RedGIFs Promotion for Adult Sites: What 37 Million Views Taught Us

Of the adult sites we run, one gets far more visitors than the others, and for a long time we assumed it ranked better. It doesn’t. When we compared them in Search Console, the sites ranked in similar positions; the difference was that people searched for its name. Almost all of that site’s Google clicks are brand searches, typed by people who learned the name from one place: a RedGIFs account with about 17,600 followers and 37 million total views, whose clips carry the site’s name.

So we started measuring that account properly: hundreds of clips, views per day controlled for age, A/B tests on clip formats. This is what we learned.

Why RedGIFs works as a traffic source

• It’s where Reddit’s adult video lives. Most NSFW video posts on Reddit are RedGIFs links, so a clip can be seen on RedGIFs itself and in every subreddit it’s posted to.
• Clips are discovered by tags and niches, not only by followers, so a new account can get views from day one.
• The real value is the name. The profile link gets very few clicks (more below). What brings visitors is the brand name on the clip, which people later type into Google.

What we measured

Tag order: 7.8x

We compared clips by views per day. Clips whose first tag described the audience’s main interest (on our account, the identity tag of the niche) had a median of 180 views a day. Clips whose first tag was a sex act (“Anal”, “Blowjob”) had a median of 23. Same account, same kind of content; the only difference was which tag came first. Our own early uploads had the order wrong, because the tool appended the niche tag at the end, where it was sometimes cut off by the tag limit.

Lesson: lead with the tag that defines your niche, then the acts.

Clips live fast

A clip gets 56% of its first two weeks’ views in the first three days. Day one brings hundreds of views; by day ten it’s a trickle. That means:

• Post steadily (a few clips every day) rather than in batches.
• Judge a clip at day 3, not day 30.
• Your account’s daily views depend on recent clips; an archive decays.

A few clips carry the account

The top 20 clips earned about 45% of the account’s views. Most clips are average; a few hit. You can’t predict which one, which is another reason to post steadily.

What content wins

• The finish. Clips showing the climax beat other parts of the same scene by about 1.4x, in both our new clips and the old archive.
• Specific niches beat generic tags: posting a clip into a specific niche brought about 1.2–1.4x more views than a generic one.
• Compilations did well (about 1.7x at day 3), on small numbers.
• No measurable effect: vertical vs horizontal in our controlled test, clip length within 15–60 seconds, and posting volume up to about nine clips a day. An early raw comparison showed vertical clips far ahead, but that was the age of the clips talking; the alternating test showed no real difference.

The profile link barely matters

We tracked the account’s profile link with UTM parameters: 4 to 8 clicks a day, about 0.01% of views. Don’t build a strategy on that link. Build it on the name:

• Watermark every clip with your site name, clearly but not across the action. Draw it last, after any cropping or resizing; we once had a crop that silently removed our own watermark.
• Use the site name as the account name or in its description.
• Keep the site name short and easy to type. People misspell it; our brand searches include half a dozen variants. Register or redirect the common misspellings if you can.

Rules that keep the account alive

• Post only content you have the right to post, of adults, with nothing suggesting otherwise in titles or tags. Words like “teen”, “school” or “step-” in a clip’s tags are a fast way to lose an account; we filter them out of everything we promote, even when the source used them.
• New accounts can’t post into niches for their first days; post to your profile and add niches later.
• Stay under the daily upload limit, and don’t repost the same clip.
• No promotional text burned into the clip beyond the watermark.

From RedGIFs to Reddit

Every clip can also be posted to Reddit, in your own subreddit and in niche subreddits that allow it, with the full video linked in a comment. We cover how we grow our own subreddits in a separate guide. For the pages those visitors land on, see why Google doesn’t index tube video pages (brand traffic lands on the homepage and hubs, so make those strong) and uploading to other tubes for traffic for the same idea on tube sites.