July 30, 2005 - (HOSTSEARCH.COM) - According to a recent LA Times article, porn web sites receive 250 million hits a day, almost one hit for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Despite all its uses the Internet is still primarily used as a pornography viewing platform. For web masters trying to break into the business it can be tough because there are already so many porn sites out there. The industry is more competitive than the travel industry.
With site content much the same for most of these sites, one way to differentiate and drive traffic to a porn site is to provide pictures of a public figure that people will recognize. i.e. celebrity porn and the king of celebrity porn brokers, what femalecelebrities.com owner Sal Abate calls, “the go-to guy” for celebrity sex videos is David Hans Schmidt.
According to the LA Times, “Over the last decade, Schmidt has emerged as one of the nation's leading brokers of celebrity porn, the man who negotiated the sale of Tonya Harding's wedding-night sex video; arranged for Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment, to pose in the buff in Penthouse magazine; and was the behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer who obtained topless shots of rescued U.S. Army POW Pfc. Jessica Lynch and nude photos of Amber Frey, the star prosecution witness in the Scott Peterson double murder trial, and then tried to peddle them to Hustler magazine's Larry Flynt.”
While going straight to the gutter level of Hans Schmidt for porn may not be for everyone, it illustrates an important marketing concept called, “name recognition”. Just as proximity is the single largest determining factor in two people getting married, name recognition is the largest determining factor in a customer’s decision to make a purchase. If you are selling goods, in the case porn, the chances of a purchase are much higher if your customer recognizes the ‘brand’ name.
