“We still advertise on billboards and magazines they’re important, but more and more we need to start advertising where people go,” so said Nicola Formichetti, the artistic director for the fashion label Diesel about starting to advertize on PornHub, YouPorn, and Tinder.
Yes, you read right, the couture fashion house Diesel has started hustling its products on the sleaziest corners of the web. In fact, it should not come as too big a surprise; back in 2014 I noted:
Currently, the only companies willing to advertise their products to viewers of pornography are companies who are in the same industry, or an offshoot, like vendors of sex toys or lubricants. But as porn becomes steadily more mainstream, this will change and the day it does is not far off. Once a single vendor of cologne, beer, firearms, cigarettes, denim, or whatever decides to flash their product on pornhub.com or one of its clones, the dominoes will fall. Since so many people watch it, the sales will skyrocket, and more companies will follow suit. Once that happens, tube sites will fall by the wayside as all major porn producers and distributors set up their own adult versions of hulu.com. Porn is here to stay.
Admittedly, I suspected the first product not of an explicitly sexual nature to break into the porn market would be Axe or some similarly crappy cologne only lonely men are stupid enough to buy, but supposedly “high end” fashion has officially won that distinction. The back and forth between the two industries has certainly been interesting, with American Apparel being something of a vanguard of our current era by featuring (barely) clothed pornstars in their ads a few years ago. That company’s bankruptcy does nothing to alter the trend.
Diesel is not publicly traded, so the number of people who will get rich off of this is not as big as it could be, but make no mistake, the money has got to be rolling in. For those of you in doubt, remember that YouPorn is the 370th most popular website on the planet, which is nothing in comparison to PornHub, which is the 64th most popular website on the planet. It’s been said that at any given second, around 28,000 people are watching porn.
And now that ostensibly respectable companies have crossed into the realm of advertising on these websites, porn has the financial safety net it has been yearning for ever since the Internet came along and the quasi-respectability it has yearned for since the dawn of time.
One wonders how much longer America can pretend that it isn’t a porn-saturated wasteland. Everyone is watching porn, but Ted Cruz’s campaign will still throw a fuss upon discovering that an actress from one of their ads has a background in softcore porn, and outed pornstars will still commit suicide out of shame.
Well, ain’t that Weimerica.