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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?"
Will the slashdot user "autopr0n" please step forward? Ah, yes.
Sir, please take a bow.
How did they gather their data.
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...
What's next? Water is wet! Film at 11.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
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.
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?
Nope, they just like to get paid watching porn like the rest of the world.
I only read slash. for the articles...
..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.
Geek: I invented a program that downloads porn off the internet one million times faster.
:drools: One million times...
Marge: Does anyone need that much porno?
Homer:
Usually it's other people beating things to porn.
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
>Of course this is only the research of one company over a one week period.
And using only one hand, no less.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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.
Well, the Reuters article says this study came from a company called Hitwise. So, let's see what they have to say.
Hmm, it looks like they've got a FAQ that gives a decent amount of information on their tracking methodology and seems to answer most of your questions. They seem to use a variety of sites and ISPs for tracking, though they're very vague as to what. The link also says that they are, in fact, using standardized definitions for the terms you mention, and they're the definitions given in "the industry standard definitions published by the US Internet Advertising Bureau's Media Measurement Task Force on 'Metrics and Methodology'". I'm not sure where to get these definitions, they aren't immediately turning up on a google search.
Still, that should be enough to give you a good start.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"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?"
Dream job.. DOJ.. all day "taking closer looks at the porn industry"..
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.)
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.
John: So you're saying that the renewed strength of the technology sector is leading the new job growth?
m . That's some nasty stuff.
Steve: Not exactly, John. Most of these 280,000 jobs are in the one type of internet business that actually makes money.
John: You mean so-called "portals", like Google.
Steve: You're thinking in the past John. Search engines are so 90s. The future is in net porn.
John: Net porn is driving the new jobs growth?
Steve: That's right, John. If present trends continue, by the year 2006, online adult entertainment will constitute 275% of the US economy, and 1,250% of our exports.
John: That's impossible, by definition it couldn't be more than 100% of-
Steve: Fine, John, we'll use your numbers.
Steve: By the year 2006, internet porn will constitute 100% of the US economy.
John: That still seems unlikely.
Steve: No manufacturing or services of any kind! Every man, woman and, yes, child, will be sucking and fucking in front of a digital camera 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.
John: Full Employment is good, but-
Steve: The only threat to continued job growth: Pets. Fido will have sex on camera for free. Oh... and, Allen Greenspan's Dominatrix might tell him to raise interest rates.
John: Wh-Wh-What about our culture generally, music, other forms of art?
Steven: Have you *seen* any music videos lately? Anyway, not to worry - sex crazed americans will still be able to get the news - from www.johnstewartreadsthenewswearingnippleclamps.co
Steven: John.
John: Thank you steven.
---
I'm trying to see if I can get the cadence and word choice right so that it reads like it was written by the people who actually do the show. How'd I do?
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Does it seem to anyone else that there's a lot more posters than usual posting as an Anonymous Coward on this story? I wonder why...? Come on, spank monkeys, post proud!
Ashcroft thinks he is a Patriot and a Christian, but he will be stopped outside the Pearly Gates.
Jesus will hold his arms while Sam Adams punches him.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Like the parent said: porn.
sig
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
US DOJ recently announced it is going to be taking a closer look at the porn industry?"
How close of a look are they going to take? Do they need volunteers to help with this "investigation"?
...I've renamed "Internet Explorer" to "Teh Pr0n Surfar!!!1!"
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.
It went down for a while when my server died. I was too busy with finals and final projects to do anything about it for way to long. The site is back up now on a new host (without the pesky bandwidth restrictions of the previous location) and has been for about a month or so.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You've just been visiting the wrong porn sites. If you just search for "porn" on google, you'll get a bunch of crap. In addition to my own site there are a couple good TGPs that have strict anti-popup rules. Before AP, my favorites were the hun and asianthumbs
But really, you should get a popup blocker. Google toolbar does it, as does mozilla, and most other non-sucky browsers.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...can coexist, fortunately.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
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.
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.
------
Where are the slash-groupies? I distinctly remember being promised slash-groupies!
I would like to go to work for the DOJ so I can spend all day looking at porn while getting paid for it.
As opposed to spending all day looking at porn and not getting paid to do it.
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
Why don't you alter your brain chemistry to remove that stick up your ass.
Why don't you go talk to Alan Turing to see how well hormone therapy works in controlling sex drive. Oh wait. He killed himself.
There's plenty of time in the day to look at the sky and get off. The only reason for "eliminating" masturbation and sexual fantasies is if you're morally opposed to it for some reason. Sexual release is a healthy part of life.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Sorry, I don't believe in taking behavior-altering drugs. I mean, drugs are for when your body isn't working properly, not when it *is* working properly!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't go to no open sores porn site.
I mean....EWWWW
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.
Like anything teh intarweb else the online porn world is full of a lot of crap. If you're willing to pay for good stuff, I'd recommend the hegre archives or the vulis archives. (yes, those are affiliate links :P).
As far as free stuff, a lot of it can suck. Especially if you just google "porn" or something. The good stuff is out there, you just need to know where to look. But many in this "community" (if you want to call it that) seem to think of traffic as a commodity that they can buy and sell. Most of the sites you see aren't selling porn, they're selling traffic. Namely, you. That's why you see so many pop-ups, garbage, and other crap. Not to mention tons of misleading links or whatnot. It wouldn't surprise me if the "passwords" you got were actually put out there by people trying to get you to sign up for a "real" account. That seems to be pretty common these days.
But yeah, for the most part the online porn world is festering along with the rest of the net, with spam and crap. These people are really "overgrazing the commons" They get lots of hits now, but in the end they alienate so many people who know consider online porn to be basically the same thing as spam. They may make more for themselves, but damage the industry overall.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
One person caught AIDS, and I think maybe 4 or 5 other people ended up catching it as well.
But what you forgot to mention was that the entire porn industry stopped production for a month, so that every single actor and actress could be tested and re-tested to make sure that the "outbreak" was contained. There were only about 40 people who could possibly have been infected in the time before that guy got back from brazil and production stopped. And it's actually very unlikely to get aids from a single sexual encounter.
AIDS rates in porn are much lower then for the general population. It doesn't make any sense for the DOJ to be going after these people over that, particularly given that the DOJ's announcement hit before this the outbreak.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
20% of all U.S. web traffic is categorized as 'adult'
Considering majority of porn sites are totally blocking any google references this number is telling something...
There you are, staring at me again.