Hi, I'm the author of the article. The podcast in question is The Program audio series, which had its premiere on HN three years ago [1]. Think of it as a historical podcast, but one that's set in the future and examines the present day. It's become a bit of a sleeper hit, so I'm now experimenting with different ways to grow my audiences. I haven't been able to find a lot of examples of advertising on porn sites, but that might be because people are loath to talk about it. If anyone has experiences to share, I'd be curious to hear them (and of course, feel free to ask any questions!)
Awesome write up! That was a very fun and educating read. Never thought about running ads on a porn site before.
You said you can't be sure if your download numbers were correlated to the ads, but did you notice a drop off in new downloads after you finished the campaigns (or too early to tell)?
And does your ad run on all mindgeek websites or do you pick which ones/categories they appear on? Perhaps if they give more granular tools and you know your audience you can target towards your demo a little better idk?
The thing with download numbers is there's a lag - unless people binge the show in two days (it happened before), they are probably going to listen to it episode by episode over a longer period, which makes downloads tricky to attribute to source.
You get the option to choose which sites you want the ads to appear on. I picked all that supported my preferred format (as mentioned in the article).
You can definitely target according to gender and sexual orientation, so you can play with the copy that way!
I love the ad images. This is a great example on how to run traffic to new sources. Good to keep track of experiments and make a monthly running log, I would subscribe to that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17425278