Pornography-hosting website PornHub is giving away $300,000 worth of free advertising space among small businesses, the New York Post reported, amid the adult entertainer’s efforts to help out ailing companies battling the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.
PornHub has now launched a “Big Package” competition, which will help to select 100 firms that will feature on the platform among its pornographic clips. The website is believed to be the biggest and the most popular in the world, hosting around 130 million visitors per day.
“No matter where you are, if yours is small and it needs a little stimulation, we’re the experts. That's why we’re giving away free ads on pornhub.com to the tune of 1 billion impressions, exclusively to small businesses everywhere,” PornHub’s website reads.
However, entrepreneurs that could now get a chance to leave their trace on the platform do not necessarily want to be connected with the adult entertainment industry. According to the competition’s advert, the 10 businesses that have been already picked up for the deal include the flower shop El Florista and the tea shop Brooklyn Tea.
“Many of the businesses this contest will appeal to have never considered marketing themselves with Pornhub before, and we are hoping that this campaign will help them consider us in a new light, given our reach and appeal to mass audiences,” Corey Price, Pornhub Vice President, told The New York Post.
According to Price, companies in the sex industry are also able to apply for the contest, but PornHub is still set to choose only those entrepreneurs that strive towards “originality and diversity of business and location”.
The company’s vice president believes that PornHub sometimes may be even more useful to small enterprises than such tech giants as Facebook.
“They [customers] might not remember seeing your business on Facebook, but they’ll definitely remember seeing you on Pornhub,” he argued.
According to “Big Package” rules, the company will create “customised ads” for its winners, “inspired” by their own (whatever it means), that then will be placed through the advertising platform TrafficJunky, which currently helps such adult-targeting websites as PornHub. It is still open for entries until 14 August.
PornHub has been facing a wave of criticism in the past several months after a #Traffickinghub campaign was launched and a related video went viral calling for the website to be shut down. The campaign accuses the adult entertainer, which is owned by MindGeek, of failing to “reliably” verify the age and consent of people featured in the videos uploaded to the website, and thus being “complicit” with instances of child rape and sex trafficking. PornHub defended itself by insisting that it is trying to do its best to review all the uploaded videos through the moderation process.
