Porn Beats Search Engines in Internet Traffic 291
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?"
Where is autopr0n? (Score:5, Funny)
Sir, please take a bow.
Hi! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Hi! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hi! (Score:5, Informative)
A couple of pay sites have "hosted galleries" that people can submit to TGPs without doing the work themselves, and I've linked to some of those with my own ID. However, I've never made a dime off of it. Autopr0n is not a big website. Analog doesn't track unique users, but his to the main page (rather then the framing and redirect pages) total about 3-4k per day. Autopr0n makes about $50-$60 a month, which is just barely enough to cover the bandwidth bill.
I'm hoping that my traffic will go up (The current connection can deal with 10-20 times the traffic before I need to upgrade, which could mean $500-$1000 a month), and since I've moved the server, it has been steadily from about 2000 hits per day after the downtime to 4000 today. It used to be I could only handle 3k hits per day, or 200mb. Now I'm serving out 4k hits/day and about 255mb/day.
So yeah, It's not making much money now, but I'm hopping that it'll grow fast enough to be able to pay for rent and food after I graduate in August
Re:Hi! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hi! (Score:3, Funny)
We're all gonna be pumping out a lot more today...
Re:Where is autopr0n? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can we really trust a person like this? So much for me being raised with "the US is a free country, not like the Soviet Union" that was beaten into our heads at school over a
Re:autopr0n is down (Score:2, Funny)
It's back up. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's back up. (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks for the mammories
I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Gathering Data. Now there's a nice euphemism for sucking down porn.
Re:I wonder (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Funny)
Wally (to boss in meeting): I need to to test our system by downloading as many large files as possible from the busiest servers I can find on the web.
Wally (to Dilbert after meeting): Damn. I came this close to making it my job to surf for porn.
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Funny)
Endlessly opening windows (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Endlessly opening windows (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
not for anyone with an iota of common sense (Score:2, Informative)
Re:not for anyone with an iota of common sense (Score:2, Informative)
Re:not for anyone with an iota of common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Huh (Score:5, Informative)
But really, you should get a popup blocker. Google toolbar does it, as does mozilla, and most other non-sucky browsers.
Re:Endlessly opening windows (Score:2)
Shouldn't this story be from (Score:5, Funny)
What's next? Water is wet! Film at 11.
Re:Shouldn't this story be from (Score:2)
MOD PARENT DOWN... oops, it's the article! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Follow the cite. (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, it looks like they've got a FAQ [hitwise.com] 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.
Consider the technology instead. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Erm (Score:2)
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN... oops, it's the article! (Score:2, Insightful)
Who are they baiting? The anti-pr0n movement? Focus on the Family and their lot?
I'll admit their statistics, like most statistics in the mainstream media, are vauge and useless.
But also consider this. How much of your time do you spend online searching for stuff, and how much of your time do you spend looking at the stuff you were searching for (pr0n or otherwise)? Using a search engine is a means to an end. It would be more suprising to find out that most people spend most of their time searchi
New Search Engine? (Score:2)
Re:New Search Engine? (Score:2)
The real reason (Score:5, Funny)
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.
WTF ever (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:WTF ever (Score:3, Informative)
Not according to this article [spiegel.de] (in German).
Es ist der siebte Tag der Quarantäne. Morgen, am achten, ist Luissa Rosso für eine Analszene gebucht. Die erste seit dem Aids-Ausbruch.
Translation: It's the seventh day of the quarantine. Tomorrow, on the eighth, L.R. is booked for an anal sce
I disagree... (Score:3, Funny)
I bet one MILLION dollars...
I bet one BILLION dollars that spam out does porn.
Re:I disagree... (Score:2)
As for your bet, I dunno. Spam accounts for a great many messages, but each is comparatively small, at least from what I've seen. The idea is to send out as many messages as possible, so I'm not sure if they'd want to send images directly in the spam, and certainly not videos. (I never look at the spam, so I can't tell for sure.)
Porn, on the other hand, is all about pictures and videos, which are massive bandwidth hogs.
I guess you could add
Re:I disagree... (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Yeah, but... (Score:2)
Before I setup autopr0n, I probably surfed for porn about two or three times a week. but I get spam every day. And a lot of it now is that damn image-laden crap.
Closer look... (Score:5, Interesting)
Damn cybersquatters (Score:2, Informative)
No (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, because one of the DOJ's stated goals is to make sure internet bandwidth isn't overloaded.
Re:No (Score:2, Insightful)
If you can't convince them with logic, baffle them with bullshit so that they want what you want them to.
Who cares if porn is often looked at as long
Obligatory Simpsons... (Score:5, Funny)
Marge: Does anyone need that much porno?
Homer:
Re:Obligatory Simpsons... (Score:3, Funny)
One of the heroes in my electrical engineering department is a grad student who was fixated on Internet porn in the mid 1990s. One weekend, he accidentally left his software running -- it was a porn crawler which downloaded as many JPEGs and MPEGs as it could. When the admins returned on Monday they found several gigabytes of pornography under this guy's uid (apparently they had no quotas).
Sure that doesn't sound too impressive, but back then a gigabyte was a lot.
Re:Obligatory Simpsons... (Score:3, Interesting)
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
The scary part... (Score:3, Funny)
That is scarier than it looks, because think about the aftermath: geeks playing follow the leader with Microsoft (oh, I don't know) and making their own open-source, free porn web site to compete with Microsoft.
Finally, open source wins.
Re:The scary part... (Score:2)
Re:The scary part... (Score:3, Funny)
I mean....EWWWW
That's funny (Score:3, Funny)
Adult sites make great benchmarks (Score:5, Interesting)
See...adult sites actually CAN be useful. "Yes sir, I understand what this looks like, but I'm really doing research"
not-tied-behind-my-back-dept. (Score:5, Funny)
And using only one hand, no less.
-yawn- (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
VHS (Score:2)
much like the Polaroid Camera
Re:VHS (Score:4, Funny)
Like the parent said: porn.
Re:VHS (Score:2)
Re:-yawn- (Score:2, Insightful)
Porn and war.
Better ways to get off and kill. Makes me proud to be human.
Re:-yawn- (Score:5, Interesting)
Coopersmith's 1998 paper [tamu.edu], sadly, is not illustrated.
Closer look (Score:3, Interesting)
"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. [theregister.co.uk]
i need a job at DOJ (Score:5, Funny)
Dream job.. DOJ.. all day "taking closer looks at the porn industry"..
on behalf of the industry (Score:2)
Why the DOJ emphasis on porn now (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Why the DOJ emphasis on porn now (Score:2)
Do they mean (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Better article on online pr0n industry and search (Score:2, Informative)
More than 80% isn't porn? (Score:2)
Thus, the rebound in jobs (Score:5, Funny)
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?
An Observation (Score:5, Funny)
Nielsen's reports seem to have lower numbers (Score:3)
Nielsen//NetRatings said 25% of US Internet users visited porn sites [itfacts.biz] (results for December only), but who knows, maybe people behaved differently when tracked by that NN app.
Re:Nielsen's reports seem to have lower numbers (Score:2)
When Ashcroft gets to Heaven (Score:5, Funny)
Jesus will hold his arms while Sam Adams punches him.
Porn Built the internet (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Yeap (Score:3, Informative)
This is a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is a problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I do not wish to enter into a debate over whether or not porn should be allowed, but rather to point out the dangerous assumption in the parent post.
A very high number of people have the observed behavior of driving while under the influence of alcohol. This does not mean that this action is "A Good Thing". This is exactly the cause of many of the problems in our society: justification without considering the ramifications on society. Many kids have sex while still in Junior High or High School. This doesn't mean we just "let kids be kids", because there are many dangers to consider: teenage pregnancy, abortion (and little publicized fact that there are medical dangers in addition to any moral considerations), and sexually transmitted diseases.
This is why the United States is not a pure democracy. A true, pure democracy is an evil thing because then whatever... I repeat whatever the majority rules, that's what we get. So if the majority of the people in country believed that every Linux programmer should be taken out and shot, well, then a whole lot of us would be dead or running away to New Zealand. Therefore, the founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights to protect against abuses and instituted a representative republic to make it harder for drastic changes. There are times when absolutes and standard codes (do not murder, do not steal) can protect us from ourselves. It was when such laws were forgotten that the German society was led to murder millions of innocent people in World War II.
Now granted, this is an extreme example, but once you start down the slippery slope of justification and compromise, where does one draw the line? Think about it.
Re:This is a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm, you do realize that compromise is one of the central components of our form of government? It is deliberately difficult to accomplish anything in government without the support of others (both houses of Congress, the administration, etc) leading inevitably to compromises.
As for justification, well, we justify everything, even those "absolute and standard codes". A person's j
Re:This is a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Very true, however, any society is established on a set of principles with which to guide its decisions. In the United States, it is the Bill of Rights. There are also other basic priniciples that have formed the society known as America: strong families, hard work, being considerate of others, dignity of life. If you sacrifice these principles, you being to erode the basis on which your society lives. Once this foundation is gone, the society falls into anarchy (do that which most benefits you as an in
Re:This is a problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that is a very narrow world view. While I agree that slavery is wrong, that is very much a western philosophy. Most of Asia believes very strongly in a class-based system in which it is morally wrong to try to be anything other what you were born to be. This is, in our view, border-line slavery, but for them, it is the right thing to do.
As for homosexuality, if it degenerates the fabric of the family and confuses the natural functioning and innate differences of the sexes, then, yes, it is morally wrong -- according to nature and religious views.
Free-love? Well, if you don't find it morally objectionable to sit idly by while people live lifestyles that will lead to an early death from AIDS, then okay, its not morally wrong. Fortunately, Uganda did not take this view point, and through the teaching of abstinence, has turned from having one of the highest rates of infection in Africa to having one of the smallest. To use a parellel, if you knew a bridger had been washed out, would you not try to warn drivers heading toward that bridge?
Atheism? Well, the same reasoning can apply. If you believe, as I do, that people who do not believe in God and His son Jesus Christ are going to spend an eternity in hell, would it not be morally irresponsible for me to not at least try to warn others of the impending danger even if they won't agree with the problem.
The often touted "every way is the right way" philosophy would actually come to my defense. After all, it only matters on your sincerity not on your accuracy, right? (sarcasm off) Just because we in America hold personal libery in very high regard does not mean that everyone sees that as the highest virtue. Christianity would teach that our slavery to sin, not man, is our critical issue.
I do not expect you to agree with me on any of these points.
Re:This is a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are an idiot.
Lower caste people in India today may believe that reachin
Re:This is a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that is what some sectors are saying about Uganda, but it is far from the truth. I would like to point you to the following article: Uganda Aids education 'working' [bbc.co.uk]. Note some of the quotes from this article:
Re:This is a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wherever you want. If you think X, Y, and Z are 'bad' then you simply ban those things, and nothing else. That's why DUI is illegal, and drinking is not.
Also Nazi Germany was definitely not a democracy. There was no 'slippery slope' of jew-killin' that lead to the holocaust. Everyone with decision making power wanted to get rid fo them.
Closer Look (Score:4, Funny)
How close of a look are they going to take? Do they need volunteers to help with this "investigation"?
This is exactly why... (Score:4, Funny)
About the DOJ... (Score:2, Funny)
Porn and Search Engines (Score:4, Funny)
going after porn... (Score:2, Insightful)
Healthy people + the weirdos spanking the monkey occasionally (or everyday:) )
I think porn is healty (I am not talking about sado/sodomist/kiddie/raping stuff - just "normal" porn movies ), and wives and husbands should take a walk to the videorental booth/machine/whatever and play with a dildo or whatever fits instead of cheating on the SO or going after
Catharsis theory isn't true (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Background on Porn Industry (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/por
They have it in Quicktime and Real formats.
I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't see actually paying for any of it. It's the same stuff over and over. None of it is particularly compelling. Even when you travelled down the pr0n foodchain to the fetish/bondage/whatnot sites, you find content by people who wouldn't know erotic if it, well, bit them in the ass.
And the amateur porn... wassup with that? Dubious looking people in poor lit situations rehashing the six or seven basic porno poses. Somewhere there's a Porno For Dummies book these people are reading.
And then there's the crossdresser sites. Honestly, do I share the same planet with these guys? Some of them aren't even trying! I mean, what the fuck is this? [geocities.com]. He's not even trying!!! What's the point?? Aaaa! Aaaa!
Well, (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Tip of iceberg? (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering majority of porn sites are totally blocking any google references this number is telling something...
What is H.I.P. ? (Score:3, Funny)
So all of us said "What is H.I.P.?"
To that our manager replied " Honor, Integrity, and Pride."
It quickly became known as "Honor In Porn" because over half of our clients and maybe most of our bandwith (2Gbps+) was taken up by porn sites.
Re:There's more to life, really. (Score:2)
Or you could, you know . . . step outside ; )
Re:There's more to life, really. (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously reducing Testosterone over a long therm also tends to make males flabby and reduce muscular mass, unless it's done by a calculated combination of physical and mental stress (as in basic training), thereby often decreasing the male's chance of attracting a partner. Without an appropriate other (not necessarily significant, although personally, I'm picky), they have to use their remaining sex drive solo, therefore requiring more porn.
Jesus christ (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:There's more to life, really. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:DOJ? Should be the DOD! (Score:3, Funny)
As opposed to spending all day looking at porn and not getting paid to do it.
There's another way to do that (Score:3, Funny)
Re:DOJ? Should be the DOD! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:ARG (Score:4, Interesting)
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.