PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – The data behind a recent investment of more than $600,000 in .xxx domains proves sites in the adults-only namespace outperform those in .com, ICM Registry founder Stuart Lawley said Tuesday.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, as they say, but we seem well on our way,” Lawley said. “JT and Really Useful [Limited] are a shining example of what can be done.”
JT, one of the founders of YouPorn, left the company to start Really Useful in 2011. During the same year, he acquired Casting.xxx and Orgasms.xxx to protect Really Useful’s investment in the .com analogues. Since then, Really Useful has added to its .xxx portfolio several times. The company’s recent acquisition of Teen.xxx, Mature.xxx, BDSM.xxx and PublicSex.xxx for a total of more than $600,000 brought the company’s expenditure to date to a total of more than $800,000.
Teens.xxx alone went for $400,000, ICM noted in an announcement.
JT said his company’s investment has not been haphazard. Operating identical websites in multiple spaces allows him to make direct performance comparisons.
“Really Useful has operated both a .com and .xxx version of what is, in effect, the same website for the past two years: FakeAgent.com and Casting.xxx,” JT said. “This gives me a direct comparison of the performance of a .xxx domain over a .com. It was because of this data that I have made a considerable investment in additional .xxx domains.
“Specifically, FakeAgent.com has a bounce rate — where the user exits my site at the first page once they realize it is an adult website — of 34 percent compared to Casting.xxx that has a bounce rate of only 16 percent,” he continued. “This means the users visiting Casting.xxx already know it is an adult website because of the .xxx domain extension.”
Bounce rates aren’t the only figures exhibiting significant differences, JT added.
“The ratio from visitor to member conversion on Casting.xxx is around 1:320, whereas the ratio on FakeAgent.com is 1:523,” he said. “Casting.xxx is significantly outperforming FakeAgent.com, and the only difference between them is the domain name.”
Within the past two years, Really Useful has grown from a team of four people in to more than 80 who produce in excess of 150 scenes per month. The company buys no advertising or traffic from third parties, yet Really Useful claims between 8 million and 10 million views daily on videos it posts on free tube sites. The views translate to about 400,000 unique daily visitors to the underlying pay sites, JT said.
“We get considerable traffic from this free exposure, and we are selling many hundreds of new memberships every day to free tube users — a fact that most of the adult industry will tell you is impossible,” he said.
He attributes a significant portion of the success of his company to his .xxx websites, and will continue to invest in the space, he averred.
“I didn’t hesitate in buying more premium [.xxx] domains,” JT said. “The existing .xxx sites I have are performing much better on a like-for-like basis than my .com sites. Google ranks them higher because they clearly identify the content as adult. This means traffic to my .xxx sites has been pre-qualified by search engines, and conversions from visitor to member are considerably higher.
“The fact that each domain will qualify for ICM’s Grandfathering rights is also important to me,” he added. “I think .porn, in particular, will be an enormous bonus to search results. Based on my experience and logic, surfers will search for ‘mature porn’ or ‘teen porn,’ for example, and my sites will rank high in those results.”
Dot-porn is one of several proposed new domain extensions for which ICM awaits launch approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
“Once I knew ICM had qualified to run .porn, I was straight on the phone with my wish list of domains,” JT said. “It is very important to me to own as many of the top 20 adult search term keywords [as I can]. In my opinion, .xxx has proven that it is the future destination for adult content on the internet, and I will continue investing in more .xxx domains for my new projects.”
Understandably, ICM was elated to receive JT’s statistical data and even more elated that JT was willing to go public with his results. Adult business owners are notoriously cagey in that regard.
“We are delighted that JT has hard data and evidence that .xxx, as a TLD, has proven its worth and continues to allow strong brands and world-leading sites to be developed,” ICM Vice President Steve Winyard said. “Approaching the second anniversary of our launch, we have had great success at the latest round of B2B adult trade shows in Europe, pulling in just under $1 million of new business on premium names from existing and many new customers.
“The results are in, so to speak, and the industry now has full data sets to compare and evaluate the real-world performance of .xxx names,” Winyard continued. “We are seeing that translated into more sales of premium names.”
According to Lawley, ICM and .xxx have reached a major turning point that vindicates his faith and multimillion-dollar personal investment in a domain space most of the adult entertainment industry fought for 10 years.
“A growing number of .xxx sites are appearing in the Alexa top 1 million, and perhaps half of the premium names we are now selling are to previous .xxx purchasers who have been delighted with the performance of their earlier names,” Lawley told YNOT. “We are looking forward to a few other major providers going on record about the successful performance of .xxx names compared to other TLDs, .com included, and will [release] those as we get them.
“What is most gratifying for us is that, two years after launch, the sites are truly being acknowledged to perform better,” he added. “And it is not only JT who is reporting this back to us.”
