Internet Only 1% Porn

Eli Gottlieb writes "In what surely comes as a complete and utter surprise to everyone here, a new calculation shows that only one percent of web pages contain pornography. While the calculations were performed using data forced from Google's and Microsoft's search indices by the government, they will help the American Civil Liberties Union to keep enforcement of the Children's Online Protection Act of 1998 banned. A loss for business privacy has become a victory for free speech, even though netizens lose a beloved old proverb."

Comments

I suspect

[WormholeFiend]

that everyone's hard drive pron content percentage is much higher, however.

Re:I suspect

[Salvance]

Hmmm .... a few years ago the journal Nature found that 2% of the internet was porn. This would explain why it now takes me twice as long to find what I'm looking for.

Re:I suspect

[ghyd]

What would be interesting is the amount of data transfered.

Re:I suspect

[ajs]

I suspect that the porn content of the Net is highly underrated. Having done such surveys in my life for businesses, I can say that any metric that you're looking for can be skewed drastically by looking at the numbers differently. For example, if you many porn sites want only a handful of pages to be indexed, so if you go by page count, porn will be very low. If you go by machine or domain names, then porn will rank fairly high, since many porn sites use domains to isolate different types of content for the same service.

If you discount auto-generated pages, you willl also eliminate a huge fraction of the Web.

There's an awful lot of play in these numbers, so don't be too shocked if they're just dead wrong from most points of view.

Re:I suspect

[grazzy]

We must take this threat to internet porn seriously and ACT before it's to late. According to these statistics internet porn will be down to 0% in just a couple of years. Save the porn before it goes extinct!

Re:I suspect

[mattwarden]

I suspect that the porn content of the Net is highly underrated. Having done such surveys in my life for businesses

I want your job.

oh no!

[rayde]

Dang! Now what am I gonna do with my new Dell?

99-1 law

[cucucu]

99% of the people spend their time in 1% of the web

Irrelevant to policy makers

[regular_gonzalez]

As if this will change the opinions of any of the powers that be in favor of increased legislation and restriction of online content? The argument will shift to "...but that 1% makes up (20 / 30 / 50 / arbitrary number) % of internet traffic! Save the children now!"

The Internet is...

[consumer_whore]

99% useless

Ok but...

[otacon]

Search engines don't index all of the things on porn sites that are for members only i.e. Terabytes of member's only pages, video, and pics. For example sex.com could only have a few pages for the public that Google would show, but in reality they have thousands more. So it would be hard to be accurate at only 1%

1% pornography, 93% "art"

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you see it's like this -- the internet contains only 1% "pornography"; but of the remaining 99%, 93% consists of "artistic nudity" and "adult performance art". :-)

Doing my part...

[Rob T Firefly]

...to skew the odds back where they belong. --------> (_Y_)

How the definition of "pornography" differs.....

[Anonymous Coward]

During a business trip to Alabama several weeks back, I met a fellow who I'd describe as the typical sort of Christian fundamentalist you'd find in the southeastern US. He's not a bad person, but his views are somewhat, in my mind, unusual.

We were talking about the Internet, and some of the work he'd done speeding up the TCP implementation for an embedded OS. He mentioned at one point that he was worried it'd be used to transmit pornography at a faster rate. I found this absurd, so I asked him to elaborate on what he considered pornography. He was telling me that he thought pictures of the adult women modelling underwear and bras in Wal-Mart flyers were pornographic!

Now, I don't know this guy very well. My best guess is that he's got a raging erection most of the time, but due to the beliefs and customs of the society and religion he has been exposed to his entire life, he's had to build up this anti-pronographic personality. It seems he's taken it to the extreme. But it showed to me the problem with pornography: its definition differs so widely between different individuals.

A few calculations

[el_womble]

My maths isn't great, but I did a few simple calculations and that is still a metric fuckload of porn.

Feel free to convert it into imperial. I think rods would be an appropriate measure.

ONLY 1% Porn?

[gambler_mtu]

Given the size of the Internet, I find that rather sad. Too many people's lives are damaged/ruined by porn for even 1% to be acceptable. It would be better for society if that number were 0, we'd have a lot less child predators and rapists on the streets. I'm not saying that people shouldn't have the right to debase themselves...I just think it is sad that it is made so easy by the internet.

Re:ONLY 1% Porn?

[StoatBringer]

If it cheers you up, I find this thread difficult to masturbate to.

1% by number of pages, 99% by bandwidth consumed

[mrops]

On a more serious note: So what makes up the Internet? Webpages or the data that flows over networks.

How do you define pornography?

[eno2001]

Considering the wide array of the kinds of porn and pecadillios out there... I'd say that the study is very likely flawed. To some people, the following are pornography:

1. Bare tit
2. Celebrity nipple slips
3. Non-detailed butt/bum shots
4. Up the skirt panty shots

To others who are more extreme in their anti-porn views, the following would qualify:

1. Females under the age of 18 wearing skimpy clothing and too much makeup on MySpace
2. Anything with a female of any age wearing clothing that starts above the knee and doesn't cover the legs, or exposes the midriff
3. Anything that celebrates female sexuality in terms of sexual pleasure. It's OK to celebrate it, if it's related to child bearing. Witness the number of couples who tell all their friends and family "we started trying to have a baby a few months ago" without batting an eye, but you wouldn't see them saying "we started trying to increase the quality and frequency of orgasm for both of us a few months ago". With "both" implying that she gets to have a lot of fun too.

The two groups above very likely would comdemn people to death for looking at images of activities like:

1. Gay/Lesbian Sex
2. Orgies
3. Bondage and Dicipline/Sado-Masochism
4. Female Domination
5. Infantilism
6. Furries/Yiff (sexual scenarios utilizing anthropomorphic animals in cartoon form)
7. Bisexual activity of any kind (forced homosexuality in the domination scene all the way to "lesbian" activity in the swingers scene)
8. Cross dressing
9. Extreme body play (super large anal and vaginal insertions. Think: bowling ball in ass or eggplant in vagina. It's been done. Many times. You'd be amazed at how much human tissue can stretch without breaking)
10. Nullo (the voluntary or involuntary removal of genitalia)
11. Amputation (removal of limbs for sexual pleasure)
12. Scat (sexual activity focused on fecal matter)
13. Bestiality (sexual activity with animals)
14. Hentai (anime with a strong sexual focus possibly even including "tentacle sex" and mutilation (typically of females))
15. Hirsute women (women with a lot of body hair who don't shave it off. As some men put it, "wool panties")
16. God/Goddess/Wife worship (people who literally worship their masters, mistresses and spouses in the BD/SM scene and take the worship very seriously)
17. Swingers (real people who engage in free exchange of sexual partners. Typically lots of straight couples and singles with bisexual activity between women. There is very little homosexual activity between men and some groups discourage it due to health concerns based around the lie that AIDS is a "gay" disease.)
18. Cybelle (Wife as goddess figure. Husband must submit to being a literal "human toilet" and ingest urine and feces of wife. Husband is also cut off crom all sexual contact with wife, while wife has right to take many lovers. Husband is also in financial bondage and all money he earns go to wife for her use only. Hehehe... I expect some guys here will say that that's why they got divorced in the first place. ;P)
19. Foot fetish
20. Hotwife/Cuckold culture. Wives sleep with other men and their husbands photo/video them for sharing on the net both free and pay. The cuckolds never get to have sex with their wives.

And that's just a smattering of what I've scene in my 16 years on the net as an amateur sexologist/enthusiast. All of the above activities/groups publish photos and text online that the simpler folk of our society would find appalling and unacceptable. Hell, even I was shocked when I found the Nullo, Amputation and Cybelle stuff. But, then after looking at these things I realized that this stuff has ALWAYS been around long before the first bits poured out onto the internet. And as long as humans exist, these things will continue to be around. In the past people did this stuff underground and kept their images, written words and fantasies to themselves. If they were caught, they were likely i

Re:1% by number of pages, 99% by bandwidth consume

[MyOtherUIDis3digits]

AKA "1% by number of pages, 99% by disk space on my computer"

Re:1% by number of pages, 99% by bandwidth consume

[MyOtherUIDis3digits]

WTF?!? I know I selected "post anonymously"! Umm, I mean, hey! Someone hijacked my /. account!