How does a company within the sex industry land links? If they can do it, so can you!

We’re in an age where sex continues to divide the nation, with those who shy away from the word and those who embrace it with open arms. Landing quality links is getting harder (no pun intended) and it must be even harder for a brand like PornHub. So, just how do they gain links as such a taboo company? Very easily in fact.

I decided to take a deep dive into PornHubs content and link building strategy to reveal exactly how they’re hitting the sweet spot…

via GIPHY

When it comes to mainstream media it’s easy to get more people on board with sex. An advert or movie is seen as more desirable when it has a sexual component to it (remember, sex sells!). National media also love a sex story with news reporting becoming more and more relaxed, but when it comes to landing links to a sex/adult entertainment site; many deem this as impossible.

So we had a look at PornHubs backlink profile from the last 12 months and well… the results surprised us…

We found that PornHub has landed 1,908 links this year alone, so how the hell are they doing it?

Well, they’ve quite literally stepped on a gold mine of data that’s right on their doorstep. They are able to perfectly target the rising generation, those who don’t shy away from sex, data, and statistics that come with it. Porn Hub has created a content hub on-site that delves deep into its user data/insights - called Pornhub Insights!

Here they regularly release various data and statistics from the most searched for sex trends, interests, what turns on the world, to peaks in search for a certain person or character. Our analysis shows that they’re uploading content at least once a week to this hub and it is certainly not going to waste.Some of their most interesting campaigns have included things like the number of searches for Kylie Jenner, what sex topics people search for at Halloween or react to when there’s an outage with Instagram or Fortnite. But the big question is, has this built links?

PornHubs 3 most SUCCESSFUL link building content campaigns of 2019

Women of the World

In 2019, PornHub partnered with Mashable and celebrated World Women’s Day by releasing insights into their data on what women all over the world watch on PornHub. The data showed that most across the world women enjoy watching Lesbian porn over any others and delved deeper into this data to reveal the specifics for each location worldwide. As a result of their partnership with Mashable, the piece received some natural pick-up from publications, however, on PornHub’s side, there would have been a slight push to press. This campaign gained links on publications such as Bustle, The Daily Dot, and Esquire Philippines. You can see the full report

Dirtiest Porn Ever

They also have a part of their business called PornHub Cares where they have released two campaigns in the past year to try and help a different cause in our modern society. Their most campaign, The Dirtiest Porn Ever, received over 200 links. They released a video of two famous amateur porn stars, having sex on a dirty beach surrounded by individuals in hazmat suits cleaning the beach around them. They stated that for every view they received they would donate money to Ocean Polymers to help fund their efforts to clean ocean waste.

You can watch the PG version of the video here. This campaign was hugely successful and was featured on publications such as LadBible, Vice and Forbes.

Avengers Search Popularity

This campaign was published after the release of Infinity War, where PornHub revealed their searches spiked 356% with a variety of searches for Captain Marvel and Black Widow also increased. This campaign gained 182 links and got featured in the likes of Men’s Health, UniLad, and Esquire.

These examples alone show that your own data is HUGELY valuable. Like other things, everyone has it but it’s all about how you use it!

I analysed every single campaign that PornHub has done in 2019 and they have built a humongous 1,580 links from just 46 solely data-led campaigns. With an additional 328 links built exclusively via their PornHub cares campaigns, taking their total links in 2019 to 1,908.

To visualise the success of their link acquisition for each campaign we have ranked them as seen in the previous graphic, but you can view all of the data here too. The campaigns varied in results, Big Beautiful Women only gained 6 links w

Unsurprisingly, PornHub already has a massive amount of links already associated with the site, for obvious reasons. But with the rise of the internet and the ease of being able to scroll through endless results, PornHub needs to create a brand for themselves. Through the massive amount of links that they are regularly creating they are also increasing their brand awareness too. Making sure that PornHub is something that people will automatically search for on their hunt for porn.

Their campaigns are innovative, they get people talking and it’s purely from data that they have access to 24/7. They use everyday scenario’s like recent movies or events to make it a tad more normal and easy for journalists to pick up and normalised for the general public to talk about.

Are you thinking about how you can use your data to create regular, useful, shareable and engaging content like this? Get in touch with our data, creative content marketing and PR team for advice or feel free to connect with the relevant experts on Twitter and slide into our DM’s.

Data and Insights Manager - Thierry NgutegureFind him on Twitter here.

Creative Director- Carrie RoseFind her on Twitter here.