Literotica is 22% Women (plus other stats)

[Bubo_bubo]

And if not included in staff, you should account for legal, accounting and IT services, licenses for proprietary software, certainly if used on a commercial basis, server hosting costs, etc. The idea they'd only have something like 100 000 USD in terms of annual costs (which is what 1% of 10 M USD comes down to) is simply laughable.

 

[KeithD]

If Literotica was really making $5-10 million, other story sites would be giving the most popular Literotica authors money to move to their site. I've not heard anything remotely like that happening.

Well, Gaydemon did pay me to post to their site when they started off, based on my stories here, but didn't require me not to post to Literotica. It just gets posted to Gaydemon first.

I don't think Laurel and Manu make anywhere close to $5 to $10 million a year off this site, or there would be more staffers here and less burden on Laurel, at least. They've got to realize that the current method of rejecting stories--not being able to back up having done so often when challenged to point out what is suspected is actually there--isn't good for business. Once when a value of $1.2 million on the site was noted and was mentioned on the board, Laurel denied the estimated worth of the site being anywhere close to that (for what her denial is worth).

 

[KeithD]

Bollocks. Staff costs alone could be easily 1M$ on a yearly basis. (if the data of 11-50 staff are any indication).

What paid staff? (other than Scouries, of course )

 

[Bubo_bubo]

What paid staff? (other than Scouries, of course )

I don't know, but it is mentioned under the same heading as annual income so if you take the income at face value, you should take the staff numbers at face value. (Could be a.o. secretary, accountant, management paying themselves a salary, etc.).

 

[LdyHoneybee]

The 22-percent sounds about right to me, at least in the forums. The writing side? Doesn't matter. The chat room are heavily populated with fake accounts, bots, posers etc. Here, I can usually tell when a "woman" is really a guy. I think most of us can.

Curious. How do you do that?

 

[MillieDynamite]

Curious. How do you do that?

I was wondering about that myself.

 

[NC_Coastal]

If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Fake women usually give themselves away with their idiotic name, but they certainly give themselves away with their idiotic talk. And they usually don't hang around too long. They tend to slither in and out of the erotic chat/role-play rooms.

 

[ElectricBlue]

That's actually 60 million unique hits a month.

The stats from Similarweb would not be based on any claims made by users in their account registration. They would be based on web analytics.

Given that the product being "analysed" is mostly text page oriented and not things being advertised or sold, I'm finding it hard to see how there are any user gender or age clues in that.

Other than the user numbers, page bounces and average stay time, I wouldn't give much credence to any of the interpolations in this report.

Being highly text oriented, Lit is unlike most other websites, which are saleable product oriented - and have product from which one could glean age and gender.

What does seem pretty clear is its market dominance - the next site gets only a tenth of Lit's traffic.

And folk get off in seventeen minutes, on average! At a typical reading speed of let's say 300 words per minute, that's around 5000 words (onto the second Lit page). Make of that what you will, given it's an average.

 

[KeithD]

I don't know, but it is mentioned under the same heading as annual income so if you take the income at face value, you should take the staff numbers at face value. (Could be a.o. secretary, accountant, management paying themselves a salary, etc.).

I don't take any of that at face value. I wasn't born tomorrow.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I don't take any of that at face value. I wasn't born tomorrow.

My dad always says, "I was born on a Friday, at 2:30 in the morning, but it wasn't last Friday."

 

[lovecraft68]

Bollocks. Staff costs alone could be easily 1M$ on a yearly basis. (if the data of 11-50 staff are any indication).

There is no staff, two people run this site. The moderators are volunteers. I'm sure there are expenses, but other than the tech side, not many.

 

[lovecraft68]

My dad always says, "I was born on a Friday, at 2:30 in the morning, but it wasn't last Friday."

My mother went with the simpler, born at night, not last night.

I was born at the very fitting time of the stroke of midnight. Technically midnight is zero hour and the earliest time of the next day, but doctors ask parents to choose. They chose the next day as the day before would have given me the same birthday as a rather infamous member of out family and they didn't want that if they didn't have to.

So, as my mother is quick to say, there's now two days in a row in April no one in the family should want
She's always been very supportive.

 

[SimonDoom]

If women account for more than 5% of Lit. membership or even just guest visitors, I'll eat my hat. It's probably much lower still even than that.

Really? I don't think so at all. I think it's pretty clear men are the majority at this site, but women have a significant presence. I know women in the real world who read erotica and read stories at this site.

While it's possible that some men are masquerading as women, it's also likely that some women are masquerading as men, so to believe that the "real" figure departs very far from that site's 22% figure, you'd have to believe that one sex masquerades a whole lot more than the other. Maybe it's true, but I have no reason to believe it.

I agree that $5-10 million figure does not sound right, nor does the estimate of over 11 employees. Because of its traffic, this site COULD do a lot more to monetize itself and make money, but I don't get the sense it does, unless the site owners are raking it in but are too miserly to spend money upgrading this place.

 

[Trionyx]

Remember: Revenue is not the same as Net Income. However, even the revenue of multiple millions seems way out of line.

 

[JGittes]

Back in 2015, the 'Life is Short, Have an Affair' website Ashley Madison was hacked and held for ransom. They didn't pay the ransom, the stolen data was revealed, and there was enough information to verify the sex of the users independently from their registered statements. 84% were men, 15% were registered females who only used their ID once (when they registered, thus bots), and 1% were actually female. It's probably a little better here, but not much.

 

[KeithD]

Back in 2015, the 'Life is Short, Have an Affair' website Ashley Madison was hacked and held for ransom. They didn't pay the ransom, the stolen data was revealed, and there was enough information to verify the sex of the users independently from their registered statements. 84% were men, 15% were registered females who only used their ID once (when they registered, thus bots), and 1% were actually female. It's probably a little better here, but not much.

Once again, basing any stat on registered statements is totally meaningless.

 

[KeithD]

so to believe that the "real" figure departs very far from that site's 22% figure,

To believe the number has any relationship to the claimed 22 percent figure based on what solid information is available is so much spitting into the wind.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I don't know, but it is mentioned under the same heading as annual income so if you take the income at face value, you should take the staff numbers at face value. (Could be a.o. secretary, accountant, management paying themselves a salary, etc.).

Yeah, you should on no account take either of those at face value.

There's no way similarweb is doing a detailed investigation into the business accounts of every website they profile. My guess is that they're collecting the kind of data that can easily be automated (probably basic stuff like where it's registered, and the kind of things you can get from cookies/tracking/etc.) and guesstimating the rest. The calculation will be something like "Literotica is an adult site that gets 60m visits per year, we did stats for a handful of adults sites and based on those visits we reckon an adult site with 60 visits/year typically has about 11-50 employees and makes about $10m/year".

Checking a few other "adult" sites, similarweb's estimates:

Pornhub: 11-50 employees, $10-15m/year.
Brazzers: 11-50 employees, $1-5m/year
Redtube: 51-100 employees, $10-15m/year
Youporn: 51-200 employees, $15-25m/year

But you know what?

All four of those sites are actually owned by the SAME COMPANY. It might in theory be possible to split the profits by brand, but there's no way similarweb is going through MindGeek's accounts to do that, let alone splitting MG's ~1400 employees by website (as reported in 2016).

Take that kind of thing with a large grain of salt.

As to how they estimate male/female readership: my guess would be they're tracking web activity by some subset of users, they guesstimate demographics for those users based on patterns of activity (visit WWE website you're probably male, embroidery patterns you're probably female - it'll be a bit more complex than that, but that kind of thing), and then they use those to estimate for sites like Lit.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Back in 2015, the 'Life is Short, Have an Affair' website Ashley Madison was hacked and held for ransom. They didn't pay the ransom, the stolen data was revealed, and there was enough information to verify the sex of the users independently from their registered statements. 84% were men, 15% were registered females who only used their ID once (when they registered, thus bots), and 1% were actually female. It's probably a little better here, but not much.

I doubt we can extrapolate very much from AM. It had a very different purpose to Literotica, and they had a financial motive to lie about their female membership.

 

[PennameWombat]

I don't know whether the 22% women Stat is accurate or not. But don't assume women are not reading these stories. My own wife occasionally (maybe once per week) spends an hour or two reading LitE stories. But she doesn't have an account, and just does so anonymously.

If women account for more than 5% of Lit. membership or even just guest visitors, I'll eat my hat. It's probably much lower still even than that.

I have no idea if 22% is correct. But I believe 5% or "much lower" is also not credible. Why?

From other writing groups in which I lurk or participate to some degree, a fair amount of mention and discussion of erotica is by self-identified women. Okay, sure, some of them might be masquerading, but the discussions are relatively anodyne and their other interactions don't seem to bear that out.

In addition... all of those copies of "50 Shades of Grey" didn't purchase themselves (how the hell do I have reason to cite this stupid book twice in one day?) The marketing and social campaigns were very focused through channels oriented to women followers and readers.

IOW, there are plenty of women interested in erotica. Whatever the numbers are, if this site is attracting a large audience ("the largest," we keep getting told) of consumers of written erotica, and many women are interested in erotica, then some number of that audience are coming here. I'd also agree many might browse anonymously or claim in their profiles to be male to avoid attention. I have no idea how to quantify that number, but then again, I'm not buying ads here based on that sort of number so don't really care.

 

[Bramblethorn]

The 22-percent sounds about right to me, at least in the forums. The writing side? Doesn't matter. The chat room are heavily populated with fake accounts, bots, posers etc. Here, I can usually tell when a "woman" is really a guy. I think most of us can.

There are certainly plenty of people who think they can usually/always tell. Here are a few of them:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1539421272756703235

https://twitter.com/x/status/1538927970374537216

https://twitter.com/x/status/1526271449622663168

 

[MrPixel]

I used to work in the personal data biz. There are limitations. Some technical, some legal. F'rinstance, Eurozone and other jurisdictions' restrictions on collection and dissemination of personal data.

Without knowing Similarweb's methodologies - which we won't - it all seems to be high-sounding bullshit to me. Fake science. Web scrapers like Similarweb and Mylife make all sorts of wildass assumptions and suppositions based on sketchy statistical "analysis" of public domain and some purchased data. The data gathering itself is seriously flawed, too. How can you possibly truly know things like income, gender and precise location from IP and browser trackers and then connecting the dots with other data sources? Or how about a household with a dozen different devices on the same IP? Who's using what? And when? For that matter, browsers like Firefox do a pretty good job of cutting off the trackers at the knees with default settings.

Someone earlier said "GIGO". Yep.

 

[LdyHoneybee]

I was wondering about that myself.

I am serious. I would like to know. It might help me when i write male characters.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I am serious. I would like to know. It might help me when i write male characters.

A better idea might be to know men in real life, than to ask the not very representational sample of men you've got here. We're all as fictional as our characters .

 

[MillieDynamite]

I am serious. I would like to know. It might help me when i write male characters.

Men aren't that different than women as far as writing about them. Men want either sex, love, or both. They are strong and dynamic or weak and needy. They take the lead or follow. They tend to give the allusion of love to get sex, while women tend to yield to sex to feel loved. If all your writing is directed toward the erotic aspects, you don't need to worry about much more. As to writing men, pick men you know, and copy them in your writing. The motivation for what they do is the important part, you'll have to figure that out for yourself. Often, outside my writing, why anyone does the things they do can be a total mystery to me.