The Last Podcast Opinionated Web 2.0 News and Commentary

Only 1% of Internet is Porn

Are you as surprised as I am? According to this Associated Press report:

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) — About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft are sexually explicit, according to a U.S. government-commissioned study.

Government lawyers introduced the study in court this month as the Justice Department seeks to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which required commercial Web sites to collect a credit card number or other proof of age before allowing Internet users to view material deemed “harmful to minors.”

Well, I guess it is only 1% – who would have thought. I think, though, it speaks more of the preception people have of the internet than antyhing else. Porn is big business on the net, but there are now so many other businesses and with the rise of blogs, pornographers just can’t put gallery sites up as fast as people can blog. Looks like I am not the only one who is surprised.

As for this site, porn is good for traffic. I had a post mentioning that “assparade” was a big search term on technorati a while back. Still getting traffic from that.

Here is a bit more from the article, mostly about the methodology,which goes back to the supoena google received to hand users search data to the DOJ:

Justice Department lawyers Theodore Hirt and Raphael Gomez declined to comment Tuesday on Stark’s findings.

Stark prepared the report based on information the Justice Department obtained through subpoenas sent to search engine companies and Internet service providers.

Google refused one such subpoena for 1 million sample queries and 1 million Web addresses in its database, citing trade secrets. A judge limited the amount of information the company had to provide.

Stark also examined a random sample of search-engine queries. He estimated that 1.7 percent of search results at Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, MSN and Yahoo Inc. are sexually explicit and 1.1 percent of Web sites cataloged at Google and MSN fall in that category.

About 6 percent of searches yield at least one explicit Web site, he said, and the most popular queries return a sexually explicit site nearly 40 percent of the time.

But filters blocked 87 percent to 98 percent of the explicit results from the most popular searches on the Web, Stark found.

Technorati tags: porn, sex

Even if 1% of internet is porn, the volume of traffic that the 1% contributes is quite significant. If you look at carrier-neutral facilities in the western US, between 80-88% of the moving average of traffic on Cogent is from pornographic websites.