Juicy Ads is a broker that brings publishers and advertisers in the adult industry together “so that everybody can make more money,” says founder and CEO Juicy Jay. This seemed like something WHACK! readers and industry folks should know about, so we hooked up with founder Juicy Jay.
WHACK! MAGAZINE I’m very interested in this topic because, as I’m sure you’ve seen, Jay, over the past few years the adult industry has become more “micro.” There are more small business trying to make it now than in the past. It seems like what you’ve put together is a good way for small websites to get started up turning a profit using ads. So let’s start with an intro. Can you tell me about you and your company?
JUICY JAY Ok, my name is Juicy Jay. I run JuicyAds.com, and we’re an advertising brokerage for publishers and advertisers to get more in earnings from their websites.
W! When you started this up, why did you decide to target the adult industry?
JJ Well I decided to target adult because I was already in it. I started JuicyAds because I already sold ads for my own adult sites. I ran several free adult sites for the last ten years. Back in ’06 what would become JuicyAds started, and one of the people wanting to sell ads in an updated way said, “Hey, you could make this a brand.” And now here we are with tens of thousands of publishers and advertisers.
In 1999 or 2000 was when I started in adult. That was when I ran my first site, which I actually just sold this year. From ’06 until now is when I ran JuicyAds. But before that I still sold advertising, just not under the JuicyAds brand.
W! So you’ve been in the industry and around it for a while and you’ve seen how the industry has changed. In light of what I said earlier, how would you say that JuicyAds can help startups in the new, more digital marketplace for adult?
JJ I wouldn’t even call it a more “digital” marketplace. I would call it more cutthroat. Realistically, when I first started, it was extremely easy to make a lot of money. I remember that I had ratios for sales that were ridiculously low. Like you’d sell a membership in ratios of 1 to 25, to 1 to 100 click-throughs to sale. And now those numbers are astronomically higher. What JuicyAds does now is basically makes it possible for publishers to make the most that they can from their traffic because we have high-paying advertisers that pay top dollar for their traffic. Instead of these publishers having to go out and get into this, that, and the other advertiser affiliate program—because there are thousands of them—we basically just say, “Ok, we’re going to pay you this much for your traffic. Just send it to us.”
W! So how do you match advertisers with publishers?
JJ It’s mostly automated. I can’t go into specifics about how it works, but essentially what it is, is we have websites that have certain niches—whether it’s teen, or amateur, or gay, or whatever the niche is—and we have advertisers on the other side of that, that have websites or products that are geared toward those niches. So essentially it’s a matter of putting Site A with Advertiser A, and that’s basically it. The other part of is it that we do a lot of direct buy. So what that is, is when a specific advertiser comes in and looks at what we have, and they say, “We want to buy this spot on this website.” That bypasses all our network optimization and they just choose what site they want to put their ad on. They just buy it, and they pay good money.
W! Ok, that makes sense. What you made about niches made me think. Since you’ve been in this industry for a long time, you have seen that it’s getting more and more niche-specific. Do you think that that’s actually driven by the way that advertising works on the internet?
JJ Actually I think it’s driven by availability. What we’re seeing right now is, with adult going so much over to piracy, you can pretty much get teen stuff anywhere. Some form of it. So what you’re seeing with more… Well, it’s more or less the harder to find or the more obscure the porn is, that’s where people are making money. That’s where the demand is. Because you can’t just search, “balloon-loving midget shemale” and have a ton of porn come up. You know?
W! laughing
JJ It’s true though! You can go on any tubesite and type in generally anything you can imagine and have all kinds of results from it. And that’s why we’re in the problem that we’re in. Like websites like what I used to have—free sites—that’s the reason they were making ten times less than they used to. And that’s because there’s a need and just more demand for stuff that you just can’t look up.
And I’d have to say it’s because the market’s diluted. I mean, how many teen sites are there? How many amateur sites are there? You don’t have any problems finding them because everybody has twenty of them.
W! Do you have mostly established websites that are signing up, or more start-ups?
JJ We’ve got many really good-quality top publishers, but that’s not the majority of our market and it never will be. There’s always going to be that one percent at the top, but I would have to say that most of our clients are mid- to small-sized. Not necessarily new versus old clients. Some of the people who use our service have been around longer than I have, but we do see a lot of new people. But it really is a mix.
W! I would imagine that JuicyAds is optimized for ease of use, if you have old-timers using it.
JJ Oh yeah. We have by far the easiest used platform in the industry. We’ve had feedback from clients for the past few years saying that they’ve tried everywhere else and that JuicyAds is the easiest to use. You look at our competition and it’s not necessarily as easy to buy spots with them as it is with us. We have by far the easiest-to-use platform. And definitely the most seductive.
W! So let’s say that you have a woman who’s been doing a webcam for a while and she decides that she wants to start advertising her site, but she’s never done it before. Would you say that JuicyAds is good for her?
JJ Oh definitely. It’s fairly easy to use, and it’s pretty instant when you find something you want to buy. It’s a matter of providing us 
with your image and your URL and sometimes some text, and your ad’s up instantly.
W! Wow that’s a great turnaround. There are a lot of people who we interview for WHACK! and who read it who are young and starting out in the industry…
JJ Well what I’d have to say to these people is that you have to promote yourself and build your brand, and make sure that people know you exist. A lot of the time, people don’t know you exist, and JuicyAds is a really good way of promoting yourself, and making some money. But you really do get that branding. For somebody who wants to be in the game, and really seriously be in this industry, with our company you can do that.
W! So what do you think JuicyAds can offer to websites, brands, people who are more established who want to branch out?
JJ I would say that it doesn’t matter what size of company or website. Really, we’re talking about people wanting to make more money with whatever they sell. And really, we control somewhere above 800 million impressions a day. I don’t need to tell you that’s a lot of traffic. We aren’t the biggest, but we are one of the best, and we definitely have the best customer service. There’s people there 24/7. Our sheer size is an attractive quality for larger players who have been in the industry for a while, because they have gone out and tried to sell stuff on their own, and it’s a pain. That’s why we’re the broker, it’s just easier to come talk to us. Because we take care of all that for busy people. It all comes down to time, and would you rather be working on your business and making your brand better? Or would you rather be trying to get people to promote you? I would rather time building my business and leave the traffic to a company like JuicyAds.
W! This is a question that pertains very much to my website, but I think other people might have similar questions: When you are pairing up publishers with ads, do you have different levels of explicitness that people can request? Is it possible for an adult website to use your service and end up with ads that are safe for work, or almost safe for work?
JJ Yes, we actually have four different ratings for campaigns and images. We actually rate each individual image separately. We have hardcore, softcore, and non-nude. Those are our three adult categories. And that’s generally rated by the image, not by the end website. So let’s assume that you have a website and you are running a non-nude website. We’re going to provide you with non-nude ads. But when you click that ad, you might end up at Kink.com. We rate by the image only.
But the other side of that question is that we actually have mainstream advertisers that aren’t adult-based. And those are the ones that we put on safe-for-work type websites, versus everything that’s on the adult side. So we do actually have mainstream advertisers and mainstream publishers.
W! That’s incredibly useful because every website is going to want something different for their ads. Like, do you want a gaping asshole on your sidebar? Or do you not want a gaping asshole on your sidebar? Very important question.
JJ And we also allow anybody to block any ad they don’t like.
W! That is fantastic. I think you’ve given me the information that people on our site are going to want! Thank you, Jay!
—Interview conducted by our reigning princess of perversion, Miss Lagsalot.
JuicyAds is the largest income producer for my sites, and Jay is not exaggerating when he says they have the best customer service, period. I had truly had enough of testing affiliate after affiliate, some of whom have disappeared while owing me money, others who have supposedly good reputations but are clearly misrepresenting CTR (and one must therefore assume, misrepresenting sales). There’s never been any reason for me to question any of their stats, and since they manage the placement, I receive more Revenue Per Thousand than I have on any affiliate campaign.
(PS – Plus, Jay is adorable lol)