Sunny success

Sunny success: How adult websites make money

NDTV | Updated On: December 14, 2012 17:32 (IST)

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New Delhi: Adult film star Sunny Leone was the most searched personality in India this year, according to Google’s annual Zeitgeist list.

Leone rose to fame after appearing in the reality show Bigg Boss in 2011, and made her Bollywood debut with Jism 2, drawing a lot of attention because of the steamy stills released online.

Leone, who runs her own entertainment company and adult websites, had said earlier this year in an interview that 80 per cent of the traffic on her website and 60 per cent of her revenue came from India.

So how does a porn site, which offers tonnes of free content, make money?

While free pornography is widely available across the Web, it forms only a tiny part of the smut universe. Beyond free porn is “premium content”, which includes high-definition videos, full-length DVDs, the promise of no ads, no pop-ups, unlimited downloads, etc. A paid subscriber may even get porn delivered in his email every day.

Subscriptions also open up doors to other services the website’s parent company may be offering, such as brand new DVDs that won’t be available free for weeks to come, and maybe sex toys and dating services. All this comes at a cost.

Websites offer different “packages” that come with different payment options. The most common type of payment is a daily, weekly or monthly subscription, which could be anything between $1 to $15 a day, depending on the website, the type of content you are subscribing to and the number of hours you will be spending online.

While a popular website earns a significant amount of money from its subscribers, it also makes money from the other websites and services to which it redirects traffic. Websites of companies offering dating services, sex toys, leather or latex clothing, accessories, online adult stores, performance enhancement drugs, adult gaming websites, cartoon porn, etc, depend heavily on mainstream porn websites for traffic.