Yesterday, Pornhub's Natalia Hampton gave a great presentation on how best to use your metadata to optimize for more views. Thank you Ms. Hampton for taking the time to compile that.
The focus was mainly on models uploading content, but most of the points apply to Content Partners. As a paysite owner, I wanted to make a few comments and observations.
Localization and Translation
Pornhub added an option for you to add translated titles to your videos and they encourage it. Xvideos has had this option as well, for quite some time. I've used it extensively, and while there is some uptick in views, the clickthrough sales were no better than not translating at all. I believe this is because my landing page and site overall, is entirely in English. So a non-english viewer, coming from a translated video, would be confronted with - to him/her - unintelligible text. Therefore, I believe having your site translated, should be a priority, before sending foreign traffic to it. A little bit of "captain obvious".
It's well known that users search for things similar to themselves. So a user from Spain would search for "espanol" or "spanish". Natalia makes it a point to geo identify your content in this manner so you have a greater chance of appearing in search results for the users of that geo. But I'm fairly certain it also applies to what is displayed to the user on the homepage's geo targetting:
It does, however, appear to be checked by the compliance team. For example, you can't randomly label something as "Canada", if it's an adultlab clip with Russian girls. I've been recommending to paysite owners to title and tag where the actresses, featured in the videos, are from.
Votes Don't Really Matter
Natalia recommends not being deceptive in titles and tags, so you will get a better rating and views, but it's not the main driver. You want your clip to be favourited, and to a lesser extent, playlisted.
I aggregated data when I was working at BLACKED, and aggregated my own data, and found these two metrics were the strongest indicators for view performance. That's not to say votes/rating are completely useless. As Natalia says, if your video is not accurate to it's title and is just bad, your video will get a low rating, and that hurts its performance. But there appears to be a threshold. A video that is 90%, does not perform signficantly better than 70%. Their algo seems to take into account a portion of users who just downvote and are jerks.
Every CPP video gets an equal shot of success when it is featured and posted on the homepage. The more favourites it gets within the first few hours of featuring, the longer it will stay on the homepage and get more views. It also greatly increases the chance of being refeatured.
Video length (aside from the standard minimum) and comments, do not seem to matter.
My suggestion: long cuts of prime action that users can jerk off to, instead of quick, snippet-style editing. If a user can jerk off to the clip, he is more likely to favourite it and want to rewatch it. This is not counter intuitive thinking. A user who is satisfied, is more likely to buy - maybe not in the moment, but later (buying habits do appear to concentrate on weekends, suggesting less impulsive buy behavior). Most importantly, more favourites mean more views, and more refeatures, and your content gets exposed to more potential customers.
Focus On Trending
Natalia makes a great suggestion that certain trends can be predicted, such as movie releases and holidays. But I think she downplays how important trending terms are. I think the algo gives it considerable weight.
I notice when I upload a video that features a trending model or subject, it gets featured much faster, often bypassing the 1 week queue.
BUT - HUGE BUT - don't rely on what you see listed on the site. That data is not current. For example, the top trending models listed, are probably a few days or weeks old. If you try to produce content around that list, you would be screwed. Just ask your rep what is trending, and they will tell you.
Don't Make Content Outside Your Norm. Stay Consistent
Natalia brings up this point and I wanted to emphasize it even further.
This is another huge "BUT" for chasing trends - don't do something outside your norm, for the sake of catching a trend. Your users will not like it. For example, if anal is trending, don't make a bunch of anal videos if you are a foot fetish site.
Example from personal experience: When I worked at BLACKED, I watched other paysites start shooting interracial content or shoe-horning interracial themes, into their paysites, during the time BLACKED was blowing up in popularity. This didn't help their sales at all and likely alienated some of their existing customers. Unless they could deliver a product consistently as good as BLACKED, they would always look inferior by comparison. It's no wonder so many interracial starter sites have disappeared, and those left, are imprints of networks.
Keep doing what you do best and be the best at it. Look at X-art. They had 50k members at one time, but stopped making good content, even so much as buying content from adultlabs. It made it much easier for VIXEN to completely take away its market share.
The Rise In Kink Interest
I forgot her exact words, but I disagree with Natalia's reasoning for the rise in kink and BDSM interest on pornhub.
I believe it's more to do with the implosion of kink.com, and to some extent FOSTA/SESTA, which have drove fans of the content to look for new sources to satisfy their preference. Pornhub essentially being the porn search engine of the world, these users have gone there to discover new content. It just makes more sense to me.
Some Other Things I Wanted To Add
- the CPP featuring system only features one video per week and I believe, it still only takes the longest video in your queue, not by upload date. So watch out.
- Show your best content. I keep seeing paysite owners posting only their old or crappy videos. The logic is that keeping the best stuff in the members area, gives the users reason to join. But think of it like a movie trailer: if you saw a trailer full of horrible, boring parts, does that give you the impression the full movie will be good? Of course not. Post the good stuff, and your potential customers will think you have even better stuff in your members area.
- Don't wait to post a video of a hot model. Same reason as above and if you wait months later and the girl is no longer trending, you lose all the potential traffic from riding that trend.
- 10 years ago, Michael Pahl told me SEO for paysites, doesn't really matter, and he's mostly right. Big tubes like xvideos and pornhub, spend millions per year to get all the juice for short and longtail google search terms. You can't compete with that. Instead, treat them as search engines of porn and optimize there. That's the gist of Natalia's presentation. SEO nowadays is really about compliance and user experience. Google will reward you by making sure your brand/domain appears at the top of searches for your brand/domain.