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The Internet

What Percentage of Internet Traffic is Pr0n? 141

Posted by Cliff from the the-internet's-hottest-asset dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "We all joke about how much of the Internet's traffic is porn, but are there are credible studies that give a definitive answer, or at least make a reasonably intelligent guess? Looking at the amount of movie clips and entire flicks posted to the '*.erotica.*' newsgroups on a daily basis, I have to believe that porn is a significant percentage of the traffic, but is it 10%, 20%, 50%? More? I've tried to research this on my own, but Google keeps sending me to sites with porn, not site about porn. (No, really!)"
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What Percentage of Internet Traffic is Pr0n? More

What Percentage of Internet Traffic is Pr0n?

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  • Equally important... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Phexro ( 9814 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:12AM (#5430601)
    Of the percentage of traffic that isn't porn, how much is warez?
    • While the binary Usenet certainly is mostly porn and warez, I would venture that the rest of the net isn't warez, in the sense of copyright-infringing distribution of software. Unless you count copyright-infringing music warez, of course.
    • I think when it comes to porn/warez, there's a far higher retention rate than other data. One of my best friends, Liz, recently married a bit of a pr0n fiend. Not only did he continuously download the stuff, but last I heard had a collection of near 400 burnt CDs of pr0n, and a few (3 I think) 80gb drives stacked with it.

      While the amounts of what he keeps probably isn't typical, I do see perhaps half the people I know keeping rather large (tens of gigs) pr0n collections.
      • Poor girl. How could she marry such a guy?
      • I have *way* (maybe 10 TB in CD form, about 2.5TB more online) more than that but I can say that anyone who collects in volume does NOT have time to view it all. At some point it just becomes very easy to obtain and it is obtained without thought or effort.

        I rent a movie, I dupe a movie. Very simple.
        • Why the hell would you want that much porn? In fact why do they want porn? Imagination people, or heaven forbid... a boy/girlfriend?!

          • Re:How much porn is stashed on peoples machines (Score:5, Interesting)

            by slaker ( 53818 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @09:51PM (#5437737)
            It sounds stupid, but porn makes for surprisingly good currency.

            I duped a couple of DVDs and my phone installer put my lines outside the multiplexer for my apartment complex. I got 56k for the first time in my life.

            When I moved I no problem getting a couple of guys to help me carry heavy things. And with my library, the fact that one of the guys wanted "tgirl" (transvestite) porn was not a problem.

            Once, on a temp gig, it even got my a contract extension.

            Everyone laughs and says "Hahaha look at the guy with the collection of dirty pictures"... and then when no one is looking they turn around and say "Hey, do you have that movie with Janine and Jenna and they're in Tuxedos..."

            • commodity money (Score:5, Interesting)

              by urbazewski ( 554143 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @11:57PM (#5438272) Homepage Journal
              Ha! When I taught intermediate macroeconomics and we got to monetary theory I used to poll students as to what commodity, other than gold, they think we would use if we went back to commodity money (as opposed to useless paper fiat currency). For example, there's a famous article about a WWII prisoner of war camp that used cigarettes as currency, and vodka and cigarettes (as well as US $) were used for a while after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Numerous students answered drugs, and one made a good argument for prescription drugs (in our aging society), but no one ever answered pr0n that I recall. Or porn for that matter.

              So is there a going rate for this stuff in the barter economy? I remember some econ professors predicting that the internet would drive to price of pr0n to zero when I was in grad school in the early 90s. They also predicted that emmigration from Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall would drive the price of brains in the US to zero. . .

              • would drive the price of brains in the US to zero. . .

                Some things are so rare they will always be valuable :-)

              • Not everyone has the opportunity or talent to find what they're looking for. Some people are cowed by the idea grabbing the stuff they really want. Asking for "Fat Grannies Volume 3" probably a little harder than picking up the lastest "Chasin' Pink".

                One of my (female) office mates found out about my "collection" and asked for some gay male bondage stuff. Given that she's a young mom, I don't think she's got a lot of time to visit the sex shops where that stuff is easy to come by.

              • Porn might be popular, but it won't work without major other changes to our culture. I know many who are opposed to porn (often, but not always on religious grounds), and who will refuse to traffic in it. They would prefer to be left out of transactions than to have to hold some form of porn. Add in all the people who privatly have porn, but refuse to admit it, and it won't work.

                Porn is easy to copy, and with modern technology it is often difficult to tell which is the copy (in the case of digital origionals, impossiable). So we get the Sally and Joe video which nobdoy has be one person, but as soon as it is used as barter, both people have it, and both will then use it, decreasing the value by half.

                Money works because there is a limit to how much there is total. That limit can (should? I'm not an expert) expand, so long as the change is minor. Gold works because there is only so much in the ground, and it is work to get at it. It happens to be deseriable to many people, so people won't object to getting it. Because of conterfitting laws (that are enforced) currency without a backing works, though with less than 100 years of testing I don't want to say it works well in all situations.

    • Re:Equally important... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hafree ( 307412 )
      I would venture to guess that the vast majority of internet bandwidth being utilized is due to piracy. A year or so ago when some of the largest illegal movie/music/software sites were raided and taken down my authorities, sites such as internettrafficreport.com showed as much as a 90% decrease in traffic in a very short period of time. Startling...

  • Well..... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Peridriga ( 308995 )
    Probably all :-)

    What else is there out on the net?
  • well if you really want to go based on percentage, there's just too many pages out there which are porn. The ratio isnt one which can be expressed well in percent. You know what I'm saying, right? 100%

    • Re:Margin of Error (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JWSmythe ( 446288 )
      Too many people thought that putting up more pages to be caught by the search engines are the way to market.. That's unfortunate.. Search for a few adult key words, and you'll find thousands of garbage pages. You may accidently even find one good one..

      Mainstream just isn't the same.. Well, except for the mainstream words that keep showing up on those bad porn pages.. Like someone searching for Microsoft Service Packs really wants porn?? It'd be nice if they'd just think.

  • 99% pr0n (Score:2, Funny)

    by Numeric ( 22250 )
    I think that leaves .8% which is reading spam mail about pr0n and .2% work related, which is forwarding humorous sex jokes to friends from my work email account. Those are just my internet usage.

  • My guess.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by tlund ( 42064 )
    "Normal" movies and tv-series takes up alot more bandwith today than, tha say, 2 years ago. I think porn takes up a smaller part of the total bandwith today than it did earlier because of this, but its still a substatial amount. The ratio of porn vs. "normal" movies is still high..
    • Um, they make much more pr0n nowdays. We're seeing something in the lines of 5 pr0ns per every movie & game release combined.

      Also, pr0n gets released in steady pace, meaning, there's no 'periods' of much pr0n like we have in game releases. What was the first release at 24th of december? Pr0n. What was the first release 1th of 2003? Pr0n. ...and you know, pr0n is the ultimate 'money' between nerds, and it really works:

      'Me want your newest game'

      'Well, what do you have?'

      'I have this semi-new game, agreed?'

      'Sorry, got that months ago...'

      'Well, I have "Briand Pumper's Pink Pussycats..."'

      'Gimeeeeeeeeeeeeee...' ...and everybody is happy.

  • Get it right (Score:5, Funny)

    by infonography ( 566403 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:21AM (#5430646) Homepage
    It's not the size it's the quality.

    Yeah I know, she lied.

  • you mean.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by linuxbert ( 78156 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:21AM (#5430650) Homepage Journal
    Theres more then just porn on the net?
    wow. My brain just exploded..

  • Gogle seemed to find info without a problem... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Matt Amato ( 2494 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:23AM (#5430660)
    I did a quick search for "percentage of porn internet usage" on google. I got a wealth of sites about porn and internet percentages relating to porn, I didn't get any porn sites themselves. Another option is to turn on google filtering so it won't show the porn sites (I had filtering off for my search and it still worked great) I don't know why you were getting only porn sites themselves.

    Matt

  • Some numbers (Score:5, Informative)

    by Devil's BSD ( 562630 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:25AM (#5430666) Homepage
    According to this site I googled up [ldolphin.org], "between 8 and 15 percent of the Net's surfers visit adult sites each week." I have no idea what overall internet usage statistics are, so I think I'll let someone else analyze these numbers further.

    • P2P stastics and optimization (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jasonrocks ( 634868 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @04:09AM (#5431227)
      I found a paper that relates to your question. It analyzes p2p traffic which accounts for a significant portion of web traffic. It shows that although music files are the most popular downloads, they account for a significantly small amount downloaded. Still images also count for nothing. The bulk of the downloads are popular movies and applications/games. Its' finding conclude that by having a 200 GB cache for storing popular downloads, it is plausible for an ISP to achieve a 67% decrease in P2P traffic and a 50% thoroughput bandwidth download decrease. My conclusion is that most bandwidth from pr0n is in the form of movies and some video games. This survey did not address what was pr0n, but it is a good starting point as to where all that bandwidth is going. The website in question is located here [iwcw.org]
      I'd say this is a good starting point for analyzing traffic and curtailing or perhaps more preferably eliminating users who abuse bandwidth usage.

    • Re:Some numbers (Score:3, Interesting)

      by larien ( 5608 )
      That means nothing. Even if 15% of surfers visit adult sites, they could only stay there for 5 minutes, get their kicks and move on, meaning that the % of traffic is tiny. Alternatively, 10% could spend 3 hours a day downloading porn, meaning that a large portion of bandwidth is used up by it.

  • A real answer (Score:4, Informative)

    by polyiguana ( 76056 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:29AM (#5430684)
    Thank you Google Groups [google.com].

    Here's an article from ZDNet [com.com] that answers this question. It dates from 1999, but is still likely to be accurate, as the commercial web has grown leaps and bounds (along with the porn industry) since then.

    Of course, this still doesn't include Usenet, P2P (which in 1999 was basically Napster), or anything like that. Usenet should be easy to calculate through file sizes and headers if you have access to an NNTP server, and I would guess that the majority of traffic on Usenet (by volume) consists of movies, CD images, and TV shows, not porn.

    According to a study conducted by Dr. Steve Lawrence and Dr. C. Lee Giles for the NEC Research Institute, the Web contains about 800 million pages encompassing about 15 terabytes of data and about 180 million images. Contrary to popular opinion that the Web's a haven for porn, though, the study found that only 1.5 percent of Web sites contain pornographic content.

    • Re:A real answer (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mbogosian ( 537034 ) <<matt> <at> <arenaunlimited.com>> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @02:15AM (#5430853) Homepage
      "Contrary to popular opinion that the Web's a haven for porn, though, the study found that only 1.5 percent of Web sites contain pornographic content."

      I think the intention of the original poster's question was related to bandwidth used rather than absolute content size. I'm not surprised by the 1.5% quoted in the article. However, the 1.5% figure offers no insight into the popularity of porn sites vs. other content.

      That being said, an absolute bandwidth percentage will probably be skewed in the other direcation as porn probably takes up more disk space per website than most other sites (except for warez, I would guess), just because the medium is necessarily richer (more movies/pics than text).

      I guess the real question is how much money are all consumers paying for porn (i.e., is the average consumer subsidizing a few users who consume a lot of bandwidth for porn, or is it negligible)? Should porn be treated differently (more like Pay-Per-View TV)? Should there be a market-imposed (as opposed to state-imposed) "sin tax" applied to bytes or are all bytes created equal? Should my apt-get upgrade cost as much as a wget http://sluts-r-us.com/big/ass/movie/archive/hillar y_clinton.mpg?

      I have no idea what the answers are, I just thought I'd pose the questions....

      • Should my apt-get upgrade cost as much as a wget http://sluts-r-us.com/big/ass/movie/archive/hillar y_clinton.mpg?

        I don't know about you, but think the latter should be so heavily taxed that it never gets downloaded, if only for the sake of humanity at large...

      • Sample Usenet values (Score:4, Insightful)

        by polyiguana ( 76056 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @05:30AM (#5431425)
        I think the intention of the original poster's question was related to bandwidth used rather than absolute content size. I'm not surprised by the 1.5% quoted in the article. However, the 1.5% figure offers no insight into the popularity of porn sites vs. other content.

        While I don't have actual values for the Web (which would be hard to get), here are some statistics from an ISP that runs a newsgroup server [op.net]. It's a bit skewed because they don't carry the high bandwidth stuff like movies, warez, or even mp3s, but it's worth a shot.

        Of course, the major Usenet providers, like EasyNews [easynews.com], Giganews [giganews.com], and RemarQ [remarq.com] would never publish these statistics, because they would expose themselves for what they are, and why people pay for them. It certainly isn't for the text files or the discussion, that's for sure.

      • i would believe the 1.5% figure to be wrong too, because there are signifigant number of GENERATED sites that have mostly generated bs data&links to another generated bs data pages, and a freaky number of porno adverts. sure, they're not porno pages but porno adverts are only thing worth looking there..

        run a search for mame roms, warez, or anything like that and you'll be bound to run into dozens of those sites on google(they're pretty easy to filter out though if you spend some time playing with googleapi since they repeat themselfs and have the adverts with same ?id's, because most of them belong just few guys who should have their asses kicked sooooooooo hard)..

        another point on the sites on web vs. porno traffic: most of the big traffic(movies) doesn't originate to any web pages, instead they are from private ftp's, irc, and p2p networks.

  • Stuff (Score:3, Interesting)

    by littlerubberfeet ( 453565 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:32AM (#5430701)
    First: there probably isn't a firm statistic, because of privacy. If you really needed to find out, are you looking at totals, p2p, HTTP, or what? Also, one could roughly model it based on total usedbandwith (known), user surfing habit surveys, and bandwidth sales.

    Second: what percentage of bandwidth is being used by grandmothers addicted to games.yahoo.com?

    Third: while you are you looking, can you tell me how much is wasted on spam?
    • 1. exactly! Good point.
      2. I don't think my Grandmother even knows about games.yahoo.com, and I'm not sure I want to get her addicted... good thing she doesn't read /.
      3. oddly enough, this is a more useful question than the porn one. The US is taking an active stance against spam, and the Canadian government is in the midst of informal consideration of the "spam issue". Appraising costs of UCE/UBE is important, and is easier to accomplish.

      The actual percentage of pornographic content on the "Internet" can't be measured. Aside from the legal complications in the US, imagine the difficulties in getting accurate measurments in other jurisdictions! Privacy laws, at least in those countries that care to protect privacy, would prohibit any sort of mass content scanning and enumeration. Porn, after all, exists in our perceptions. An image is an image, and the meaning carried is what is pornographic.

      You can't merely run a counter for all dirty or skungy packets... but wouldn't it be cool if you could?

  • USENET (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cerebus ( 10185 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:34AM (#5430710) Homepage
    When I was running the USENET servers of a top 100 service about 5 years ago, an average of 95% of the daily traffic by bytes was in alt.binaries.*

    Of that traffic, 80% was in alt.binaries.*erotica*.

    Total traffic as 12-14GB/day. You figure it out.

    • Re:USENET (Score:1)

      by PD ( 9577 )
      I wish that was all porn. Unfortunately, the binaries newsgroups also have the highest spam traffic.

      • Re:USENET (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <[moc.cirtceleknom] [ta] [todhsals]> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @07:09AM (#5431692)
        Yea that always confused me ... very few people are aware of usenet, and if you are using usenet to see the spam, then its obvious you know how to get porn for free, so you're about the worst target for advertising there is.

        It should work the other way around, usenet servers should advertise on porn sites :)

      • I was running Jeremy Nixon's cleanfeed on my backbone servers at its most aggressive, and I was vigilant at keeping both it and my customized filters up-to-date.

        IIRC, I was catching an estimated 90% of the spam overall. Most of what slipped by was still in alt.binaries.*, but I think it was clean enough to say that most of the traffic I was seeing was, in fact, porn.

        The comments about CD ripping and uploading today is of course accurate. But somehow I doubt people's appetite for pron has abated in recent years.
    • Here's the math!! [nerd, nerd, nerd] .95 * .80 = .76

      so.... !!!

      THE ANSWER IS 76%

      76% of the internet is porn.
      - slashdot 2003 roXors my soXors -
  • ... Downloading pr0n on my OC-48

  • What I want to know is ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by one9nine ( 526521 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @01:43AM (#5430749) Journal
    How much of it is corn? Can a brother get an ear of maize up in this mo-fo?

    This [google.com] is more like it.

  • Defining the percentage (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kasperd ( 592156 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @02:05AM (#5430824) Homepage Journal
    How do you actually define a percent of the traffic? Is there some requirement to how far the traffic must go? When I access files on an NFS server on our local net, does that count as internet traffic? (Both server and client has a real IP address i.e. not RFC 1918.) Perhaps not. Then how about me accessing computers on other universities through the the university-network, does that count as internet traffic? How about when I access messages on our newsserver which is somewhere on the university-network, does that count as internet traffic? How about when I post something, does that count? How about postings that nobody ever read? (But that might not be possible.) How about when I tunnel most of my traffic through ssh to the university, does that count twice? (Or more because of the blowup in size because of me using X11 forwarding, or does X11 forwarding not count even if used to display pr0n?) And how would you find out what I was portforwarding anyway? And if you do not think access to a local newsserver acrosss the university network counts, then how about access to a local newsserver at an ISP? And does all traffic count equal no matter how far it goes? And does lost packets count? Do they count twice when retransmitted? I could come up with a lot more questions, in all it is nontrivial to define the percentage, which is a requirement before you can attempt to meassure it. It really is important, because I believe the most packets being send are in fact not traveling very far, and never leaves the local network.
    • Spot on my friend

      An ISP's NNTP server gets each picture only once (usually). The ISP's customers can each get the pictures many times, putting no load on the Internet as such, only the ISP. The answer will only ever remain in the realms of hyposthesis.

    • Wow so many sources of porn! So you have it on your NFS server, and which university is this where they have porn even in the newsserver? Cool and convenient local access to your pron, that's what I'm talking about!.

      Also thanks for the great tip on using SSH and X11 forwarding when viewing the pr0n, they'll never catch me now :-)
    • So what counts as p()rn?
      nudity
      genital photos
      simulated sex
      real sex
      bsdm
  • can be solved by a proper Google query? I searched Google, and all I found was Google.

    [related links]
    What percentage of responses to an Ask Slashdot question that can be solved by a proper Google querty mention something along the lines of "Use Google?"

  • Looking at the amount of movie clips and entire flicks posted to the '*.erotica.*' newsgroups on a daily basis, I have to believe that porn is a significant percentage of the traffic, but is it 10%, 20%, 50%? More?

    Just take your daily download count and multiply it by 20.

    I like your sig better than mine.

  • The real question.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by majestynine ( 605494 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @02:20AM (#5430876)
    The real question is:

    How much of it was because of $$$$exyGirl's Journal [slashdot.org] ;)

  • More Pr0n Faster (Score:5, Funny)

    by Inexile2002 ( 540368 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @02:26AM (#5430898) Homepage Journal
    I have a brother who used to be an engineer at JDS Uniphase and their unofficial slogan (in the engineering department) was "More Pr0n faster". They estimated that on one line of fiber that they were maintaining something on the order of 70% of the bandwidth was pr0n. I don't really know how they arrived at this number.

    Once, during an executive meeting one of the engineers raised the issue that really anyone building internet infrastructure was really in the mass pr0n delivery business and thus the company's 'No pr0n on the business machines' was in conflict with their main source of revenue.

    "Pornographer! Pornographer! How can you call me that?!? I don't even own a pornograph!"
    • I resemble that remark. :) Check the other posting Here [slashdot.org]

      If it wasn't for porn, I wouldn't be able to play with so many servers, and play with our fast networking equipment. I'd probably be at po-dunk hosting company exploring the wonders of my T1, and the 3 servers on it.. :)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:do this (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JWSmythe ( 446288 ) <jwsmytheNO@SPAMjwsmythe.com> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @05:13AM (#5431384) Homepage Journal
      Good guess, but wrong.. :)

      I've been watching our usage trends for years.. Highest traffic is Mondays, descdending all week until Sunday.

      Have a look at this graph http://www.voyeurweb.com/NY_BW_day.png [voyeurweb.com]

      This is our bandwidth usage at our New York 1Gb line.. (one of three). I grabbed it right from our monitoring and put it up, unmodified. Our graph reads left to right (obviously, look at the numbers). Times at the bottom are marked in Eastern.

      We follow very typical curves, that follow the workday of the typical US office worker.

      6am, people start waking up and heading to work.

      9:30am, we post our updates, which sync with the web servers at 10am (note the roughly 100Mb/s jump). We were playing with servers at 11:30 to noon, so excuse the dip. That traffic went to Florida.

      Between 1pm and 4pm, traffic dips down while people are have lunches..

      Between 4pm and 6pm, people have come back from lunch, get in some porn (usually equal to the morning peak).

      6pm to 9pm, people are driving home, having dinner with the family, playing with the kids, molesting the babysitter, hearing about headaches from the wife. Whatever they do, it's none of my business.

      9pm, traffic picks up as the kids go to bed, and the wife downs her third vodka martini and goes to bed alone. It comes up a bit (when you'd *THINK* it should be highest), until midnight to 1am, when it then drops off..

      1am to 6am, most people are asleep. Consider most of the users to be over in the European timezones.. Oh ya, and you night owls.. :)

      I know people *LOVE* their company bandwidth.. :)

      Our curves are like this every day.. The Florida and New York 1Gb lines match almost exactly. Todays peak was 342.3 in New York. That makes it 684Mb/s between Florida and New York. Add a few hundred Mb/s more for our locations in San Diego, and Los Angeles (three of them).

      BTW, I'm sure everyone would love what we put together in Los Angeles. 1Gb/s fiber between all our cabinets. No more silly 100Mb/s cables between switches. :)

      For those interested, we do free hosting for adult sites. Check out http://proadult.com [proadult.com]. If you want to get a sweet deal on bandwidth, check out http://l3vip.com [l3vip.com].. Since it's on topic, I couldn't help but advertise a little bit..

      • The question posted was how much Internet traffic is porn not how much Internet porn traffic is porn. At voynetworks, it's well into the 5 nines.

        That being said, thanks for the interesting post. A follow-up Slashdot interview with JWSmythe could ask what he and his colleagues do at work when they're not surfing for porn. 700 Club? Jerry Falwell?

      • Re:do this (Score:4, Interesting)

        by slaker ( 53818 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @11:48PM (#5438234)
        If you're a VW admin, find your webslave and beat him. I get page display errors on all the your link pages in Mozilla 1.3 on Linux and Win32.

        Love your site, though! One of the few I visit with a browser instead of perl+wget.

  • Voyeurweb vs MaeEast stats (Score:4, Informative)

    by JWSmythe ( 446288 ) <jwsmytheNO@SPAMjwsmythe.com> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @04:37AM (#5431299) Homepage Journal
    Porn is a good chunk of it.. A few years back, MaeEast had their bandwidth graphs available to the general public. At the time our usage was 10% of their total.

    Right now, our networks pull between 800Mb/s and 1Gb/s peak weekly.. 500Mb/s are just voyeurweb.com. BTW, MRTG does *NOT* like measuring that much. I have composite graphs of most of our facilities to show how they all work together, but the big graph of everything falls apart, unfortunately. I wanted to put it on our front page. :)

    We are dedicated to lots more bandwidth than that, but it's not all porn. For those interested, you can buy from l3vip.com .. We get great rates because we buy so much bandwidth

    I know of one other company that has 2Gb/s that is mostly utilized (they're begging for another 1Gb/s, but can't get it because of not paying their bills), and the majority of their traffic is porn. They have some mainstream sites, but honestly they don't use a lot of bandwidth.

    I'd be willing to bet places like Pornholio, VideoSecrets, and Hustler have a rather substantial bandwidth bill every month. They sell permission to stream video from their servers, and have a whole lot of viewers (we supply quite a from from ProAdult.com and Quantum.ProAdult.com)

    • You can try Cacti [raxnet.net]. It's a web interface in PHP built around MySQL and RRDtool, the much more flexible successor to the flexible-as-hell MRTG. A friend just showed it to me yesterday, and I'm playing now. Looks very very nice. Homepage for Oetikers RRDTool is here [ee.ethz.ch]


      • Hmmm.. Looks interesting. I'll check it out more today...

        I don't suppose it has an option for importing old MRTG data though, does it. :(
        • I bet you can. MRTG just uses a flat text file right? And you can massage data any way you want to for RRDs, I bet it's fairly easy, especially since they're both written by Tobi Oetiker.

  • Since people discovered new ways to (ab)use the internet: first warez, than mp3s and now (non-pr0n) movies...

  • look at webcollage... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dotgod ( 567913 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:21AM (#5431902)
    Take a look at webcollage [jwz.org], which is also avaliable as part of the xscreensaver project. It randomly searches the internet for pictures and displays them. I'd say out of about every 20 pictures it finds, at least 1 is pr0n.
    • From the web collage source @http://www.jwz.org/webcollage/webcollage :

      ...
      use bytes; # Larry can take Unicode and shove it up his ass sideways.
      # Perl 5.8.0 causes us to start getting incomprehensible
      # errors about UTF-8 all over the place without this.
      ...
    • I recall the more amusing (sadder?) thing about webcollage was how many of the images it pulls are just text. Hm. Like that Slashdot logo up there.

  • more than you'd think (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dieMSdie ( 24109 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @09:57AM (#5432296)
    When I was SysAdmin at a moderate-sized ISP, we built a squid cache and forced our users to surf through it via a redirect on the router.

    Out of curiousity, I often ran various scripts on the squid access logs, to see what our users were up to.

    40-45 percent of the traffic was pron or pron-related....

    Found a lot of interesting URLs that way too ;)
  • One day in December 2002 my little known website had over 30GB downloaded in a 24hr time period. This was based off of 2 mentions on BB style pr0n sites, and whatever traffic through IRC. Ended up completely saturating my friends T1 line, AT HIS WORK! oops... Needless to say, that stuff was removed. After all, free hosting does have it's shortcomings, but, I don't pay for bandwidth (thank god).
  • Fry: Wow! You got that off the internet? In my day the internet was only used to download pornography.

    Farnsworth: Actually that's still true.

    Woman: "Now that the garbage is in space, Doctor, perhaps you can help me with my sexual inhibitions."

    Man: "With gusto."

    Fry: "Aww..."

    Check out the sound clip here:
    http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/Episo deSound s/1ACV08/13.mp3

  • 100% (Score:1)

    by UtSupra ( 16971 )
    If you account for all personal tastes, the percentage is 100%. Everything is kinky to someone...
  • I figure the Internet's total traffic breaks down like this:

    30% Pr0n
    30% MP3 trading
    20% Spam
    10% Warez
    10% Everything else

    I might be a little low on the Pr0n and spam percentages, though...

  • 80% (Score:4, Informative)

    by kruczkowski ( 160872 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @02:58PM (#5434689) Homepage
    When I worked for the Army I had a sign in my office" "80% of porn goes thu the system of one company. Cisco Systems"

    The chaplin came in once and look at that for a while...

    On a side note I went to a ISP that servers up all sorts of sites. The net admin told me what they push around 3,4 GB. Once the porn servers died and the traffic that day was around 1GB.

    You figure it out.
  • Ok ok just being picky.. but that's always annoyed me.

    On a more serious vein, what % of traffic is Spam and popups? Regardless of subject matter being presented.

    Porn and Warez is the users doing, but Spam and adverts are just a nuisance.
  • No porn sites here. http://sfgate.com/net/rosenberg/0706.html http://www.nationalcoalition.org/stat.phtml?ID=53 http://www.sics.se/~psm/kr9512-015.html http://www.monroe.lib.in.us/~lchampel/netadv1.html http://www.centerfordecency.org/pornprob_stats.htm http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link9910/ 0442.html And that's just from page 1 of a well-crafted Google query.
    • Of course, I could learn to format my posts better, too :-)

      http://sfgate.com/net/rosenberg/0706.html
      http://www.nationalcoalition.org/stat.phtml?ID=5 3
      http://www.sics.se/~psm/kr9512-015.html
      http://www.monroe.lib.in.us/~lchampel/netadv1.ht ml
      http://www.centerfordecency.org/pornprob_stats.h tm
      http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link991 0/ 0442.html
      And that's just from page 1 of a well-crafted Google query.
  • Bandwidth-wise, porn takes up a substantial amount of the Internet. But since porn is all pictures and videos, it's not really fair to use bandwidth alone to compare it to the rest of the internet. When you look at things with the time you spend using them in mind versus the raw file size, or look at the amount of actual content, the number doesn't seem so huge. Take, for example, Slashdot {pander++}. HUGE amounts of content, but it's more or less all text. Judging by bandwidth is fine if you're just going on a factfinding mission, but there are other considerations involved in guaging the pulse of the internet.
  • Wow, the statistics on porn from voyeurweb were extremely interesting.

    Now here's something I'd like to know, how much electricity is used in the viewing and distribution of porn over the web? And while we're at it, how much in the distribution of printed porn?

    Is the web increasing or decreasing the environmental impact of porn?

    And while we're at it, how many dollars per day are spent on porn?

    It would also be interesting to compare per capita results for other less inhibited countries, such as scandanavian countries, or germany, france, etc.

    The fact is, the US is clearly using a tremendous amount of resources distributing porn. How much better off would we all be (in terms of resources available for other purposes) if we weren't all so sexually frustrated?

    Anyone have at a porn company have the power bill?

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