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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.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Phrasing!
You had me all worked up about the amount of electricity used, but then - just 11k bulbs?
That's not even enough to light a single wing of Al Gores' mansion (here's I'm just speaking about the primary mansion, not all of the secondary ones).
Think I'll skip the outrage on this one, especially considering the vast benefit that pro brings humanity. You wonder why there's not been a WWIII? Internet porn.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
NO ONE CARES!
So it's more efficient than lighting up a red light district and thousands of seedy hotel rooms?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"And operating with Netflix's efficiency would be a best-case scenario for the porn site, Ensmenger believes"
I'd like to know why. I am not fan of the Internet Porn industry, i think its harming society and based on this article the planet but to say, "And operating with Netflix's efficiency would be a best-case scenario for the porn site, Ensmenger believes"
Seems just nakedly prejudiced. I mean does Netflix have the help of data center angels, that don't lend their divine intervention to pornhub? Do you subscribe? I thought Internet porn was almost universally free as in beer? Why would think a pornhub a sophisticated marketing machine that has to derive its revenue primarily form razor thin ad impression payments would be doing anything other than in the most efficient way possible?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So what is there revenue stream that allows them to serve up this much content? It seems like most folks streaming free videos wouldn't make the best customers for their advertisers, not to mention adblocking software.
load "linux",8,1
What about the fact that folks have a *right* to do whatever they want with their computer, their bandwidth, and their fucking life! Jezuz, did this come from the same assholes who were shaking their fingers at us over Bitcoin energy consumption? Here's a hint: go fuck yourselves. Nobody gives a two small shits about your opinion on what's "okay" for them to be using resources they paid for. If you think it's a waste, well, then we have something in common because I think all the watts/joules put into SJW hot air is a big waste of energy, too. Judgmental pricks what they are.
Did they also work out the environmental impact of all the cute kitten, epic fail, stupid human tricks, vBlogs, etc., videos as well?
Bet it is much, much higher than just porn.
Big deal.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
So, watching porn uses ONLY 0.0013 kWh per streaming hour. Just about ANYTHING else will use heaps more...like watching TV (~110W), making tea (~2 KW), driving a car (tens of KW).......
THEREFORE watching porn saves a huge amount of energy that you'd otherwise be using instead.
The vanguard of the antiporn antisex puritan movement has shifted from the old stodgy religious right to the new left. You can see it as the arguments have gradually shifted from destruction of morality and family values to the exploitation of women and harm to their psychological health and ridiculous appeals to the environment that porn, sex and prostitution entail according to them. Harlotry is now sex slavery. The sunday school marm has transformed into the wizened womyn's studies professor. One argument they both seem to use is the crime factor though. The more things change I guess.
okay, now compare that to pulling oil out of the ground, cracking it, chemically treating it, turning it into plastic, moulding it, and shipping it across the world half a dozen times
for each stream
hull hypothesis schmull schmypothesis
StoneCypher is Full of BS
A quick check with my calculator shows that the 11000 number assumes 60W incandescent bulbs.
Which is all well and good, but do people still use incandescent light bulbs?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
they could be streaming Buzzfeed videos.
It's a porn shift. Trees are spared because magazines not published anymore. All the books that once populated shelves in "adult" book stores. Then there's the peep shows that are gone as well with their dark booths. I knew one Tech Sergeant when I was in the Air Force who have over 500 8mm (the old reel type) films. The simple fact is that streaming is replacing traditional porn materials. I can't help but believe it's environmentally better.
...all the kleenex waste going into landfills (can spooge be recycled?) or tube socks needing extra washing.
-Styopa
Thought this article was going to be about all the kleenix in landfills...
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..
"We'll leave a light on for you!" I never understood before!
Bruce Perens.
wasting all the power?!!
or, in more readable scientific number, about 6GWh, which is not that much really, for a entire year for a worldwide service.
"By 2016, the number of visitors had almost doubled, to 23 billion" There are only 7.6 billion people on the planet, half don't have internet much less pornhub. How can 23 billion visitors or really is it a repeat business. And so what, it's porn or hookers, what uses more fuel?
23 billion visitors, totaling 4.59 billion hours (275.4 billion minutes), which means on average each visitor only spent 11.97 (~12) minutes per visit.
That checks out, considering it takes like 5 minutes before finding something I want to fap to.
Why not measure the waste in FB, Tweeter, You Tube and all those wasted pics uploaded?
It is very interesting, but they never do a cost/ benefit analysis when they do this kind of thing. When I buy alcohol I spend money, and I may damage my health to some degree, but I get relaxation and possibly social interaction. I get a respite from brutal reality. What does mankind get from its energy use from pornography? They never ask. Ask.
E Proelio Veritas.
Hey, some of us old-timers used to sneakily buy copies of Playboy or Oui. Those cost like $10 in today's money each. And the environmental costs of 200 pages of glossy paper and ink (about 1.5 pounds ) is a whole lot more than the 0.0014 kilograms of CO2 used to run an iPad for 20 minutes.
I agree that network transfers are better for the environment than hunks of plastic, esp. with the associated costs of transport. However, streaming is needlessly wasteful when you could have local copies. Streaming is a choice dictated by businesses who want to control every single listening experience -- we already had our environmentally friendly (pirate)? copies before that.
Oldskool radio is great in that you don't need to waste transfer capacity for every single copy received. Live streaming with broadcast packets would be great, but AFAIK it's not feasible.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The first Year In Review post in 2013 tabulated that 14.7 billion people visited the site.
Something keeps telling me that this number may be a little bit inflated.
Real life is overrated.
There is no environment cost to internet porn. People are going to watch porn. Instead of all the plastic wrap, cases, CDs, DVDs, traffic to blockbuster/other porn renting store, gasoline, emissions....now there is just streaming porn. Yes, data centers use electricity. So does everything else.
You can't bloody well note that online streaming is a win for the environment, then claim the exception is porn because people stream a *lot* of it.
Is that billions of people or visits to the sites? There is a big difference.
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...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Yes but is it a coincidence that a short time after the local video rental store dropped the porn section, it went out of business?
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
Oh, it is. For reference, at the current estimated energy cost of BTC, 6 GWh is roughly power equivalent to mining 12.2 blocks (2 hours).
Visitors != visits. English. Learn it, motherfuckers.
it would be if they used these.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
... what would the people be doing if they were not surfing the porn sites? How detrimental to the environment would what ever they might be doing be? In other owrds, you cannot just take the environment cost or surfing porn sites as if it were an isolated event, it is not. It is part of a person's day lifestyle and should be analyzed as such.
There's also the energy taken up running the computer systems used to view all that porn. That's a considerably larger amount.
Kinda not worried about online porn bringing the world to the brink of apocalypse anytime soon with Google using as much power as 1,000 PornHubs!
Ah, a new unit of power measurement. The "PornHub"!
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I thought this was going to be about all the extra tissue and paper towels used, and extra wash cycles for socks and towels.
through all these fucking years taken into account?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Hmm... What kind of lightbulbs?
It seems like a thinly veiled attempt to win points by "proving" something unpopular should be even more unpopular because it consumes energy. Would porn be more OK for the author if it defied the laws of thermodynamics and actually produced more energy than it consumed?
I'd go out on a limb and guess that any given year of porn in the VHS distribution era consumed more energy and resources than the last 3 years of porn streamed online. The video cassettes, the packaging, the shipping, the trips in the car to the rental place -- the energy consumption was huge.
This is an idiotic study, an almost perfect example of content-free virtue signaling. Please the feminists by finding a heretofore unique criticism of pornography. Please the anti-technology environmentalists that the Internet is a source of valueless energy consumption. The only thing the author didn't do was customize the study to somehow demonstrate to conservatives a way to be environmentalists by blaming gay porn for wasting energy.
I'll admit that it's a fairly novel way to create a new way to exploit environmentalism as politics -- simply do some math on the energy consumption of your enemy and decry their waste of natural resources.
There's nothing better on a cold winter's night than a freshly home brewed coffee and beating his dick to free porn like it just stole his microsoft dividend check.
People overlook that even the worst porn is pretty good for the intended purpose. So porn video sites offer a kind of concentrated quality, if you will.
As you say there's a lot of content on every other kind of streaming service that will never do anyone any good.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Go back to porn newspapers, for environment sake! Paper is a carbon sink, all you have under your bed is not in the atmosphere.
It was officially going to be the PornHub/Hour unit, but the average person only lasted 12 minutes at a time so it became the PornHub/Minute unit of energy.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
it's a rounding error
5.967 million kWh is about 6GWh
Bitcoin uses 29,000GWh according to PowerCompare.co.uk, other estimates are higher.
That's about 0.02%
1.3W to stream a video is pretty good.
In terms of the power used for me to watch it at home, 1.3W wouldn't even power the fibre terminator bringing the internet connection to my house.
Then there's the router, the network switch, the wireless AP, my laptop... It's probably at least 50W
My phone uses more than that watching a video, let alone streaming it over wifi.
Of course that 1.3W isn't going to include any of the electrical cost to send the data all over the world though. I assume it's only the cost of powering their data centres divided by the number of concurrent streams.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
the USA used 4 petawatt-hours in 2015. So pornhub used 0.000006 petawatt-hours....so what?
Was expecting this to be the top comment, and then you didn't even link to the original.
The Internet is for Porn
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
the thousands of gallons of sperm wasted
Wasted? Do you have a better use in mind?
I would love to hear your ideas.....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I thought the same thing. Electricity is increasingly becoming 100% green as more non-coal power plants come online, where as cars (gasoline) aren't. Once everyone has an electric car, that metric might change, but for now you can probably do a lot to help save the planet by staying home and jerking off.
Alternately, I suppose if you were REALLY into conserving energy, you could call up all the guys in your neighborhood and invite them to come jerk off with you. That way, you wouldn't have to power dozens of computers all just surfing for porn.
Ma always said I was full of great ideas....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Cryptocurrency.
How much power has THAT sucked down in the past how many years?
Enough to offset the cessation of incandescent bulb usage for 8-10 years?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If Pornhub went away, if people stopped watching porn, it would not save any energy. They'd just go watch something else. Then we'd get 6 million kWh spent on watching Netflix or cat videos.
23 Billion people! That's amazing! Especially since there are only around 7 billion people in the world.
Wow that’s like 4.93 Deloreans.
Isn't 11k lightbulbs like 1 bitcoin worth of power?
Sure, there is some environmental impact to internet porn. But just as the impact of mainstream streaming video is lower than that of video rentals and purchased disks, the impact of streamed porn is lower. The preponderance of flesh-colored pixels doesn't change that.
5.9 GWh/8760 hours in a year is 673 MW = 6.7 million lightbulbs at 100 W each.