What do women want?
The ages old question. The answer being as much a mystery to women as it is to men, especially in the Adult Internet business.
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"When it comes to sex, the places in cyberspace that have a large, female attendance tend to look more like magazines than the standard, male-oriented porn site." |
We've all read the studies and the headlines. Women now comprise more than half of the world's Internet surfers. In the United States, women make almost 80% of the purchasing decisions in a household. Some studies even suggest that although women do not yet exceed men in online sales, they eventually will. Women basically, dictate consumer-spending trends in every market except the Internet's most profitable: The Adult Market.
Stating that females buy less online porn is more of an understood agreement among adult site owners. A recent search into the subject returned very few results. The Internet itself is still in an elementary stage of development. Only in the last two or three years have researchers studied women as an online force. They usually blame the delay on women and their hesitancy to cruise the information highway the moment the ribbon was cut. When it came to the more finite research into what sex sites women actually patronized, the resources were practically nonexistent.
One of the oldest, Adult webmaster information pages on the net listed only 8 sites that were expressly, for women. This lack of information speaks volumes to that understood agreement between Adult site owners.
A look at a few of the few studies on women, the Internet, sex and behavior might give a perspective on why the single, most powerful buying force in the world still eludes the single, most profitable Internet product.
The "allabouteve" Survey
This British women's portal site surveyed over 1000 people to get their view of sex on the Internet. The responses indicated that women use the Internet as a sex aid more than a source of instant gratification. The females (of which 65% were married) searched the net for tips and advice about sex. They showed that almost half would definitely use shopping carts to purchase erotic toys, books and videos. A majority of the ladies found no interest in chats or cybersex with new partners.
The "MSNBC" Poll
Dr. Al Cooper of the San Jose, California, Marital and Sexuality Centre in conjunction with MSNBC polled 38,000 cyber citizens about online sexuality. Cooper said: ``While men might be looking for stimulation, women often seem to be looking for education’~. The survey also somewhat, established an average "time spent" with online sex. Men spent 3.2 hours per week on Internet smut. Women allowed only 1.85 hours per week on the subject. In a side-ways contradiction to the "allabouteve" survey, less than half of the women who were polled by MSNBC, felt they compromised their marriage vows by having cybersex.
The "Pew Internet & American Life" Project
This group that funds research exploring the impact of the Internet has several studies on net behavior. Their study entitled: "More Online, Doing More" (February, 2001), suggested that even though men presently made the lion's share of Internet purchases, women would soon bypass them in spending. They suggested a correlation between Internet experience and Internet procurement. Thirty-three percent of online men have had Internet access for three years or more, while just twenty-four percent of women have that much experience. The study made a strong effort to stress that half of net-enabled women use email every day.
What does all this mean to the Adult site owner trying to sell their wares to the female population? To this writer it means that women like sex on the Internet but, if you are spending all your time building image galleries of nude males in hopes of attracting women to your sponsors, you may be wasting your time.
Melody Wigdahl-Hahn of Womensnet explains why. "Women are multi-taskers," says Wigdahl-Hahn.
"The average woman has ten minutes to surf. She needs to be able to find and review about three new sources instead of sorting through thousands of things that aren't relevant to her. Anyone who wants to market services to women on the Internet had better keep time, ease of use and multi-function in mind".
Women want portal sites. When it comes to sex, the places in cyberspace that have a large, female attendance tend to look more like magazines than the standard, male-oriented porn site. They contain the advice columns, shopping pages, story collections and other trappings of non-adult fem-zines, but with a nasty twist.
Untitled Page
Two sites have consistently made the top of first-page search results when investigating this article:
Nerve is an online webzine that calls itself "literate smut". Begun in 1997, it claims that one third of it readers are female and 56% of those readers between the ages of 18 and 24 are female.
Lilith is a clean, easy to navigate directory with links ranging from activism to BDSM to personals.
While Lilith is a labor-of-love site, Nerve generates a decent profit from big-ticket advertisers that would never approach a man's adult page.
Most of the other woman-oriented pages usually had one or two elements of the portal site format, but not the whole array of sexual selections that would entice a woman to break out the credit card. Women want pictures AND toys AND advice AND erotica AND how-to books. Women want it all.
Instead of building the general-purpose porn site with video feeds and chat and exclusive photos, try a completely different approach with sex-searching women surfers. Give them a shopping page with links to sex toy and herbal enhancement sponsors.
In your advice column, fly banners to adult classified sponsors. Provide them with a daily horoscope that conveniently comes from an adult-friendly psychic sponsor. The beauty of a women-oriented adult website is, you find your content complies with more affiliate TOS.
The definitive answer to what women want can probably never be found. Suffice it to say they want a little bit of everything. The want their sex, but they want it as part of an experience. They will pay money for sexual product, but the product has to be more functional like a teddy or a dildo. They are curious about sexual experimentation but would rather buy a book on the subject than download a video off your sponsor's site.
Maybe you feel like some adult website owners that have been queried for this article. You find the female market too hard to reach. You don't even try. This is understandable with such evasive clientele. Women (as adult customers) are under-examined therefore, unpredictable.
They also make up half the world.