Business-hungry Zomato begins advertising on pornography sites

The online food ordering platform says the average cost per click on pornographic sites would be Rs 2

"Great food is like great sex. The more you have, the more you want," legendary food critic Gael Greene wrote in one of her essays. Food search-and-delivery website Zomato seems to have taken her observation rather seriously. The Gurgaon-headquartered company has started advertising on some of the world's biggest porn sites. The logic behind the decision: A large number of Indians spend their time, particularly at night, watching porn.

With this, Zomato has become the first Indian consumer internet company to serve advertisements on porn websites. The company is expecting these ads to boost its late night food delivery business in big cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru.

Zomato says the average cost per click (CPC) on porn sites would be Rs 2, one-tenth of what it pays for Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.

"The alternative seemed almost obvious when someone said 'Hey we should try advertising on porn sites', and then justified it with 'look, people watch porn, and people get hungry, so stop judging me'," Pramod Rao, senior vice-president of growth at Zomato, wrote in a blogpost dated December 15.

Zomato is routing ads through ad networks such as Traffic Junky and Traffic Factory, serving ads on porn sites such as Pornhub and XVideos on both mobile and desktop sites from 11pm to 4am. "One of the reasons we wanted to share this (information) was because we were blown away by the results," said Rao said in a phone interview. "Advertising on porn websites makes sense commercially," said Harish Bijoor, a brand consultant.

"We are not a brand that goes and advertises on billboards and does sustained TV campaigns. We do it in bursts and we have always had a hunch that porn might work out, or do very well, with our target audience," Rao added.

Zomato has toyed with the food through porn idea since 2012 when it launched zomato.xxx - one of the first .xxx domains for non-pornographic content. At that time, it did not support food ordering on its platform. But now, with Zomato Order, it sees value in the concept.

Incidentally, in 2012, eat24, a US-based food ordering platform, now owned by Yelp, (Zomato's biggest global rival) had served ads on porn websites for business.

Zomato, which underwent restructuring in October, fired 300 employees as business floundered. At that time, founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal warned employees of missing revenue targets. "We are close to not living up to that for the first time in the past five years. So, we really need the sales team to achieve peak performance, and it needs to happen right now," Goyal had written in an internal memo.

Zomato, one of India's Unicorns, is majority owned by InfoEdge and funded by Sequoia Capital.