Cialis Better Than Viagra? Well it has finally overtaken it.

In the media erectile dysfunction may be synonymous with Viagra, but the reality is quite different. As of March this year Cialis vs Viagra were put on the charts and the global market leader is Cialis.

Eli Lilly entered the erectile dysfunction market with Cialis in 2003, a full five years after Viagra. What the company lost in terms of time it made up for with marketing and consumer-friendly innovations. Unlike other contemporary impotence drugs, the early Cialis advertisements featured women's perspectives, and details about the drug and its potential side-effects. The marketing department at Lilly also emphasised the longer effectiveness of Cialis, thirty-six hours compared to Viagra's four. The little pill was dubbed "the weekender" because a man could take it on Friday afternoon and achieve an erection all weekend.

EDGuider News: Viagra vs Cialis which is better?

But there is more than clever marketing to the success of Cialis. In 2008 Lilly released a reformulation of Cialis that allows men to deal with erectile problems with daily medication - no more planned sex, no more stigma of needing to stop and take a pill. It is this sort of consumer awareness that makes it unsurprising that Cialis now makes up 41% of the global market.

Those figures are somewhat lower in the United States where Viagra is more closely associated with erectile dysfunction than it is in the rest of the world. Only $0.7 billion of the company's $1.7 billion worldwide sales in 2010 were made in the US. That is set to change if Lilly gets approved as a treatment against other issues, such as prostate enlargement. Lilly is also pursuing approval in the EU as a treatment against hypertension.

EDGuider Blog: Cialis is on the rise and has a bright future

Such approval may catapult the company forward. John Boris, analyst for the international financial conglomerate CitiGroup, predicts that Cialis sales will reach $2.2 billion in 2015. David Risinger, analyst for Morgan Stanley, on the other hand predicts that by 2015 Cialis sales will have dropped to $1.4 billion. By then, the argument goes, Pfizer's patents for Viagra will have expired and cheaper generics will have taken over the market.

For now, however, things are looking good for Cialis and not so good for Viagra.