How to legally earn $1 MILLION monthly from 18+ content and not get kicked out of the AppStore?

Monetization is on the brink. It is prohibited to post erotic and pornographic content on the AppStore. At the same time, there are those who are able to not only place them, but also earn good money from it. How to do this if it is not even possible to officially advertise such topics?

We will talk about such a segment as audio erotica. Yes, yes, you heard right, it turns out that this kind of content may not be blocked in app stores, the main thing is not to insert videos and photos of an explicit nature and everything will be OK.

Hello, I’m Dima Garnik: I’ve been in IT for 20 years, the last 10 of which I’ve been coming up with B2C projects. Co-founder of the Simpler application – 20 MILLION installations, nomination for application of the year. I’m trying to figure out how the world works, so I talk about my findings, write articles on Habr and notes on Telegram. I have no affiliation with the products reviewed.

$1 MILLION monthly is, of course, cool, but it has its own difficulties:

• A ban on advertising such content on all leading advertising platforms.

• Competition in the form of a large number of sites with free porn, and there is a full-fledged video, and not just an audio track where everyone oohs and ahs.

Who is buying this?

When you make a new project, the first thing you should think about is the target audience, who will use it? Second, how can this be monetized?

Since this is a mobile application on iOS with a small number of monthly users – on average, only 40K per month, then the second question is clear: the only reasonable monetization option is a subscription model.

But the first question is much more difficult: who and why needs “aah-sighs” exclusively in audio format, even without pictures (the application would immediately be banned from the AppStore for them)?

Here are the categories of users for this type of application:

• Young girls (18 – 25 years old) – they are shy, pornography does not attract them, they get to know their body. Some of them use such content as additional stimulation outside of sexual activity with partners.

• Middle aged women – family, husband, children, work, everyday life: they are very tired, they have little time, they do not have time to fully enjoy love pleasures.

• Lonely people – they cannot find a partner in life for one reason or another, so they use such applications to satisfy the need for sexual life.

• LGBTQ+ community (recognized as an extremist organization and banned on the territory of the Russian Federation) – there is not much content for them in principle and they want to use exactly the kind of content that is not for everyone and makes them “not like everyone else,” plus, they can introduce anyone, but not what they are shown in the picture.

How to advertise this if it is prohibited?

If we look at the market leader in this niche, we will not see a single advertisement through traditional advertising tools, because advertising of such content will definitely not pass moderation.

What they do to attract audience:

Filming Tik-Toks.

Here, of course, there cannot be any 18+ content, they make all sorts of funny and funny videos like: listening to audio erotica in a public place and so on.

The channel has more than half a million subscribers (515K), some videos receive millions of views, but they, as a rule, have almost nothing to do with the topic of the application, people just come to laugh, and only then find out about some app.

They maintain a Negram account.

The content is not very remarkable, rare videos from Tik Tok appear here, a lot of advertising-designed, branded posts, apparently used for seeding, plus funny pictures.

The channel has 229K subscribers, some posts get good coverage, which is generally not bad, because the channel itself is a direct advertisement for the service.

Rocking the YouTube channel.

The channel is pretty dead, YouTube algorithms don’t really pick up the content, despite the fact that they even came up with and held their own Olympics among voice actors.

It is clear that a lot of effort is put into it and the production is expensive, but there is no profit here:

Only 6K subscribers and very small views compared to other sites.

At the same time, short videos from Tik Tok are uploaded to YouTube Shorts, but they don’t fit here at all and instead of millions of views they only have a couple dozen.

Generate web traffic.

Competing with top platforms like PornHub for top queries is simply pointless, so they “vacuum clean” all low- and medium-frequency queries.

To achieve this, they write a lot of articles on various topics that relate to relationships, psychology and women’s/men’s health.

Per month, the website of the leader of this segment is visited by from 600K to 1 MILLION unique users – some buy a web subscription, some leave the site for the application.

Involve media persons in cooperation.

It’s interesting, of course, how they persuade them, probably connections + money, but this is an interesting case.

For example, Irish actor Andrew Scott, who played Professor Moriarty in Sherlock, and starred in a bunch of other films:

Or, American actor Jesse Williams from the TV series “Grey’s Anatomy”:

Media figures can immediately be used in social media, in promotional materials and even screenshots in the app store.

How do you monetize users within the application?

Let's look at User Onboarding for the market leader in this segment. Surprisingly, it is very short and there is one trick: you cannot go through it without leaving your email, in fact, I block the user’s actions from the very first screen, as soon as I installed the application:

Why do they always ask to leave email? For most applications, such a step will greatly reduce the conversion to onboarding and you will get “empty installs” – some people will immediately demolish the application without even trying it if they cannot complete this step.

I don't recommend this type of onboarding concept for most apps.

But these guys know exactly why they make such a structure:

• They do very cool transactional email marketing. When you leave your contacts, you get into a database where the sending of each letter is verified by numerous tests: there will be some useful material, reminders, and all sorts of hot offers with discounts. Plus, the user can be converted to purchase via the web – bypassing the application store commission.

• They are good at “exploiting” the base vices of a person: content of an intimate nature, you really want to find out what is inside – “the forbidden fruit is sweet” – therefore, in their case, the reduction in conversion will not be so critical.

Well, when the user gets inside the application, all the content there is also blocked. There is only one introductory audio fragment on the very first onboarding screen; everything else is paid.

This is also not worth doing in other applications, but here this strategy is justified.

Conclusions

It doesn’t matter what product you deal with, what matters is how well you know your audience. You need to study your target audience constantly: before the launch of the product, and during, and after the launch – this will give you the necessary insights not only in product features, but also in sales and advertising.

If you liked the post, then take a look at me, there’s no sex there, you can read it at work: https://t.me/roastapps (I hid the link so as not to irritate those who are not happy about it).