Banned From Marketing
Challenges of marketing your product in the adult space
When starting my own adult company, I quickly realized that marketing your platform is a near-to-impossible task. This isn’t as much of an issue if you are already an established porn company, but for new companies entering the space with no brand recognition yet, you’ll find that you cannot use a PR agency, or run ads, and you will be quickly censored on social media. So, getting your company off the ground can feel like a near-to-impossible task. We certainly had to get very creative with Freyja.
When I first started my company I didn’t know anything about marketing, I had to learn everything on the spot, and very quickly. I assumed that this included running ads, PR and social media. How hard could it be? Well, it certainly was not easy especially when you put the fact that my company was porn on top of it. The first thing I did was try to find a PR agency because I was naive enough to think that PR agencies would be helpful for startups when in reality it’s just an unnecessary financial drain, with little to no conversion. PR agencies for startups are just Russian roulette. I reached out to multiple PR agencies, expecting that they would reply to me because well, they’d be getting money. Once again, I was very wrong. Most of the agencies I reached out to did not reply to me. Out of the three that did reply to me, two said that they couldn’t take us on as a client as they thought that what Freyja did was too taboo, and even though there was a great impact angle they didn’t feel comfortable taking us on as a client because they didn’t think any newspapers or magazines would write about us. This was large since writing a pro-pornography or pornography-promoting article could be an issue with advertisers and just the general public image. This made sense to me, and yet it didn’t. The fact is the media does write about porn but if you look at the examples, it is always talking negatively about companies or only speaks about performers. You will very rarely see anything positive about the industry, especially companies. As an adult company, I began to see the bias in the media and felt silenced. I don’t like to use the word unfair, but it did feel like unfair censorship.
It was clear that PR was not going to be an option for us. Most companies didn’t want us, or they would charge insane fees that are daylight robbery for a startup. This was just another obstacle for our industry, just because it was taboo. I so desperately wanted to get that coverage to let these issues be known publicly because all these ESG policies that were put in place to stop harm were actively preventing the industry from becoming safer. Nevertheless, it felt as though I would never be able to get the word out publicly. It was just another barrier. It was pretty tough at times to not feel angry about the way that we were treated compared to other companies just because of the ‘taboo’ angle, but when faced with these types of hurdles, we just had to get more creative, and that’s exactly what we did.
I turned to an advertisement. Every investor would always ask us;
“Are you running ads on google or meta?”
“No. We can’t.” I would say disappointingly. I got pretty sick of this question after a while.
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“We’re not allowed, it's against their TOS.”
“Oh.”
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if we ran google ads, then my company wouldn’t have gone under. Adult companies are not allowed to advertise on Google or Meta. Fine, fair enough, but when you combine this with the restrictions to PR, investment, banking etc, you start to feel as though you are attempting a mission impossible to get your company going. This isn’t an issue for the big established companies; these new types of restrictions are really only an issue for newer companies. This is because it makes it virtually impossible for these companies to get the coverage that they need.
Since we couldn’t advertise in those places we turned to Traffic Junky which was the advertising center for Mindgeek. I made a couple of different ads and began to test them out to see if they worked well. It managed to get some people over to our site but never converted into paying users. Yet, we did notice that this helped with brand recognition so we continued doing it. That was until we noticed one day that we could no longer use Mastercard on Traffic Junky. This was because they received increasing pressure to stop not only working with Pornhub but all of Mindgeek. Nonetheless, this had a humongous ricochet effect on companies such as ourselves who could no longer find a way to pay traffic junky. There were now only three options to pay them:
Crypto, which we couldn't do for accounting reasons.
Minimum 10k wire transfer which we couldn't do because that was too much money for us.
An offshore bank that a lot of the industry uses. We had wanted to avoid this because it took a 1% transaction fee on inbound and outbound payments.
Even though we understood why this had happened, it was incredibly devastating for companies such as ourselves who already can’t advertise elsewhere, can’t get PR, and are censored on social media. It was another hurdle, but at this point, it was more comical than anything.
Since PR was ruled out, and advertisement was patchy, this only left us with social media marketing and influencer marketing. We ended up spending most of our focus on these two things.
The first couple of months we made sure to censor ourselves on social media because we knew the risks that we would face with shadow banning and possibly losing our accounts. What most adult companies and performers do is censor words such as:
Sex = s*x or seggs
Porn = Corn
And so on. However, even if you censor words in this manner it can still lead to you getting reported and shadow-banned because their moderation algorithms can pick up on those words too. At first, our posts were largely about our education site, as we thought that it was safer to promote this than our porn site. We also were not allowed to link directly towards our site, because most mainstream social media platforms do not let you link directly to a porn site so we had to use a linktree. This automatically reduces your conversion rate from social media to your site because that’s more clicks for the user to make to get to your site. Data also shows that people will not go above a certain number of clicks to find something. Nonetheless, this social media strategy failed. Our content creation didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere early on. What was also challenging with the censorship, was that we then couldn’t give clear messaging about what our company did, because it wasn’t worth the risk. In turn, we would get a lot of users on social media asking what we did, telling us we aren’t clear, but we couldn’t do anything about that if we wanted to keep our account, and I could rarely even reply to them on social media out of fear of losing the account we had worked so hard to build.
In the beginning, we barely got any traction, and we were clear under a shadow ban. Once again, the censorship was incredibly frustrating, I couldn’t comprehend how on earth we were meant to gain more users and traction when we barely had any chance of marketing ourselves with all of these layered restrictions, it often felt like we didn’t have a shot, but we couldn’t think like that for too long. The rule I set in the company was you can be annoyed about this stuff for a couple of minutes, but then we need solutions not just to state the problem. That’s when we moved on to influencer marketing.
We began to work with more mainstream influencers and b-list celebrities. I didn’t know much about influencer marketing, but I most definitely learnt about it way too fast. I would spend hours going through social media to find relevant influencers who could fit our brand with followings anywhere from 10k to millions. I would then email them, or their agents.
I was quite fortunate that the first couple of influencers that we worked with were super lovely and enthusiastic about our product. I would try to get them to do a paid post for us, and then also sign-up for our site. So, this felt like a good way to increase our site signups, and brand recognition and get more credible mainstream influencers to join the platform. Once we started these campaigns, we did see a more direct conversion rate onto our site with signups, and more social media followers, so out of everything else we had tried before, this seemed to be working better.
After the first couple of successful campaigns, we decided to adopt this type of marketing strategy and so, I reached out to more and more influencers. We set a goal of trying to do three campaigns a month. All of the responsibility for our marketing and our user numbers was on me. So, I felt immense pressure to consistently line up these campaigns and get the best results possible.
The whole influencer marketing business was a massive headache, and it felt like a roulette. This marketing strategy was fine at the beginning, but as our budget became more limited this no longer felt like an option for marketing. It was too much of a financial gamble.
Our team sat down and took a hard look at our own social media strategy. Something wasn’t going well for us and it wasn’t just the shadow ban. After 5 months we were only at around 5,000 followers which was frankly pathetic. I wanted to stay away from the strategy of focusing on sex education because it didn’t feel worth the risk of losing our account. Therefore, we decided to move more towards social media messaging with fewer bots, no ads, and no unfair censorship. After evaluating all these different influencers' accounts and content, I thought to myself;
“Why don’t we just do what they do?”
I wanted to move away from this typical social media corporate content that you see and instead make the kind of content that people want to watch for fun, I wanted to make the kind of content that I watch when I go on social media. We started to make a plan to make more comedy-like content, and we started by doing street interviews where we would ask people about dating and sex. We went out to Helsinki in the minus cold weather to do these interviews. We tried to ask questions that would be entertaining, and slightly relevant to our topics, but also not cross the line into us getting censored. We asked questions such as;
“Does body count matter?”
And “do you care if your partner is shaved?”
We got some pretty funny replies to all of these questions, with one man replying to the shaving question with; “Man’s gotta eat” and “the wilderness must be explored.”
These videos instantly went viral hitting millions of views on Tiktok. However, it didn’t do as well on Instagram because of our shadow ban which is why we decided to post the videos on my Instagram to try to get more traction around Freyja without a shadow ban, and this really worked. We did more and more interviews, and then we also one day had the idea to start doing PowerPoint presentations about the company and what it was like working there as an attempt to get out following interest in what the company did. Because there was no point in having a big following if it wasn’t going to lead to conversions on the site. I had the idea to have Sofiia give me a presentation on why she thought I should hire more men, which went viral. This was an amazing feeling because in turn, we began to see a massive increase in interest in the company, and our user numbers were growing at the fastest rate that they ever had. We had finally cracked the code and were on an excellent marketing path. The best bit about it was that it was 80x more successful than running ads, or influencer marketing, and it barely cost me anything in comparison. Our following also quickly jumped from 5,000 to over 50k. However, there was always still the censorship threat and worry of it all being taken away.
Overall, the experiences that we had at Freyja with trying to market, show how challenging it can be in the adult space. One can understand why these restrictions are in place, but we also have to ask ourselves if these restrictions are doing more harm than good, as they are preventing new companies who want to make the industry safer from being able to market and survive.