Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?

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welcome back to "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?" The show where agency founders unpack what's real and what's just noise in the world of funnels, founders and full blown marketing chaos. I'm your host, Adam W. Barney And today's guest isn't here to play it safe.

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She's here to break stigma and drop serious business truth. Pauline Schmeichen runs not one, but two high traffic adult platforms, consults for vice industry brands, and knows firsthand what it's like to grow when traditional ad channels shut the door.

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Pauline, welcome. Thanks for having me today. Awesome. First, quick question. With 3 million monthly users but zero access to mainstream ad platforms, is paid advertising even real for you? Yeah.

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There's a saying paid ads work for everybody. And I have a feeling that for my industry the saying doesn't count, but we have our ways to still advertise. I love it. I love it. And you've basically said that nothing works in your world on those traditional platforms.

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What's the experience like trying to grow inside the ad ecosystems but within a blind spot that they have or a regulated kind of an environment? Yeah, you have to put everything you ever learned about paid ads, aside when you start in the industry.

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So, we have a lot of platforms that forbid advertisement, like Google, Meta, TikTok, they don't allow any adult or vice content. They close our accounts. Sometimes, ads are refused, payments are stopped.

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That's what we have to deal with every day. But there are channels that work for us and, and there are also special ad networks we can use as adult platforms where you can advertise on other adult platforms. I mean, that's the way it works.

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And I mean, it's not only about the adult world. There are other highly regulated platforms, of course, but to sort of zero in a little bit more. From your perspective, what do most people not understand about, number one, the size and number two, the professionalism in the industry?

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Yeah, a lot of people say, people don't pay for porn. And I think that is a really big misconception because there is a lot of money in our industry. If you look at the numbers from OnlyFans, I mean, it's insane. They're making $8 billion/month now.

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It's so crazy. So people definitely pay for porn. Right. I mean, that's basically the revenue size of a small country in this wild world that we live in. Right. So it's critical, I think also to bring these conversations to the forefront.

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And be advocates to break the stigma, as we had talked about before. Why do you think that these alternate ad systems, which is not what I want to call them, but I think what, what we have to in conversation, the ones that no one or not many people talk about, how are they still so effective for the work that you do and the businesses that you, you've built?

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You can look at the numbers, for example from pornhub. They, once a year release, pornhub year in a review. Really interesting numbers in there. And if you see the amount of traffic they have, if you put advertisement on there, obviously it also works for you.

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You can also still try to be in the shade, of meta and try to complain with the rules and try to be on there, but vague advertisement never works.

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So we can hide the real purpose of ads and try to put them on Google and social media platforms, but it will never work out because we can't put like the real slogans on there and our real purpose. I have to imagine that it's actually kind of a fun challenge though, right?

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Because you can't, you don't, you don't go down those traditional avenues. You don't have those afforded to you. I think that that must be something that probably inspires you here as well to keep going and try to figure out the right way to do things. Can you talk a little bit more about how that journey has evolved over your time of running these various different operations in the space?

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Yeah, so we have like the paid ways, through our special networks as we already talked about, where you can also set geolocations You can set age range like we were used to But what makes it interesting and creative are the not paid ways to advertise for us.

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For example, community places: You can put ads in forums like Reddit or FetLife, which is a fetish website, or you can start private telegram channels to advertise your content or discord groups.

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But you still have to have in mind that you want to help users or give them real content on there and not just advertisements. So channels like this work because users are really sensitive to advertisement and if they see something in forums like that, they will report you and you get banned from platforms like that.

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So you have to do it in a creative and smart way to be on that platform and do it. What is also a channel for us is definitely search engine optimization. You can have a lot of good keywords when it comes to Adult or vice content, a lot of really good search keywords.

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If you do it smart, you can rank really high on Google. But also for that it needs a lot of work as we know, just buying backlinks. It's not working anymore. And Google is banning you also for buying backlinks.

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So you have to put like good content, informative content on there so that you rank higher on Google and also counts for our space. What you can also do is pay influencers, our influencers, I like to call them sometimes pornfluencers, because we for sure use different influencers, like vanilla influencers.

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They probably wouldn't advertise for our space. So you have to check who you want, which face you want for your brand. Brand ambassadors are a really common thing in our space and it gives the company a lot of trust. If you have a common porn star with the face on your brand, it creates a lot of trust for other creators but also users.

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It basically turns into almost a friend's recommendation then, basically. Right, so it works in that, that sort of lens. Yeah. What would you say that the I mean we talked a little bit about the scale of, of only fans before, but what would you say is the most misunderstood part of the business from both a metrics and a monetization lens?

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I think most misunderstood is for sure that people are not paying for porn, as I said, but I think what people are paying for today is not the porn itself because it's true. The porn you can see for free on pornhub.

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You watch some advertisement, that's how you pay for it. But people don't see it as paying for something. What people pay these days for is intimacy. They want content that only they have from their favorite creator. They want a personalized text message, an audio message, a phone call.

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That is where the money is at. I think intimacy is the biggest currency in our industry these days. that's a fantastic answer because it's that evolution even more broadly across the way they think the Internet is evolving for that 1:1 connection versus the one-to-many connection that we've gotten so used to through platforms like the Tiktoks, the Instagrams of the world where we're one to many, seeing many different things or sharing different things.

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But that 1:1 connection is what we all truly crave. I think we're in an interesting Evolution of the way that the market just broadly is moving. that's why OnlyFans became so big, because it was the first platform where you could really reach the people. on Instagram You can text your favorite creator but they would never reply because they cannot monetize the chatting.

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So why should they do it? And I'm also working with a company, I'm consulting them from Hamburg. They're giving creators, mainstream creators and spicy creators a fake phone number. And people can text the creators via WhatsApp and iMessage which is like the most intimate channels you have on your phone.

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You have like your mom's number and then your favorite creator or your favorite football star and you can text them. And for these kind of models with chatting and also AI chatbots, which is a really big thing, there are now new marketing channel advertisement channels where AI is putting ads inside the text messages which fit the topic at the moment.

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If you are saying "I have a headache today", it could be that the creator or the AI is texting back, "oh no, I'm so sorry. For me, Advil is helping sometimes. Maybe you should get it."

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That's a wild evolution, right? I mean talk about needing to, which nobody does this, go through the terms and conditions when you sign up for something. It's incredible the power that that could have over folks and what they see in front of them.

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I would love Pauline though, Could you share an example of a creative campaign or growth hack that worked despite the limits that you face? I have one porn star, she's called Kazumi. I'm a really big fan of her marketing activities.

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Do you know what a fleshlight is? A fleshlight is this Masterbator toy for men. And sometimes they do replicas of real creators intimate parts and sell it. And she really wanted a fleshlight with her name and her intimate parts for herself.

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She really wanted it. So she rented some billboards in LA, put posters on there. Flashlight, you want to date me? XOXO Kazumi. And it worked. She has her own fleshlight now and I love it. And one time she rented a plane with a banner behind the plane and the plane flew above Coachella and she had her onlyfans link on that banner.

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That's incredible. I love to think in that realm about how you can use things that grew like QR codes, right? with the impact of COVID and the things that came out of that. One of the things that you've mentioned to me before, is "I'm fully dressed at my laptop making business decisions like everyone else." Why is it so critical for you to normalize and humanize what you do?

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I think a lot of people, they don't know anything about my industry, but still they have a really strong opinion about my industry. And that is what is really annoying me because, because I'm here to answer questions for people and I know there are a lot of questions, but just ask me and don't judge me without having any knowledge about it.

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That's really annoying to me and I'm really happy and open for conversations about everything. I love it. that gets into that mission of not just in marketing, but in tech and more broadly about what you hope people understood about the reality of this industry in the space that, that you work in.

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And I also would would say, a lot of people, I'm sure, that you come across or that have experienced the work or others in the industry that you're in, you, know, have said that they label your work as a niche, but I have to say with over 3 million users a month within what you manage, is that really a niche even?

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in porn, nothing is a niche and everybody's consuming it. Nobody wants to talk about it, but everybody's consuming it. Get a lot of backlash on LinkedIn and social media. And I think the people who scream scream the loudest They're the biggest consumers and the biggest payer that I have.

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I love that theory. That's that digs into probably one of the biggest myths that people believe about this world. That really doesn't hold up under the numbers. That's incredible. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of big creators, they share their numbers really openly.

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For example, Amouranth, which is the biggest twitch streamer in the world. She's sharing her onlyfans earnings on Twitter all the time. And I think last year or the year before she was earning more than $90 million a year just on OnlyFans. And I say just on OnlyFans because they never just have one channel, they never put their eggs in just one basket.

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They have a lot. a couple more questions: What's one tool you rely upon that no one in mainstream marketing even knows exists? TrafficJunky, which is an ad network for especially adult.

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It's under the umbrella of the mother of pornhub. So it's the same company as pornhub. Pornhub, the mother company, has a lot of companies and they put traffic ads on their tube sites basically. Really easy concept.

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And I think most people don't know. Interesting. All right, Pauline, this was both bold and brilliant. Where can people follow your work or learn more about Kotti Konsulting if they're curious or need help growing in a restricted industry?

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I'm on LinkedIn and I love positive comments to shut the backlash down a little. And I'm running a newsletter for investors who are interested in investing in just adult and vice, startups.

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Twice a month I'm posting, interesting ideas I had on my desk during this month with investors. You can find the link also on LinkedIn. I love it. Awesome. And if someone listening is in a, quote and I'll put quotes around "vice" because it's not.

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I think that there should be a new term that we create for that In this world or even just feels like an outsider in marketing. What's your no BS advice for claiming your space and growing with confidence? Call me and talk to me about consulting.

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I think it's really hard to find your way around entering this space because it's so different. Even though it's so ubiquitous across all of the humans that are on this planet. That's incredible. Well, Pauline, thank you again for joining us on "Is anything Real in paid advertising?" where we separate what's real from what's just noise.

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I'm Adam W. Barney Subscribe, share and stay tuned for the next episode. Thank you for having me.