As the Geneva Motor Show kicks off today (and I’ve already fallen madly in love with the Porsche 918 Spyder), and as our very own Daniel Sumner is a self confessed car lover, we thought it would be rude not to share Part I of his ‘Car Porn’ post with you.
Car Porn – Part 1
Talking to someone who works within the car sales industry recently, he dropped the term “Car Porn” mid-sentence. Obviously the use of such words in generic technological discussion pricked my ears (so to speak). He explained that in their site statistics they have to filter out the high end luxury brand vehicles from their reports, as although they may only have a few hundred of these cars on their site, the number of users actively searching for these cars is x100 higher.
Now either there are a lot of people with very good saving plans in place, or people are having that “if I did win the lottery tonight, then I would buy…” moment. This moment of fantasy is usually born out of the fact that maybe, just maybe tonight I will win £85 million… what follows is that brief but delicious fantasy of how you would then spend the dosh, and how long you would keep on going to work for, just to keep a measured life style (I think I might manage about 3 days).
What is interesting is how many people love to window or fantasy shop and how that manifests itself in the online world. A tire kicker coming into a showroom in a car dealership is of absolutely no value at all to the seller. But online there is still value to be had; simply looking generates advertising revenue for the publisher. So while it may well be a reporting task to filter out the fantasists, it’s still a job worth doing because of the value it generates.
But is there a way we can better service the lovers of Car Porn? Or any other interest group for that matter? And by ‘service’ I mean both 1) giving the lovers of all things V12 a rewarding experience, and 2) giving the publisher a quality click steam, and improved advertising revenues?
Better still is there some way we could link together all the automotive fantasists into such a cornucopia of automotive eroticism that had not been seen since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah?
I think there is….
Photograph reproduced courtesy of CNET UK
