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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?"
How did they gather their data.
..they'll take a closer look, decide it's great to tax and regulate and govern and profit from, and then? Oh yeah baby, miles and miles of laws on the books. Funny thing is, they'll do this, but not for say....um, marijuana, wtf?
Yes, because one of the DOJ's stated goals is to make sure internet bandwidth isn't overloaded.
Seriously. Given the traffic-intensive nature of adult sites, they have to have some pretty solid servers and such. So when you're testing out a network connection or such, just direct it to an adult site and view a video. You'll be able to see where you're at. These are also good for hosting other types of videos that may be popular on the net at any given time. When all the other news sites and whatnot seem to give mediocre video, see if you can find the same video on an adult oriented site. It will be much higher quality.
See...adult sites actually CAN be useful. "Yes sir, I understand what this looks like, but I'm really doing research"
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
So if "traffic" is measured in bandwidth usage rather than page visits, then sites that are image-and-video intensive (like, say, porn), would pretty much necessarily have a disproportionate share of traffic because they have larger data. Most of the internet is still text, and most site images are loaded once, cached, and not loaded again.
Ken Brown would notice that there's also a lot of traffic related to downloading ISOs (also large files), thus porn and Linux must be linked. But this analysis probably under covers web (HTTP) traffic, and most ISOs aren't downloaded over HTTP.
In short, nothing to see here, move along.
"the US DOJ recently announced it is going to be taking a closer look at the porn industry"
The Irish banking system has already done that.
More likely they want to take on 'porn' to garner political support from the conservatives for the upcoming election and deflect public attention from their failure to uphold civil liberties and their failure to protect the public by enforcing antitrust law.
And by the way I can remember about 5-10 or so years ago there being another study of this same thing and it claimed about 90% of all traffic was porn, so are we getting less sinful or is the other 70% copyrighted songs and movies now?
That was back when there were still anonymous FTP sites filled with the stuff but the moral minority got them shut down. I wonder if the morals of those righteous crusaders were really offended or if they just smelled the untapped potential of pay porn sites (which rapidly sprang up.)
However, even if you break it down to either individual items Or bandwidth SPAM wouldn't win.
Items: I get 40 spams a day, some probably get more, but I definately hit several hundred individual web pages per day
Bandwidth: Say those 40 spams are 10k each, that's 400k, easily surpassed by a Single Porn picture
Actually though, their methodology is still flawed. They aren't doing an intrusive test (replacing the web targets with a pass-through coordinating proxy) so they are snooping the data traffic.
Ever go to a site where the big flashy graphic of the naked (chosen gender pronoun here) is a tiling together of image fragments so that the "image maps" are easier and coincidentally the user can't steal a freebee for the home colleciton by selecting "save image as"?
In a frams-based site each ad, and pop-up, and frame element is a separate HTTP request. So if the snoopig method is just counting-the-gets some sites can generate 200 or more HTTP GET transactions in a "page view". Most browsers will open multiple TCP sessions to to do these gets in parallel "to apear faster".
Contrapostiviely, a well-designed and simple site can have relatively fiew elements and do the entire fetch in one TCP session with maybe even just one HTTP GET.
So which of the "industry standard definitions" are they using for what term?
Claiming a standard definition is used is really easy to do. But think about the terms WAN and LAN. They have a "standard definition" that hinge aggressively around "what do you mean, exactly, when you say 'Local' this time Bob?"
Beleive me, I make test equipment that tests data rates for cellular systems. I juggle (read, "have to argue about") these "standard definitions" all day, every day because each technicion at each customer organization has their own definiton for this or that. And they are about as standard as "a cubit".
If I used these numbers and definitions in a monthly report I would have my ass handed to me.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
/takes bow
:P
Actually, my site only pumps out a measly 255 megabytes per day. At least that's what it's been doing recently. Shouldn't be too long before it's up to a terabyte or three.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
For an excellent (and TV friendly) look at the porn industry in general, including the decency crackdown that was set to begin shortly before 9/11 happened and we developed 'other priorities' (namely supressing civil liberties it seems, but that's neither here nor there...), take a look at PBS/Frontline's "American Porn" which is available to watch for free here:
n /
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/por
They have it in Quicktime and Real formats.
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Where are the slash-groupies? I distinctly remember being promised slash-groupies!
If you're looking for a Slashcode-based adult discussion site, try babes.bomis.com. It gets almost no posts, but I'm fairly certain the site gets lots of traffic, for reasons discussed in the subject article.
There's also Coolio's Babelog (babes.coolios.net) , which is a softcore picture aggregation service that allows discussions. They're always looking for new contributors.
Yeah, yeah, I'm modding myself down so mods don't have to. But before I go, I'd just like to say the fact that I have "Excellent" karma and mostly post about porn says there might be an interest here. It isn't like trolls don't post smut anyway.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Coopersmith's 1998 paper, sadly, is not illustrated.
Reminds me of a fellow student (in 1995) who had a subdirectory on his homepage filled with the "best" hardcore porn he (and we) could find back then.
One day, he decided to link it from his homepage via a small . (dot) as HREF.
That was funny - until the search-engines picked it up and made the site No2 for "hot and ugly".
The following weekend, I couldn't login to my account anymore (took 2 or 3 minutes to get a prompt - back then, there was only a dial-in server where you connected with a real terminal-program and used zmodem to transfer files...) and on monday morning, nobody else could either.
On tuesday, they finally found-out that the hits on the files dragged down the whole network (the joys of NFS) and the file-server - as well as the internet-line (measily 2 MBit's back then, IIRC).
Back then, there was no AUP that disallowed this, strictly speaking, and he got away with a wrist-slap (1 week no account).
Ah, those were the times....
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Or you could just use a program like this to download the porn for you automatically. Don't have to deal with the porn sites at all.
Autopr0n is one of my favorite porn sites. Being able to comment on the pics is a cool feature that I've never seen on any other porn site. However, I always wondered how this site got adopted by slashdot? (Not complaining ... I like the site.)I know that thousands of porn sites would love to get their links on slashdot without getting modded down to nothing.
Firefox with the Linky browser extension makes it far too easy to porn surf: Find TGP > Right click > Linky > Show all image links in one tab. There one click, three mouse movements and all pics downloaded. In IE it's Click > Back > Click > Back Click > ....
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.