Penthouse, Playboy, Persian Kitty? In a deal announced Wednesday with Princeton Media Group, Persian Kitty will build Web sites and direct traffic for the company's 19 "adult sophisticate" titles. In exchange, the publisher will port Persian Kitty into print.
"We have the content, and they have the traffic," says Princeton Media publisher Wendy Shrug. "Fortunately, or unfortunately, there's a lot of need for sex online."
Persian Kitty, launched in October 1995 by Beth Mansfield, now categorizes more than 1,500 adult sites on the Web. With more than 550,000 visitors a day and as the starting point for many sex-surfers, Persian Kitty is able to direct a lot of traffic. Sites listed in Mansfield's directory can expect between 4,000 and 7,000 visitors a day. If Mansfield labels sites with a special "new" tag, they'll receive 1,000 visitors an hour.
Mansfield is so aware of the visitors Persian Kitty drives because it is those kind of numbers that make an operation like hers lucrative. Persian Kitty takes in a reported US$80,000 a month from advertising.
"The whole intent for free sites is to drive traffic off your site, not to get them to stay," Mansfield explains.
Sites with free porn make money by selling banner ads for pay-per-view porn sites. With the number of free sites now hitting the Web, competitiveness has increased, clickthrough banner prices have dramatically increased (from 2.5 cents per clickthrough a year ago to 17 cents today), and quality has dropped. With the Net's glut of porn pix, getting a place on Persian Kitty has become key.
Princeton Media, whose titles include Oui and the gay-focused Blue Boy, sells more than 1 million magazines a month. The company hopes to turn that readership into traffic, and part of Persian Kitty's job will be to push traffic to the Princeton Media sites via text links, icons, banners, and a special newsstand area.
Princeton is fashioning the new Persian Kitty book as a sort of Yahoo Internet Life for sex sites, showing sample pictures from choice pages and URLs for readers who want to check out the rest. Shrug said sex-site webmasters have been happy to oblige supply images for what amounts to a free ad for a new audience. The anticipated readership is non-webbies who want to begin exploring the Net's Great Smut Kingdom.
Princeton Media will also gain access to Persian Kitty's database of user patterns, data the company can use to follow and respond to porn trends.
"What's cool about Persian Kitty is that the world's fetishes are easily accessible, and whatever it is that they're interested in, we will provide," Shrug says. "In all media, sex has led the revenue streams - video, cable, and on the Net. Five years from now, everyone is going to be online, and sex won't be so interesting anymore. But right now there's revenue out there to be had."
