BLT with your BDSM? Eat24 says ads on porn sites is good for business

Does porn make you hungry? Have you ever wanted a BLT with your BDSM?

Food delivery startup Eat24 is betting that you do. The company has decided to advertise on porn websites.

Eat24 powers online ordering and food delivery for over 25,000 restaurants in 1,000 cities. It generates a hefty amount in sales and has proudly taken no venture capital funding, getting to this point with a combination of “hard work, smart marketing techniques, and giant balls.”

And “giant balls” is just what this latest marketing tactic requires.

“When we start a new marketing campaign, one of our main goals is to maximize ROI without dipping into our hair gel fund, because, priorities,” the company said in a blog post. “It’s an eternal quest to find the perfect ad platform with really high traffic and dirt cheap inventory. PORN. Porn is the answer!”

Thus far, advertising on porn site has given Eat24 three times the impressions of than Google, Twitter, or Facebook. The company said that some of its heaviest users and biggest fans on social media are porn stars, and it has a series of tweets to back this claim up.

“So this got us thinking about porn websites,” the blog post said. “Are they a good place for us to advertise? Will we hit our target audience? Can we afford it? And why is everyone always shaking their head at us when we bring it up? We decided to seriously look into it and what we found was boobs. A lot of them. But, we also found an advertising gold mine.”

People watch a lot of porn online. Eat24 found that if it compared its average CPM across major ad publishers, it would get more impressions via porn sites than the Google, Twitter, and Facebook combined — at 10 percent of the cost.

Despite the “gold mine” of opportunity, mainstream brands don’t advertise on porn sites. Adult brands do. Mainstream brands don’t want to be associated with adult entertainment and would be wary of what advertising on porn sites would do for their products. It makes logical good sense for male enhancement pills and adult friend finders to target porn-viewers, but everyone, regardless of their sexual proclivities, has to eat.

Which is where Eat24 came in to “Tap. Dat. Ass.”

“Our challenge with designing banner ads for porn sites was our competition, porn itself,” the post said. “We needed to create something eye catching enough to make someone stop what they’re doing — watching porn — and say, ‘You know what? Yes. I AM going to be hungry in 3-5 minutes. I better order delivery.’ Not an easy task.”

The team then set down to the arduous task of watching porn, and brainstorming ways to connect the pleasure of food with the pleasure of sex.

This technique worked. Tens of thousands of “hongry” people clicked on the ads, and Eat24 saw a huge spike in ordering, “especially late at night when that insatiable desire for DP — double pepperoni — is at its most intense.” Ninety percent of the traffic came from first-time visitors.

These are metrics entrepreneurs yearn for harder than, well, use your imagination.

The campaign yielded a few other interesting insights. Chicago is the “hongriest” city in the U.S., New Yorkers like to get naughty at noon, and the most ordered item in San Francisco (after watching porn)? Hot wings. Just make sure to wash your hands before putting them back down…you know.