Ah, two of my favourite things have finally been combined.

But enough about pizza with marinated ribs as a topping, what’s all this then regarding saving whales and flicking the bean? It’s those folks over at Pornhub again, the world’s largest porn site that is not afraid of a little publicity.

Having just released their new online combination of porn and gambling (see that HERE, better have a strong hand) they’ve now moved onto saving the world’s biggest animals. Over to Stuff:

The idea is simple. For every 2000 videos viewed on Pornhub this February, the site will donate a cent to a whale charity. They’re emphasising the sperm whales, because duh, but it turns out the money will actually end up helping Orcas. How lovely!

…Let’s take a look at that number again. A cent – one cent – for every 2000 views. That doesn’t add up to much. Even with PornHub’s huge 280,000,000 daily views, that’s just $1400 a day. A drop in the bucket for a site this large.

But it gets worse. Pornhub aren’t just stingy, they’re profiteering. The influx of views they are likely to receive this month thanks to all the free advertising (hi!) is going to earn them a lot more money than they will donate to whales.

How? Advertising. Let’s do some quick maths.

Much of the internet is funded by ads – us included. The going rate is around US$2.80 per 1000 views (they call this “CPM). In other words, for every 1000 visits a website receives, the advertisers on said website are around US$2.80. On the face of it, that would mean Pornhub earns US$5.60 for every 2000 views, making their US$0.01 cent contribution absolutely miserly.

Hang on, it’s like they’re actually trying to profit from all of this – shock, horror, what is the world coming to? Stuff again with a few cold hard facts:

Pornhub obviously has to cover a lot of things with its revenue – web hosting, licensing fees, and the salaries of their excellent PR staff. But they’re not making a serious contribution to the whales here. They’re just running an ad campaign in stealth.

Some money will go to some whales, sure. But if you really want to help out, you’d be better off just donating a few bucks to a charity yourself.

Yeah, but then how will you explain that sordid internet history?

[source:stuff]