Social Networks Are The New Porn
Since the rise of the internet in the 1990s, pornography has ruled the internet. While difficult to measure accurately, the online pornography industry is estimated to be worth about $1 billion, and counts for about 13% of website visits in America (compared to search engines, which account for 7%). But it appears that new uses are about to overtake pornography in terms of online popularity.
The Economist is reporting that according to Hitwise data, pornography-related web activity is decreasing in America (as a proportion of total visits), as more and more people are opting to participate in social networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Since the data presented is limited to February, a definitive conclusion is hard to make, but traffic to these social networking sites may have already overtaken traffic to sex-related sites, and if not, will probably do so any day now.
...pornographic content is often the first to take advantage of new media, from photography to videocassettes to satellite television. "Sex is a virus that infects new technology first," as Wired put it back in 1993. Once a new medium becomes popular, its usage is no longer dominated by porn.
The resulting implication is that the internet has matured as a medium for disseminating information, and therefore people are switching from using the internet for pornography to other uses.
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Reader Comments (7)
- super rats, April 21, 2007
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Or maybe it shows that porn has become Porn 2.0 and activity has moved in part to these net communities. If porn truly does take advantage of new technology, then why wouldn't it spread to social networking sites? The article alludes to that and I suspect it's one of the major drivers of social networking.
- Michael M @ freshome, April 21, 2007
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Usually people who love p0rn are shy people, and with social networks, they feel more safe behind their monitor, chatting with girls.Using a social network they can find a girl they like, and make their p0rn fantasy a reality. :)
- Liam Victor, April 21, 2007
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Much of porn traffic has found other sources such as bit-torrent, and the social networks themselves have many little dark corners.
- Douglas Karr, April 21, 2007
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Thanks for sharing this!
- engtech, April 21, 2007
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Agreed with Michael M. People are hooking up on social networks like crazy. Facebook/MySpace are killing the pay and free dating sites. http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com
- kenya, April 22, 2007
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the headline caught my eye, for sure...it's funny... and the article is quite good.
- Leon, April 26, 2007
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What you write is understandable, however, there are siters such as ours, MyCircles.com where we try to provide our members different targeted "Circles" that allow our users to differentiate between sections where sexual and adult content is permitted and other areas where the networking environment does not contain adult or sexual content.
It is tough to walk the line between porn and adult content, especially when the content is user-driver, but we are doing our best! To make sure content is only viewed by appropriate members we require an age verification which in our opinion should be done by all sites that contain content which would be inappropriate for minors.
