Zomato Advertises on Porn Sites, Achieves 10X-20X Returns Compared to Traditional Advertising

Now this is something you would not expect from a leading Tech startup. But they did it – they took a little detour from traditional ways, and reaped rich dividends!

Zomato, India’s popular restaurant discovery, review and food ordering platform advertised their food delivery service on porn sites and the results were stunning. The justification is as simple as it can get. People who watch porn obviously get hungry too…

And porn websites are some of the most visited websites by Indians. Pramod Rao of Zomato, in an official blog gave insights into how their advertising campaign ran. The 2 3 main reasons why Zomato went ahead with advertising on porn sites.

1. India ranks #5 in terms of most daily visitors to Pornhub (the world’s biggest porn site network)
2. Outside of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and e-commerce sites, Xvideos is one of India’s top visited sites
3. The average time spent on the site by Indians is ~8 minutes (yes, really, just 8 minutes #quickgunmurugan)

Zomato creative team, specifically created display ads for these porn sites – here are some of those!

The ads were quite creative – all of them with message that probably every porn watcher will understand. And a simple line stating “late night food delivery”

Zomato said about their strategy, “The goal was clear – get people to click. Our strategy for this was fairly straightforward, too – create something that’ll take people’s eyes off the video, they’ll click the banner because they’re (obviously) getting hungry now, and then they’ll order online on Zomato. The easiest part was creating ads that didn’t look like all other ads on porn sites, because most ads on porn sites are for…wait for it…more porn!”

Zomato ran these ads between 11 pm and 4 am and if some of the stats are to be believed, advertising on these sites gave them probably 10X to 20X bang for the buck compared to traditional Ad platforms like Adwords and Facebook.

Here are the statistic and insights from this experiment from Zomato.

• Advertising on porn sites costs very little money, and is significantly cheaper than other platforms. Like, significantly cheaper. Just look at these numbers:

• People in Delhi NCR clicked on these banners the most on desktops, at an average click-through rate (CTR) of 0.12% while Bangalore came (*teehee*) a close second with an average CTR of 0.11%. The campaign average CTR so far is at 0.22%.
• At a more granular level, the highest number of clicks in Delhi came from around the Hauz Khas area. We can’t say for sure why that happened, but IIT-Delhi is in the area, so… ¯\_(?)_/¯
  In Bangalore, Koramangala was hands down the naughtiest part of town, while in Mumbai, Powai gets down and dirty the most.
• The BBW/Big Beautiful Wraps ad was our best performing desktop ad (no surprises there); the “Hot Sticky Mess” and “Hot Singles” ads also did really well.

Zomato, thanks for bringing these insights and I am sure we will now see quite a few startups take this route to advertising!

[Source]