Sex(haustion) sells: Marketing in a saturated mediascape

This chapter explains about the ‘sex sells’ advertising mantra has migrated from other media forms. Its sexual content often drives people’s desires to obtain access to new media technologies, even at initially high costs. SexTracker ranks only soft and hard pornography sites that subscribe to the service and allow public distribution of their ratings, using real-time data gathered from traffic patterns at the sites themselves. Sex-related sites that charge most successfully for content are soft-core, ‘arty’ pornography sites, according to one e-commerce analyst, this content is most similar to photo gallery content offered for free by mainstream Web sites such as Esquire.com, NFL.com, and IGN.com. All of the top 25 Web sites may be classified as providing mainstream content for a general audience, and the top 25 Web advertisers reflect these broad interests. The success of X10.com’s Web campaign for miniature video cameras suggests that sexually oriented ads helped its Web site reach a top-10 ranking, according to Media Metrix.