By Peter Berton
CANADA – JuicyJay, founder and Chief Executive Officer of adult advertising network JuicyAds, is a 15-year veteran of the adult online industry. He and his company have won many industry awards — including the 2013 YNOT Award for Businessman of the Year — which gives him a certain cachet when discussing how the industry works and where it might be headed.
YNOT.com tracked him down and insisted he share the wealth.
YNOT: What’s your overall take on the adult online industry?
Juicy Jay: I remember when I was first exposed to the people and the lifestyle of the industry. It was life-altering. I had already been in the industry several years, earning good money as an affiliate, before I met a single person.
The people are very open and, most times, honest. They’ll tell you exactly what they are thinking. Everyone’s filter is turned off, but that’s not always a good thing.
What’s the skinny on JuicyAds?
JuicyAds is “The Sexy Advertising Network.” We deliver billions of impressions per month through banner ads, mobile traffic and pops. I’m proud to say we are the most award-winning network in the industry, so it’s clear people like us because we do things a bit differently.
It’s hard to imagine working anywhere else when the conventions are so much fun and we get to do so many exciting things. It really feels more like getting together with old friends, and I felt it was really important to incorporate that into how we do business.
That’s one of the reasons we sponsor or host so many sexy, exciting, fun events. There’s a time to be serious and get things done, and there’s a time to be juicy. We are building a better ad network, not just a bigger one, but we are also building friendships and memories. What we do is well beyond just business.
How did you end up in adult advertising?
Like so much of the way my life has gone, I really don’t know why I ended up in advertising.
My reason for landing in adult at all was like most other people’s: I was just trying to make some money. I was young and my life was pretty simple and I thought if I could make $1,000 a month, that would be awesome. Well, the first year as an affiliate, I made $60,000.
I learned quickly that adult was where I wanted to be, and around 2002 I started subsidizing my affiliate revenues with paid ads, which I brokered myself. Over time I started to grow a network of websites and started to syndicate and sell ads across them.
When friends started to ask me for my services, that’s when JuicyAds was born. Now we broker for morethan 110,000 websites and 58,000 clients.
I wanted to do flat-rate ads only, but everything has changed since then. JuicyAds is nothing like it was when I started the company, but that’s a good thing. We are growing and making our publishers and advertisers a lot of money. For me, it’s not about the money. It’s about the innovation and making things better every day.
Besides the money, what else attracted you to brokering adult ad sales?
I was a publisher for a long time, and I miss working with the content and doing traffic trades and generating traffic and revenue. Statistics and numbers were my life. The biggest part of being a publisher is updating your website, getting the hottest content and being first to market; doing things differently, giving people something consistent to keep them coming back.
JuicyAds is there to take care of some of that money generation, so you can run your website and run it well. Yes, publishers can sell their own ads, but we have the highest paying advertisers for each type of traffic for each region, and you’re not going to be able to do that yourself while trying to run a successful website.
It took me years to learn, but it’s true: You just can’t do everything yourself. When you let people and businesses help you with what they do best, things get a lot better. Besides, what’s your time worth?
What does JuicyAds provide to advertisers?
Advertisers want to make money. Their job is to sell whatever it is they are selling. It’s about distribution.
We have billions of impressions all in one place; no clients must over-think anything. Instead, they are free to work on improving their membership sales through innovation and posting great offers and content. They can work on product development and make what they sell better, meanwhile reducing the time spent promoting and generating sales.
We have dedicated account managers to help, advise and take action on their behalf and to maximize returns. It’s about letting experts do what experts are good at, and we are traffic and promotional experts.
How has the adult market changed since you started JuicyAds, and where do you see it going?
The adult market is becoming so specialized and micro-targeted these days. This is mostly driven by the mobile market.
I have to be honest: I never thought people would actually get off on using their tiny mobile devices for porn. What the industry may not have realized at the time was that it was not so much about the small screen size as it was about accessibility and the plain fact that desktop computers are good for certain things, but we have our phones with us all the time. They are our lives; they are how we connect to each other.
To me, the biggest innovation for adult has to be how it relates to dating, sex and mobile devices. Who hasn’t wanted to be able to message that girl from across the bar without having to sign up for a website or download a specific app? Why hasn’t it been “always on” or simpler?
This is where technology is going. This is where adult is going. Adult is about sex, both visually and physically for our own joy.
The popularity of webcams shows that people have an interest in talking, communicating and possibly hooking up with or falling in love with someone over the internet. The connectivity is what people want. Our job as an advertising network is to make sure the public knows all the awesome stuff they can do on the internet by showing them ads for things they might enjoy.
What about people who complain that this kind of advertising is intrusive?
People scream for privacy, but we are in an ever-less-private world. The internet is the opposite of privacy. It is everything privacy is not.
We will see the micro-targeting of advertising to people more than we already are. This isn’t a bad thing, and while some people may find it creepy, isn’t it nice seeing things in ads you might actually be interested in looking at or buying? Isn’t that the entire point?
At the end of the day, nobody behind a desk at JuicyAds or Google or Facebook is looking at what you are clicking on. They don’t know you’re interested in skinny redheads who like to have sex with black men with small penises, or maybe blondes who like to smile while they give blowjobs. It’s just irrelevant.
Banner ads and pop-unders and all the other annoying forms of advertising are going to pale in comparison with the intrusive nature of the future of promotion and marketing. Augmented reality is the next big thing in advertising. We are intertwining our lives so much with technology it simply is inevitable.
Adult will be part of the evolution, because porn and sex have become mainstream and accepted. In a few years, it won’t even bother people to receive promotions for penis pills and porn pay-per-view, right into their car navigation systems, sunglasses and countless other previously uninterrupted parts of our lives.
