How The Publishers Of Advocate & Out Use Porn Sites To Inflate Traffic And Deceive Advertisers

You know those annoying “pop-under” advertisements that appear behind your favorite porn sites that distract you from the matter at hand?

Viewers may be surprised to see the home pages of Out.com and Advocate.com appear as pop-unders (see browser tabs on screen shot, right), behind such X-rated fare on PornHub.com as Hospital Gangbang and Mature Blake Tops Silver Daddy. Among the other pop-unders in this inspiring category is LiveJasmin.com, featuring nude shows of female strippers.

Why are the two venerable gay media brands showing up alongside such X-rated offerings? Here Media, which owns and operate the sites, is apparently artificially inflating the popularity of their digital properties and serving up false ad impressions to their sponsors.

In a nutshell, pop-unders allow the company to tally unique home page views every time one surfaces, even though viewers, otherwise occupied, almost never actually click away from the site they are checking out, and onto the news sites. The  benefit to Here? The price is significantly less than the cost of paid marketing on, say, Facebook or Twitter, where you must do the hard work of engaging readers and poney up dough to acquire traffic. Here then pockets the difference between what advertisers pay for high-value impressions and what the company pays for pop-unders. (Full disclosure: GayCities, Inc., the parent company of Queerty, competes with Here Media for some advertisers. GayCities has a policy prohibiting the use of pop-unders and other artificial traffic boosters.)

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The pop-under strategy is generally considered cheating, deceiving advertisers about the actual size of the audience while bringing disrepute to online publishing. An entire industry, from browsers with pop-up blockers to rating services, has grown up alongside the Internet to keep publishers honest. Web rating companies like Comscore and Quantcast attempt to filter non-human requested traffic, with varying degrees of success, but Google Analytics, which also compiles web traffic, does not. Andrew Lipsman VP, Marketing & Insights at Comscore, Inc., told Queerty his company is devoted to determining “whether traffic being generated is actually coming from humans who are engaging in user-requested activity. If we determine the traffic isn’t human and isn’t user-requested, we don’t count it.”

Lipsman noted that even if pop-under traffic gets filtered by Comscore and other services, ad impressions are not generally monitored except by some advertisers themselves. He termed the practice of pumping up ad impressions “nefarious… Bad actors will try to inflate impression counts. We stay ahead of the the threats. But we don’t do that when it comes to ads. That’s not something we filter.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s hard to imagine Here’s advertisers approved the practice in advance. For instance, look at the screen shot (above) we grabbed in September from the”pop-under” at the top of the home page. The Out.com home page that goes with that pop-under (see “Popunder” in the out.com URL) included a banner advertisement for American Express Platinum Card.

All major marketers steer clear of risque content, especially porn, gay or not. Given the history of  The Advocate and Out, the company’s marketing strategy seems particularly risky. Long before it was purchased by Here Media, the magazines struggled to attract mainstream advertisers due to its association with adult content, eventually shedding adult magazines like Men and Freshmen that it published alongside news and entertainment publications.

Now the company has come full circle, embracing online porn as a sham traffic driver. “I’m stunned,” says Henry Scott, the president of Out from 1996 to 2000 and today the publisher of the well-regarded WEHOville. “It’s 2014, and those of us in gay-oriented media long ago realized that porn content denigrates the reputation of the gay audience among advertisers, who today appreciate us for our interest in politics, style and fashion rather than commercial sex.”

Asked for a response to this article, Here Media spokesman Mark Umbach emailed Queerty the following statement: “Here Media uses dozens of marketing techniques across all major search engines as well as native ads, display ads and text links on hundreds of web properties. As we own Gay.com, a prominent dating platform, adult sites have always been included in our marketing mix for the past 20 years.” (However, in dozens of searches by multiple editors for Here Media pop-unders on adult sites, the hookup site Gay.com never displayed. We saw only Out.com and Advocate.com and in dozens of instances.)

Oddly enough, we also noticed Out.com pop-unders (see above), featuring Tommy Hilfiger ads, appearing on myVidster, a site that posts pirated gay porn, making it the enemy of porn producers worldwide.

There you have it. From American Express to pirated porn, strange bedfellows at Here Media.