BOSTON — Adult search engine BoodiGo.com is reporting rapid success, as a fast-growing number of consumers adopt the platform, in part because of privacy concerns.
According to the company, when BoodiGo co-founder Colin Rowntree first conceived of launching an adult entertainment-specific search engine that emphasizes user privacy, he certainly expected it to find an audience — just not quite such an enormous audience, perhaps.
“Within hours of making our first announcement, we realized we were going to have to devote additional servers to BoodiGo in order to support the amount of traffic and searches we were seeing,” Rowntree said. “The consumer response was just amazing and outpaced even our most enthusiastic projections.”
Rowntree reveals that the new search engine took off quickly, spurred on by positive media coverage, which allowed BoodiGo to grow without having to spend a dime on traffic or advertising to date.
Examples of this positive media coverage include BetaBeat.com calling it “a new search engine just for porn, for when Google just isn’t sexy enough.” BoodiGo’s proactive offering of surf-safe and legitimate search results led Cosmo.com to note that it “let’s you find porn without giving you a computer virus.”
These points resonate with today’s porn consumers, who are savvy enough to be wary of their privacy.
“While it’s no secret that porn has long been a consistent draw for web users,” Rowntree explains, “the primary driving force behind consumer interest in BoodiGo is the privacy factor, with surfers in droves jumping on the opportunity to use a search engine that doesn’t track their every move in furtherance of profile-building and ad-targeting.”
As Salon.com put it, BoodiGo “might be the best new way to find porn without selling users’ fantasies to advertisers.”
In the days immediately following its launch, BoodiGo reportedly received more than 2.5 million unique visitors, a surprising percentage of which accessed and read the site’s privacy policy, in addition to trying out its search function.
“I’ve been running adult websites since 1994, and I’ve never seen anything like this sort of interest in a privacy policy,” Rowntree said. “I think it says a lot about what really appeals to people about BoodiGo; it’s not just a good way to find online porn, it’s a good way to find online porn without having to look over your digital shoulder, so to speak.”
Rowntree says that this appeal comes as no surprise to him, as it fits into a larger cultural concern about privacy, both on- and offline.
“One of the things that inspired the creation of BoodiGo was an explosion of news stories that revealed just how frequently and intensely we are monitored as Internet users,” Rowntree explains. “The NSA and other federal government surveillance gets the headlines, but if you think about it, private sector tracking of users is the thing that’s truly ubiquitous.”
“There’s a new level of awareness among the public that ‘Big Brother’ might not be the government,” Rowntree concludes. “‘Big Brother’ just might be a bunch of suit-wearing VPs sitting in a boardroom.”
With that type of sentiment becoming more common, BoodiGo’s warm welcome from consumers may be long-lived.