Global Marketing Trends - Interesting Observations..

With GEO:IP and geotargeting becoming a buzz word as late in the industry i was doing a bit of surfing around seeing how various corporations handle their global businesses, the main one i chose was AOL because, they literally are globally available, with that said, take a look at these different versions of the AOL site that they actively market to consumers in various countries around the world:

http://www.aol.com - America

http://www.aol.co.uk - Britain / UK

http://www.aol.ca - Canada

http://www.aol.de - Germany

http://www.aol.co.jp - Japan

Not only do each of those sites look completely different to one another, the stuff they have on them is significantly different to so far as marketing of the AOL products go.

Some of the sites charge consumers for email space, some charge for news and some even have ads on them for liquor related products.

I always find it amazing looking at just how different the world treats the internet and what is, and more importantly, what isnt accepted so far as marketing goes.

Is there anything we can take from this and put in to the adult industry do you think, especially now we seem to be heading the way of attracting more global consumers of porn?

Regards,

Lee

geotargeting has been a buzz for a few years now, especially when it comes to adult traffic and peeling off all your unbillable traffic to send it directly to a dialer or loading up low rez versions of your sites to countries that are known to be on dial-up only. Its brillilant if you have the time to set it up and maintain multiple tours. The only issue with geotargeting is maintaining databases of the current IP distributions, but like you point out it is easy enough for sites that maintain .com plus .com.au, .ca, .co.uk, etc versions of their sites. (oh, I wish I had money & time to do this too!)

One easier thing to do is to pickup the language from the surfer's browser and offer multi-lingual versions of your paysite....just make sure to always have links to the other languages on your tour pages just in case!

cheers,
Luke