{"id":1373,"date":"2014-10-16T16:25:40","date_gmt":"2014-10-16T16:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=1373"},"modified":"2016-08-14T19:43:33","modified_gmt":"2016-08-14T19:43:33","slug":"pornhub-has-planted-a-few-more-trees-but-dont-pretend-its-being-responsible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/pornhub-has-planted-a-few-more-trees-but-dont-pretend-its-being-responsible\/","title":{"rendered":"Pornhub has planted a few more trees, but don’t pretend it’s being responsible"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Gordon Fletcher<\/a>, University of Salford<\/em><\/p>\n

Pornhub\u2019s recent announcement<\/a> that it would \u201cGive America Wood\u201d quickly went viral. The site\u2019s pledge to plant a tree for every 100 \u201cBig Dick\u201d videos viewed was covered by everyone from AdWeek<\/a> to Time<\/a>, The Independent<\/a> to Mashable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Much more importantly however, Pornhub\u2019s campaign spread across blogs and sites such as Reddit. A quick search brings up a further 100,000 different results. And then you have instant messaging, WhatsApp, SnapChat and so on. Clearly, the tree campaign has reached a lot of Pornhub\u2019s core client base.<\/p>\n

This is corporate social responsibility for a jaded digital age. It is also unashamedly a marketing campaign.<\/p>\n

Pornhub is a big deal. The site is ranked 83rd most popular in the world<\/a>, just behind HuffingtonPost.com (which of course also covered<\/a> the tree campaign), and its business model is largely based upon onsite advertising. Many of the articles reporting the campaign have presented the concept as an \u201ceasy\u201d way of giving or being charitable. After all, viewing a video costs nothing more than a few minutes of time. However Pornhub expects these new visitors will stick around, clicking through to its advertisers and, as a result, generate new income.<\/p>\n

In any case a tree planting campaign is a very light form of corporate social responsibility. For an airline feeling guilty about its air pollution then tree planting makes sense. But for a porn site? This campaign ignores the claimed social and personal consequences<\/a> of pornography, and the various support groups and organisations who would presumably welcome support from a corporate donor.<\/p>\n

Of course, such recognition from Pornhub would mean a degree of corporate reflection and introspection, and these are qualities that are still relatively rare in any sector of the business world. Yet it is exactly this self-recognition that is pivotal to a robust corporate social responsibility programme. Organisations must look at the downside to their business \u2013 their social irresponsibility, as it were \u2013 and design a programme accordingly. Instead, Pornhub has favoured a campaign founded around the combination of a specific holiday \u2013 America\u2019s Arbor Day<\/a> \u2013 and a simple double entendre.<\/p>\n

What this campaign reveals \u2013 with more than 1.5m videos viewed according to the site\u2019s own \u201ctrees planted<\/a>\u201d counter \u2013 is how easy it is for an organisation to create an imitation of corporate social responsibility that appeals to its customers. What has been created is a cargo cult<\/a> of giving. If it looks like corporate social responsibility then we \u2013 as consumers \u2013 are inclined to think of it in that way. The alternative is less media-friendly, as an apparent act of corporate social responsibility that has been achieved by merely copying the actions of other \u2013 possibly more mainstream \u2013 organisations.<\/p>\n

For Pornhub, the tree planting commitment neatly flips into a significant marketing campaign for a specific niche of pornography: \u201cBig Dick\u201d. Pornhub lists fewer videos in this category than in many others, and a Google Trends comparison also suggests it is one of the less popular categories of pornography. And yet the \u201cwood for wood\u201d campaign has generated 300 unique views for each video in this one category over the past week.<\/p>\n

All of this publicity may cost as little as $US15,000<\/a>, depending on which tree-planting organisation is used. The world is a better place with 15,000 more trees, and Pornhub\u2019s corporate social responsibility department is no doubt very pleased. But getting worldwide publicity for your website on a budget of just US$15,000? That is the sort of achievement any marketing department would be wildly celebrating.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Gordon Fletcher receives funding from the Technology Strategy Board.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Gordon Fletcher, University of Salford Pornhub\u2019s recent announcement that it would \u201cGive America Wood\u201d quickly went viral. The site\u2019s pledge to plant a tree for every 100 \u201cBig Dick\u201d videos viewed was covered by everyone from AdWeek to Time, The Independent to Mashable. Much more importantly however, Pornhub\u2019s campaign spread across blogs and sites […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":6157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1373"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6158,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions\/6158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}