The Environmental Cost of Internet Porn (theatlantic.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report (condensed for space): Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material -- CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel -- and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this "dematerialization," observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn. Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike "the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008." Precise numbers don't exist to quantify specifics, but the impression across the industry is that viewership is way, way up. Pornhub, the world's most popular porn site, provides some of the only accessible data on its yearly web-traffic report. The first Year In Review post in 2013 tabulated that 14.7 billion people visited the site. By 2016, the number of visitors had almost doubled, to 23 billion, and those visitors watched more than 4.59 billion hours of porn. And Pornhub is just one site. Using a formula that Netflix published on its blog in 2015, Nathan Ensmenger, a professor at Indiana University who is writing a book about the environmental history of the computer, calculates that if Pornhub streams video as efficiently as Netflix (0.0013 kWh per streaming hour), it used 5.967 million kWh in 2016. For comparison, that's about the same amount of energy 11,000 light bulbs would use if left on for a year. And operating with Netflix's efficiency would be a best-case scenario for the porn site, Ensmenger believes.

Comments

Re:... and also think of ...

[gnick]

... and also think of ...
the thousands of gallons of sperm wasted

Waste more! Way too much of that stuff is becoming people. There's no people shortage.

please.....

[sdinfoserv]

What hogwash "By 2016, the number of visitors had almost doubled, to 23 billion, ".... there's only 7.4B people on the entire planet..... Only 3 billion people have internet access today.. I'm fairly certain my 90 year old grand mother has never (on purpose) been to pornhub... and given the punishment of Muslim countries... there's no way it's in the billions of visitors. This means of those who do visit are really, really active..

Only 6GWh/year ???

[Ecuador]

Seriously, this is VERY little power, especially for 4.6 billion hours of (exciting) entertainment! I mean, just my country house solar roof produces 15MWh/year - just 400 of those relatively small solar roofs are enough to power world porn! Or compare to the bitcoin network's 32TWh consumption - that's more than 5000 times the claimed amount of streaming porn (without the actual benefits!). I mean, the summary tries to say one thing, but the numbers seem to indicate the exact opposite!

Also, it is not "23 billion visitors", it is "23 billion visits". Unless our streaming porn is popular among extraterrestrial civilizations with populations numbering in the dozens of billions...