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Porn Beats Search Engines in Internet Traffic
zamboni1138 writes "A just published Reuters story claims almost 20% of all U.S. web traffic is categorized as 'adult'. While some of it is just of an adult nature, most of it is probably porn. Search engines get about 5.5%, Google being about half of that. This should surprise no one given the bandwidth intensive nature of online porn. Of course this is only the research of one company over a one week period. Is this one of the reasons why the US DOJ recently announced it is going to be taking a closer look at the porn industry?"
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that everytime a porn site is visited (even accidentally) it opens 20-some-odd popup windows...
I'm ready to dismiss this story as pure flamebait because it's throwing numbers at us without any indication of what they're representing.
Just what exactly are "web traffic", "internet visits" and "web visits"? Without standardized defintions for those terms, or at least knowing what the study authors were using as their definitions, we really don't know what the numbers mean.
One of the biggest problems with comparing one website to any other, or even categories of sites, is that the easiest to measure numbers are also the most useless ones. Afterall, what advertisers really want to know is how much of an impression they're getting on the viewer's mind, and there's no real way to quantify that.
We don't know what the study authors are defining as the end point of one "visit" and the start of another "visit" by the same user. We can't just assume that "traffic" is equated to "bandwidth consumed", or if they're using some more exotic formula for traffic like Alexa uses.
We also don't know where this study is collecting its information, and what problems that introduces. Alexa admits that they will always report a biased number for Amazon.com since any user of their toolbar is exposed to links to Amazon.com inside that toolbar. Slashdot will usually be underreported in such reports because Slashdot users are more likely to be unwilling to run a data-collecting toolbar than the average user.
In short... that article says a lot but communicates nothing.
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Porn drives technology. Whether or not this is conscious is debatable. Still:
VHS/VCRs: widely adopted after porn
DVD: widely adopted with/after porn
Internet: widely adopted after porn.
And it's going to drive video on demand too.
--Moo.
What is one of the reasons? The fact that the porn industry is a huge part of the internet, or the fact that someone wrote a story about it?
The porn industry has always had a huge presence online as long as I can remember. Maybe it wasn't like that pre-1992, but thats when I got hooked up and there was shedloads of porn then. A story about it neither increases the amount of porn on the net, nor makes it any more illegal. It just brings it to peoples attention, like all good 'controversy' news stories.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Lots of people never want to admit this, however the desire for online porn and its extremely high bandwidth requirements played a large role in buidling the internet.
Porn Providers needed lot of bandwidth and large ISPs (The main backbone providers) recieved lots of buisness and money from these bandwitdh needs.
I worked for one fo these companies and at the time over 25% of our revenue was comming from porn related companies.
I would also argue it helped push home broadband services.
The nice thing is everyone benefits from the larger pipes the porn industry has helped to build.
The voters have decided, with their dollars, and with their observed behavior, that pr0n is A Good Thing.
Of course, given that in John Ashcroft's last personal experience with the political process, he got beaten by a corpse, democracy and the will of the people may not mean a whole lot to him.
Tech Public Policy stuff
What does this have to do with IE? IE is going to have a built-in popup blocker in about a month from SP2, and toolbars that have it now are plentiful.
Wow. Well, your post will make sense in about a month then. That said, isn't the new version of IE for XP only? or has that changed? A lot of people still use older versions of windows.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Actually, if you could really stop all porn, people's sex drives would simply go down. You wouldn't have people out raping anyone. Really all you'd end up with is a bunch of bored masturbators fantasizing about a hot chick they saw at the mall or something.
Of course, while spankin' it will reduce the desire to have sex immediately afterwards, porn just makes it more fun. If you watched less porn, you'd think about sex less.
The same is true of violence and violent media. Watch violent media, and you're more likely to be aggressive. If you do something like punch a pillow or whatnot when you're pissed off, you'll just get more pissed off (but maybe fell a little better).
Some studies have been done on porn and rape, and according to the findings men who looked at violent pornography did change their attitudes towards rape (more likely to say they'd do if they knew they would get away with it, more likely to say it wasn't that bad) after watching tons of porn. But a lot of the "affects of porn" research is done with violent pornography, while the vast majority of porn out there is "normal" stuff, you know naked women hopefully making out with each other. It's totally obvious that "violent" porn would make people have "violent" sexual fantasies, but most people aren't interested in that sort of thing anyway.
Ultimately, each individual is responsible for their own actions, and trying to control speech, and artistic expression in order to keep "bad thoughts" out of peoples heads might work somewhat, but that doesn't mean it will prevent "bad actions". And a censored world like that isn't one I'd want to live in.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.