the company is, in effect, trying to increase its economic value: to offer more content, raise engagement, and create additional ad formats and new sources of revenue.

Yes, people go there for anything but cooking recipes. But that is exactly what the marketing experiment is about: can an already established audience be turned into consumers of a fundamentally different kind of content?

Of course, big traffic does not yet guarantee high conversion. There are questions of brand reputation, advertising restrictions and users' willingness to change their habits.

Still, the business logic itself is clear to me: why buy a new audience every time if you can offer extra value to the one you already have?

And the main question now is not even whether Pornhub can compete with YouTube. It is how far a platform that already holds the attention of millions of people can be scaled.

Are you ready to watch cooking shows and technology videos on Pornhub? 😁

Sources: official Pornhub press release, WIRED, Tubefilter