“We wanted to make our mobile sites easy to navigate,” says PIMPROLL CEO David K. “It’s easy to find stuff on our system. If you go to one of our competitors’ websites, you’ll see that they have a search feature, but it doesn’t really work. With those sites, if you’re looking for ‘Big-Titted Asian MILF,’ you’re not going to find it in two seconds. On the PIMPROLL mobile sites, you’ll find it right away.
“We have our own proprietary search technology. It’s on porn.com, and we brought it to mobile. We did it because we understand that mobile customers are using a tiny hand-held device, and to make them scroll endlessly from page to page will take forever. So we brought in the search and tuned it up, and it’s really working well. In fact, we now have a higher retention on mobile than on web, so we know we’re doing something right.”
Realizing that a large number of customers now are using mobile devices for all of their adult surfing, David installed a new system that only requires them to access porn.com and they automatically are redirected to the mobile platform, bypassing the desktop version on the phone. This move away from desktop is an important ingredient in the new PIMPROLL system.
“We used to release only desktop versions of our sites,” David says, “but now every desktop site that we release is also released on mobile. Customers can join porn.com and they’ll get the mobile version for free. At this point, we have more than 100 desktop sites with mobile versions and that will keep growing. On top of that, we’re also releasing mobile-only sites.”
The new mobile-friendly setup has enormous advantages for webmasters, as well. For the client who has a free site and wants to create a mobile site with it, PIMPROLL offers a white label system that allows webmasters to use their own domains, or their sub-domains, and even take advantage of a PIMPROLL domain.
“For example,” David explains, “PersianKitty redirects all of her mobile traffic to our white label system, which is custom branded to her site. This means she doesn’t need to do any work. We build the mobile site instantaneously when webmasters use our system. Also, if you’re on a legal tube site and you’re not monetizing your mobile traffic, you can hook up with a white label, put a little bit of code on your site and your mobile traffic is monetized right away.”
The new mobile system that PIMPROLL has installed may scare off other companies, because it sounds like a costly investment. It isn’t. Designing a mobile site is much cheaper than designing a desktop site, according to David.
“It’s a very simple template and we just plug in the content,” he adds. “We’ve always encoded our video to iPod format. A lot of our competition just focuses on iPhone, whereas we encode our video for iPhone as well as for the older phones in 3GP format. We also have a special new proprietary delivery system to phones now, and have a patent pending on it.”
With the new delivery system in place, video quality becomes the next key in successfully marketing the PIMPROLL system. David believes he’s solved the ban of Flash players on mobile carriers like Apple — Flash will not play on iPhone and iPad — by installing the HTML5 player.
The firm is slightly ahead of the pack in this area, as the new player is already up and running. In addition, PIMPROLL has just acquired a legal mobile tube called Mporn.com to add to its broadening list of offerings, and according to David, the firm will launch a mobile dating site later this year.
The major shift into mobile may have boosted revenues, but it also forced David to rethink marketing strategies. PIMPROLL in the past was famous for its creative and expensive campaigns, like the “Porn Bailout” that took place during the major bank bailouts, and the “Win a Threesome” contest held on the Howard Stern show. All of that has changed.
“We do a lot of our own traffic generation now,” David says. “Instead of doing those broad marketing campaigns, we’re basically creating our own list now of people that we want to do business with, and going one-on-one with them. The big marketing campaigns used to work because there were a lot of affiliates, but now there are fewer and we know who the good ones are, so we just go directly to them. It works much better for us. We save a lot of money and we can put that money toward better payouts. Instead of blowing $40,000 on a campaign, we can put that money into better product and into the webmasters’ hands.”
The webmasters’ hands do indeed get the benefit of PIMPROLL payouts. Long regarded as one of the most dependable companies in this regard, PIMPROLL has actually improved their payout system in the last year.
“We still pay weekly,” David says. “We’re like a bank. Webmasters trust us because we do a lot of things to make sure their recurring databases are protected. We handle a lot of things internally, which allows us to get around the webmaster checks issue in processing affiliate payouts. When webmaster checks was shut down by the Department of Justice, it didn’t affect us because we don’t rely on third parties to take care of our affiliate payouts. Other companies haven’t been able to pay for the last four months while our affiliates have been getting paid like clockwork.”
Customers, too, are pleased with PIMPROLL because the company does not do crosssells. Instead, the firm relies on up-sells and according to David, as long as the up-sell is a complimentary product to the main sale, surfers are content. In this way, PIMPROLL has thrived while many large programs have had to shut down due to last year’s decision by MasterCard to stop accepting cross-sells.
As to its content, PIMPROLL is still on a roll.
“We’ve been adding sites like crazy, and we plan to keep doing it,” David says. “We can do this because of our great partnerships with studios, which have been knocking on our door to give us all their content in exchange for us making websites. We also have our own studios and shoot a lot of exclusive content. In fact, we’re buying a brand new facility for shooting. A lot of competitors have stopped this, but we continue because they’re going to run out of fresh content while we’ll still have it. I’ve always believed that the more updates you have, the better your sales are. That’s not going away any time soon.”
And neither is PIMPROLL.