Internet Is For Porn

Internet Is For Porn
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But the arrival of .XXX begs the question:
How much of the internet is actually for porn?
Plug the question into Google and you reach an abandoned corner of the net: an article from 2005, a mess of answers from 37-80% and the Avenue Q Wikipedia page.
So I asked Ogi Ogas, one of the amazingly nerdy neuroscientists behind A Billion Wicked Thoughts , who says he and co-author Sai Gaddam are sitting on what they think is “the most comprehensive collection of porn-use stats on the web.”
(At least, till they stopped counting last July. Now they’re busy with their book tour.)
So Ogi: How much of the Internet is actually for porn?
There are a couple ways of thinking about the proportion of the Internet that is porn:
● In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That's about 4% of sites.
● From July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content. Both of these are from our research in Billion Wicked Thoughts . We consider our data the best available. It's an impossible task to say exactly what % of *ALL* websites are pornographic or anything else, because the web is both so enormous and so dynamic; looking at the million most popular sites is a very reasonable sample.
You could also look at the number of "adult sites" that are blocked by various parental filtering software programs--for example, CYBERsitter claims to block 2.5 million adult Web sites--though it's not clear how they're deciding a site is an adult site; the sites may not necessarily be sexual sites, and they may be exaggerating their numbers.
Only 4% of the top million websites? That feels... underwhelming. I was thinking at least half.
There have been a bunch of false and ultimately mythic stats floating around for years that say half the Internet is porn or one third of the Internet is porn, though this has never been remotely true.
In the early days of the Web, when the vast majority of users were guys, there was a much greater proportion of searches for porn--I think in 1999 that 4 or 5 of the top 10 searches on the Web were for porn--though the % of websites that were porn may actually have been lower than today.
Web filtering companies used to always release competing figures on the number of porn sites they blocked, but these numbers were almost certainly boosted to get sensationalist headlines and to seem competitive with other filtering companies that filtered "less" adult sites. For example, N2H2 claimed there were 260 million porn sites (ed. correction: pages) --haha, one for every American citizen! :) Conservative groups are always coming up with porn figures that are crazy high, too, especially with regard to children's exposure to porn.
You and Sai Gaddam are sitting on arguably the largest collection of porn data in the history of mankind. Was this the first burning question on your minds?
This was one of the first questions we tackled while working on Billion Wicked Thoughts . We did our best to locate every previous measure and quickly realized that most available stats were completely fabricated or bogus.
The only systematic scientific attempt to determine how much of the Web was porn was Berkeley professor of statistics Philip Stark's 2006 study carried out at the behest of the US Department of Justice under Bush.
Stark found that about 6% of searches were for sexual content - he must have used crazy stringent definitions of "sexual content" because all the numbers we found in our own data sets was higher. Stark also found that about 1.5% of all web sites were porn sites. We took issue with his method of random sampling sites; we looked at the million most popular websites in the world, since we figured that would give a more realistic indication of a random person's experience on the Internet.
So how do you go about measuring how much of the internet is for porn?
I think the two best metrics for analyzing the level of human interest in sex on the Internet is: (1) how often do people freely search for it and (2) what amount of web traffic goes to porn sites.
The best way to evaluate (1) is by counting porn searches on Internet search engines; the numbers are usually from 10-15% these days (higher as you go back in time to more men and less women online).
The best way to evaluate (2) is by looking at the number of sites out of the million most highly trafficked websites and seeing how many are porn sites (about 4% according to us, higher than Philip Stark's random-sample 1.5%).
You could even count the monthly traffic to all of these porn sites, which I admit we didn't do, though it would be pretty straightforward. In our book we have a table of porn traffic to the five most popular porn sites, varying from about 7 million to 16 million visitors a month.
What about porn downloads? Isn’t that a lot to account for?
The only reliable source I know of that can measure "porn downloads" is Nielsen, but I'm not sure how they measure this. We actually spent some time trying to get Nielsen to share data with us, but they never did, so I have to be skeptical of their calculations. I'm sure they're not considering torrents or other P2P sources of downloads.
I also don't know how they're categorizing porn. Also, now that video streaming is so widespread, I'm sure the percentage of downloads that are porn is lower.
.XXX domains go on sale today. Will the number sold tell us how much of the internet is for porn?
Probably not. All the online porn webmasters I know don't like the .XXX domain, since they think it will be too easy for ISPs and other network administrators to block them. On the other hand, I suspect many porn operators might simply use two (or many more) domain names, including a .com and a .XXX. But there's also tons of erotic sites run by amateurs, not for profit, and they probably won't feel any compulsion to switch to .XXX.
But they could establish some sort of minimum?
Yes, the number of .XXX sites will certainly place a lower limit on the number of porn sites on the Web. I bet we'll see many articles about online porn start with something like, "There are over 200,000 .XXX sites on the Web," giving an artificially low sense of the total amount of porn because of the ease of calculating that statistic.
So what’s the most popular porn site on the planet?
The single most popular adult site in the world is LiveJasmin.com, a webcam site which gets around 32 million visitors a month, or almost 2.5% of all Internet users!
You’re telling me a webcam site is more popular than PornHub ?
LiveJasmin is the most popular adult site on the Web by a huge margin.
Basically, it's interesting that what men prefer the most is watching women strip on a webcam and being able to talk to them while they do, telling the women what they want to see. Once this became available (through high-quality broadband streaming of webcam video) it just shot to the top of popularity; it's even more popular than the tube sites like PornHub and RedTube.
The fact that 2.5% of the billion people on the Internet are using LiveJasmin each month is pretty extraordinary.
A global phenomenon! Where do the webcam women come from?
Almost all of the webcam girls are from eastern Europe or southeast Asia. At $8-$15/hour with no benefits, it doesn't pay enough for American women... except teenage girls and college students.
Most of the foreign women do it without the knowledge of their friends and family and only do it for Americans so that acquaintances in their homeland won't hear about it.
Porn tourism, interesting. How about search queries? Is this a broader trend?
In our search data from English-speaking searchers (mainly Americans, Canadians, and British), Blacks are the most popular ethnicity, followed by Asians, with no other ethnicity in the top 100 most popular sexual searches. I say "blacks" rather than African-American because "black" is the term people always use in their searches. Blacks and Asians also have the most porn sites devoted to them, though Latino sites are also well-represented.
We also looked at searches on PornHub, where the most popular ethnic searches are quite different: PornHub features an international audience, including non-English speakers. The most searched for ethnicities, in decreasing popularity, are: (1) Indian, (2) German, (3) French, (4) Japanese, (5) Russian, (6) Black, (7) Italian, (8) Arab.
It's hard to draw conclusions from this since we don't know the geographic regions of the audience who are searching for each of these ethnicities, though a good guess is that Indian men are searching for Indian women.
But it's worth observing that PornHub offers three specific ethnic porn categories: Asian, Ebony, Latina. This suggests that PornHub believes these are the most popular ethnicities across all of their Western audiences--Western because PornHub doesn't generate much revenue from their non-Western audiences so don't try to cater to their tastes.
Any idea how big the porn industry is in dollars?
There's no knowing how much money goes into the porn industry. You should treat any such statistic about how much money is spent on online porn as bogus and completely unreliable. We spent effort on this in the early going, but you quickly see that the vast majority of porn operators are small (1-10 employees) who hide or cook their books.
The big companies report earnings, but talking with industry professionals suggests there's all kinds of financial shenanigans going on even with the big ones. (Maybe not Playboy or Penthouse...) There's no clearinghouse of information on adult companies, so any estimate of the online porn market is going to contain wild extrapolations.
A $3 billion online porn industry in the USA? I don't think so. PornHub, the most popular online porn video site, has 16 million viewers a month, but they're still no DreamWorks. Where's all the millionaires?
Last question. Does anyone still pay for porn?
Utah may have the highest per-capita porn subscribing rate. I've heard from different adult operators that the Republican states have higher per-capita subscription rates. Meaning, they're more likely to pay money—they don't know about free porn viewing.
Read my rundown on Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam's A Billion Wicked Thoughts in The Internet is for Porn (So Let's Talk About It) for Forbes.com.

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This is not just the plot line of a classic Dave Chappelle skit - it's now official statistical fact with the publication of a book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts .
In the largest case of TMI in recent history, computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam looked at “a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, and millions of online personal ads” to conclude, as Jezebel puts it, "literally everyone is a sex freak."
In 1991 — before the birth of the Internet as we know it — there were fewer than 90 porn magazines published in the US. Today, more than 2.5 million porn sites are blocked by CYBERsitter. In 2008, approximately 100 million men in North America logged on to porn.
That’s right ladies, it’s not for us! We'd rather spend our free time shopping online and tweeting . Anything but that .
Porn is for for our colleagues, bosses, partners, sons, uncles, boyfriends, husbands. But now we know what they're watching, and it's not pretty.
I am told there is nothing new under the sun, not even online, and that this happened once before.
It was 1953, the same year Hef published Playboy with the help of a loan from his mom, when a biologist named Alfred Kinsey published the Kinsey Reports , then the largest study of sex in modern history.
Poor Kinsey, the comparison is unfair, but I’m going to make it anyway:
Kinsey : Biologist. PhD from Harvard. Doctoral thesis: Gall wasps . One of the first Eagle Scouts.
Billion Wicked Thoughts : Neuroscientists. PhDs from Boston University in Cognitive and Neural Systems. Gaddam’s doctoral thesis: biologically inspired models of machine learning . Ogas was one of the first Homeland Security Fellows.
Kinsey : Most men masturbate. 50% of married men he surveyed had cheated on their wives. (It was easier to shock people in the 50's.)
BWT : “MILFs” outperforms “Cheerleaders” 43:1 as a search term. “Cheating wives” outperforms “Cheerleaders” 34:1. The most popular search term on Pornhub.com is “moms.” (My favorite: “Straight men have a fascination with other men's penises, which may be conscious or unconscious.”)
Data: Billion Wicked Thoughts +infinity
Kinsey : Painstakingly pre-Internet methods of data collection: He interviewed 18,000 people, encouraged his colleagues to "participate in the lab," and had to use the United States Postal Service to amass his photo archive.
BWT : Terabytes of data. Or multiple terabytes, I'm not exactly sure.
Kinsey : Subject of federal prosecution for obscenity in a trial that lasted till after his death. The materials in question: 31 photographs seized by US Customs.
Ogas : Subject of Meredith Vieira’s adoration on an episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire . The question: Name the ship colonists didn't seize during the Boston Tea Party or walk for $500,000?
1950’s : Attack . The Post Office was in its glory days, bringing everyone from Sunshine & Health to Esquire to court for obscenity charges. (Now it's on junk mail life support and losing billions of dollars a year.)
2011 : Retreat . A month before A Billion Wicked Thoughts was published, Attorney General Eric Holder shuttered the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force because there's just too much porn to prosecute :
[Former Attorney General] Gonzales said he always considered child pornography a bigger priority than adult pornography but set up the task force because he was getting complaints from families across the country about the sheer volume of adult pornography on the Web and elsewhere. “I did hear concerns about how prevalent pornography is and how easy it is to access now....”
Show me a man who has not seen Internet porn and I will show you a man who has not seen the Internet.
The search engines would have us believe otherwise. Google is happy to publish any Top 10 list - even Fastest Rising Translations - as long as it’s not that list. And Yahoo would have you believe Britney Spears is still a top 10 search term . (Thank our authors for the uncensored list ).
Plus, once all the porn sites move to the .xxx domain , it’s going to be even easier to pretend they aren’t a click away.
Perhaps the impulse to avoid comes with the digital territory. There’s this sense of inevitability , like you can’t stop the Free Flow of Information, whether it’s pirated content or a sex tape or Wikileaks, so what can you do :
Even some who support such prosecutions concede that they are increasingly difficult to pursue at a time when pornography is a multibillion dollar industry whose products are readily available to anyone with a computer — and when the lines between pop culture and X-rated entertainment are seriously blurred.
Quick Intro to American Law refresher on obscenity. A thing is obscene, according to the Supreme Court , if that thing is all three of these things:
So porn is a free speech issue. Is it protected by the First Amendment or is it obscene? Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart gives us the Cliff Notes version: “ I know it when I see it .”
I wonder if I would "know it" if I could see the evidence in United States v. 31 Photographs , but viewing access is restricted to qualified scholars. I am told the photos are nothing worse than what tweens are sexting these days.
Kinsey's judges averaged about a month per still photo to decide if they "saw it." I wonder how long they would have deliberated on whether killing prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto III is "completely devoid of educational value," but it didn't take prostitutes long to know it when they saw it .
But GTA III isn't even the Internet, it's a PlayStation 2 game, IGN's Best Game of 2001 in fact, " a true classic ." So are we sure the Internet is the problem? Or are we avoiding the problem?
Feminist law professor Catherine MacKinnon wonders in Not a Moral Issue (I'm breaking out the JSTOR archives here) “why a body of law which can’t in practice tell rape from intercourse should be entrusted with telling pornography from anything less.”
But at least we can all agree things are getting worse, a phenomenon she calls "escalating explicitness," sex counselor Ian Kerner calls "sexual attention deficit disorder," and John Mayer calls "a new synaptic pathway." In fact, Politico’s story on the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force shut-down quotes MacKinnon verbatim: “Pornography has become ubiquitous.”
But instead of blaming the Internet, MacKinnon argues pornography is getting worse because it’s about access to women, and it’s a fading horizon to keep that access exciting:
Put another way, more and more violence has become necessary to keep the progressively desensitized consumer aroused to the illusion that sex is (and he is) daring and dangerous. Making sex with the powerless “not allowed” is a way to keep “getting it” defined as an act of power, an assertion of hierarchy.... Show me an atrocity to women, I’ll show it to you eroticized in the pornography.
A phenomenon amplified by the Internet, no doubt, but MacKinnon wouldn’t have known it back then, because she wrote this back in 1984.
I’d like to think the Internet is our friend in this whole mess. For the first time in history, thanks to the Internet, we have unadulterated access to what our men are watching about us:
Crucially, pornography has become truly available to women for the first time in history.... This central mechanism of sexual subordination, this means of systematizing the definition of women as a sexual class, has now become available to its victims for scrutiny and analysis as an open public system.
And therein lies the opportunity. To see it, discuss it, critique it, have an opinion about it. And ironically, we’re choosing to silence our own free speech by looking the other way.
So... I hate to say this... go forth and explore. Read the book. Ask your guy friends what they’re watching. Cast off your SafeSearch goggles . And when it gets ugly, which it undoubtedly will after a few clicks, try unicorn chasers .
Central to the institution of male dominance, pornography cannot be reformed or suppressed or banned. It can only be changed.

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