As adult traffic faces more and more restrictions via the big players like Google and Apple, services providers are required to become increasingly flexible and innovative in how they attract and obtain new customers. Cherry Media has grown up in the mobile world of super-strict content regulations and market barriers regarding any form of adult entertainment. Accordingly, very early on we realized that our content portfolio and associated business model would need to fit this new stringent environment if we were going to be successful.
In response, we developed a specialized portfolio that focused on strictly graded and specially edited content to match more than 32 different grading levels required by the various global mobile operators and local regulations.
As the mobile ecosystem becomes increasingly complex and the need for a strong mobile strategy ever more important, mobile can no longer hide under the radar and we will continue to see new barriers, restrictions and regulations in order to obtain customers.
The interesting result was that if a territory (or operator) did not allow adult content, customers were more than happy to pay a premium price for softer content (whatever was allowed) — due to the convenience and impulse factor that a mobile device offers.
This in turn created new marketing and business approaches, so that our clients could remain within the regulations, capture valuable data from visiting customers, make money from the softer content, but also effectively filter those who were looking for something naughtier to more relevant services.
As the mobile ecosystem becomes increasingly complex and the need for a strong mobile strategy ever more important, mobile can no longer hide under the radar and we will continue to see new barriers, restrictions and regulations in order to obtain customers. This of course is tenfold when it comes to adult.
The approach then becomes about casting the widest net possible within the restrictions and then filtering and targeting the traffic effectively to monetize them in the best way.
Evolving from offering bikini and glamour content, we are now seeing highly regulated territories such as Turkey and India actually utilize our “suggestive” mainstream content to capture customers and data — genres such as exercise classes, fashion shows, celebrity content — content that still basically focuses on desirable women, but that removes any form of restriction in capturing and monetizing new customers.
Through good CRM and analytics, customers can then be sent targeted marketing to upsell to things they might be more interested in, or were really looking for! We have clients running services in countries outside of their own to allow them to offer nudity or hardcore content, but they are re-monetizing existing traffic that they have already turned into customers. It’s a win-win situation if you play your cards right in the new mobile ecosystem.
We see so many service providers focus constantly on buying new traffic all the time and just churning through it, but I believe that the real profit margin lies in what you do with that traffic once they have shown interest or bought something from you.
Julia Dimambro, founder and managing director of Cherry Media, has spent the last 19 years in new media and digital communications and 13 years specifically in mobile entertainment. After launching new digital strategies and business divisions for companies such as J. Walter Thompson, Deepend and Private Media Group, Dimambro set up Cherry Media in 2003 to enable brands and consumer-orientated aggregators to reach, acquire, engage and retain a receptive, high-spending and loyal client base.
