Internet Only 1% Porn

Eli Gottlieb writes "In what surely comes as a complete and utter surprise to everyone here, a new calculation shows that only one percent of web pages contain pornography. While the calculations were performed using data forced from Google's and Microsoft's search indices by the government, they will help the American Civil Liberties Union to keep enforcement of the Children's Online Protection Act of 1998 banned. A loss for business privacy has become a victory for free speech, even though netizens lose a beloved old proverb."

I suspect

[WormholeFiend (674934)]

that everyone's hard drive pron content percentage is much higher, however.

1% pornography, 93% "art"

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you see it's like this -- the internet contains only 1% "pornography"; but of the remaining 99%, 93% consists of "artistic nudity" and "adult performance art". :-)

Re:I suspect

[Salvance (1014001)]

Hmmm .... a few years ago the journal Nature found that 2% of the internet was porn [216.109.125.130]. This would explain why it now takes me twice as long to find what I'm looking for.

Re:I suspect

[grazzy (56382)]

We must take this threat to internet porn seriously and ACT before it's to late. According to these statistics internet porn will be down to 0% in just a couple of years. Save the porn before it goes extinct!

Re:I suspect

[metalligoth (672285)]

I work in the entertainment business. While I don't work in porn, I definitely know plenty of strippers. (For example, my roommate gives strippers choreography lessons every Sunday at my house.) Every single one of them chose that job because they like sexuality, they like showing off and being in the spotlight, and it's exactly what they wanted to do with their lives while they are young. Your arguments are completely wrong.

You seem to be a Christian, so let me ask you this: in the Bible, Jesus spent his time with the poor and destitute. He spent time with criminals and prostitutes. Have you ever actually met anyone that currently works in pornography and befriended them? You might be shocked at what they have to say about their chosen profession. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Is this trend really a surprise though?

[snowwrestler (896305)]

User-driven content ("Web 2.0") has led to a massive increase in the parallelism of page creation. Every single story submitted to Digg becomes a new Web page, as does every Flickr page, every Wikipedia page, every Match.com profile, every Youtube video, every Myspace page, every Slashdot comment, etc.

Some porn sites allow user-generated content (pun intended, eewww...), but overall the number of people willing to share recordings of themselves having sex is probably pretty small compared to the number willing to share their favorite song or interesting link or thoughts on a subject. (At least I hope to God it is.)

Re:I suspect

[ghyd (981064)]

What would be interesting is the amount of data transfered.

Re:I suspect

[ajs (35943)]

I suspect that the porn content of the Net is highly underrated. Having done such surveys in my life for businesses, I can say that any metric that you're looking for can be skewed drastically by looking at the numbers differently. For example, if you many porn sites want only a handful of pages to be indexed, so if you go by page count, porn will be very low. If you go by machine or domain names, then porn will rank fairly high, since many porn sites use domains to isolate different types of content for the same service.

If you discount auto-generated pages, you willl also eliminate a huge fraction of the Web.

There's an awful lot of play in these numbers, so don't be too shocked if they're just dead wrong from most points of view.

Re:I suspect

[mattwarden (699984)]

I suspect that the porn content of the Net is highly underrated. Having done such surveys in my life for businesses

I want your job.

oh no!

[rayde (738949)]

Dang! Now what am I gonna do with my new Dell [youtube.com]?

Re:oh no!

[neoform (551705)]

Get yourself a hotmail account. You'll be shown where to get porn in a few hours.

99-1 law

[cucucu (953756)]

99% of the people spend their time in 1% of the web

Irrelevant to policy makers

[regular_gonzalez (926606)]

As if this will change the opinions of any of the powers that be in favor of increased legislation and restriction of online content? The argument will shift to "...but that 1% makes up (20 / 30 / 50 / arbitrary number) % of internet traffic! Save the children now!"

Re:Irrelevant to policy makers

[Apocalypse111 (597674)]

All that porn is clogging up the tubes, and it making them really sticky - that's why it takes so long for me to get the internets that my staff sends me.

Re:Don't blame just the policy makers.

[monkeydo (173558)]

As with any government endeavour they hired scientist, computer experts, and a slew of other specialities. Do you think those people are come back with data that doesn't support their continued existance?

Yes, that's EXACTLY what they did. The government was trying to prove that there is a need for COPA. Instead they proved that there isn't.

Re:Don't blame just the policy makers.

[El Torico (732160)]

Yes, that's EXACTLY what they did. The government was trying to prove that there is a need for COPA. Instead they proved that there isn't.

Don't open the champagne yet; the DOJ can find data in the study to support their claim.
I noted this in the article -

Stark's study found that only 6 percent of all queries returned a sexually explicit Web site, despite the consistent popularity of queries related to sex.

Which raises the question, what percentage of the search terms are of that nature? The report from Dr. Philip Stark states that in addition to the random search terms, 685 popular queries (as counted by Wordtracker) were used in the study. When those search terms were used, the return rate of sexually explicit sites was about 37%.

To me it shows that a lot of people are looking for pr0n (and finding it), so I wanted to see what people are currently looking for. These are the current top 30 search terms [wordtracker.com], but they have been edited by Wordtracker "so as not to cause offense." Does anyone have access to the current, unedited top 30, 100, 500, etc.?

The Internet is...

[consumer_whore (652448)]

99% useless

Re:The Internet is...

[owlnation (858981)]

Of course the whole 99% isn't useless. However a significant percentage does indeed seem to be.

For example if I use English words to search for something in Google.de....

(At this point I would like to point out to any web designers who code to redirect users to country specific sites and languages based on their IP address, that if I ever find you I will hurt you, that's a promise. I live in Germany and travel a lot in the EU, but I speak English, I'm damned if I can ever get the page I'm looking for after a cookie clear. Seriously, do you think I'm too stupid to know the difference between .com and .de; that's why I typed one not the other, why on earth should you redirect me?)

...anyway, using almost any English words in Google.de pulls up almost nothing but link farms, SEO pages and click fraud sites, etc. It makes me seriously wonder about the true value of my Adwords account - I really don't think enough is being done about this issue. (And to anyone from Google who's reading, please encourage your German colleagues to do some work, SEO is rampant here.)

Or perhaps we're just long overdue for the next generation of search engine. Google is better than that which came before it, but it still has a long way to go. I want to find my porn without click fraud crap.

Why I usually don't RTFA...

[geoffspear (692508)]

A giant, annoying ad floating over the page and they still can't earn enough money to hire a copyeditor who can spell "Microsoft" correctly? How can I subscribe to this fine publication?

Supply, Demand, Availability

[Rahga (13479)]

Let's face it... The supply of women ready to put themselves out on display on the internet pales in comparison to the sheer mass of teen angst that flows out onto myspace/youtube/livjournals etc. :)

Ok but...

[otacon (445694)]

Search engines don't index all of the things on porn sites that are for members only i.e. Terabytes of member's only pages, video, and pics. For example sex.com could only have a few pages for the public that Google would show, but in reality they have thousands more. So it would be hard to be accurate at only 1%

Re:That only bolsters the argument though

[Dhalka226 (559740)]

The important question is [. . .] whether federal legislation is needed to protect kids from porn when they are online.

The important question is whether or not children need to be protected from porn at all.

I ask this question seriously: Have there been any studies done that shows that exposure to pornographic images makes a child more likely to engage in sexual activity sooner, or makes them somehow less likely to use protection during intercourse? If not, it seems to me that this isn't about protecting children -- it's about protecting parents from uncomfortable discussions that, frankly, are part of their job as parents.

Personally I wish children were exposed to MORE porn and MORE sexual discussion. It seems to me that the US has become entirely too prudish about sex. It is a natural and necessary part of life and we should stop treating it as a depravity. Sex is what it is. If we, as a society, instill maturity and responsibility in our children, I believe the vast majority of the concern of sex is rendered moot.

Doing my part...

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

...to skew the odds back where they belong. --------> (_Y_)

Easy now...

[Greyfox (87712)]

People could be looking at this from work. You don't want to get anyone fired, do you?

The muzzle of a cat?

[Ayanami Rei (621112)]

  o o
*(_Y_)*

Another way of loooking at it...

[91degrees (207121)]

Google indexes somewhere around 4000 million web pages. This means that the internet is flooded with 40 million pages of porn!

Numbers are great when you make them dance.

The internet == the web?

[Rogerborg (306625)]

Well, I'm glad we've cleared up that little misunderstanding. I guess ISPs can block everything except port 80 now. Many thanks.

Lies, damn lies - and statistics

[Toby The Economist (811138)]

Percentages mean absolutely nothing if you don't know the sample upon which the percentage is based.

"30% of the Internet is porn".

Was the entire Internet checked? of course not. So what sample was taken? was it a list of random domains, or a list of random pages - which will produce quite different results. If it was random domains, which list was the sample taken from? was it from all sites, or just .com sites? how was the random number generated? presumably sites beginning with "s" (e.g. sex) will tend to be porn sites - was the generator biased in any way? if *pages* were chosen (unlikely, I guess, since it means indexing entire sites, and some porn sites will be pay access, so their pages will be hidden), was it a sample of pages from a sample of sites, or a full set of pages from a sample of sites?

Also, pointedly, what exactly *is* a site with porn? do we mean hardcore porn (peneratration) or do we include softcore porn (glamour)? shouldn't we differentiate between the two, and have two percentages?

So propositions like "the xxx is nn% yyy" are so trite that they are meaningless.

How the definition of "pornography" differs.....

[Anonymous Coward]

During a business trip to Alabama several weeks back, I met a fellow who I'd describe as the typical sort of Christian fundamentalist you'd find in the southeastern US. He's not a bad person, but his views are somewhat, in my mind, unusual.

We were talking about the Internet, and some of the work he'd done speeding up the TCP implementation for an embedded OS. He mentioned at one point that he was worried it'd be used to transmit pornography at a faster rate. I found this absurd, so I asked him to elaborate on what he considered pornography. He was telling me that he thought pictures of the adult women modelling underwear and bras in Wal-Mart flyers were pornographic!

Now, I don't know this guy very well. My best guess is that he's got a raging erection most of the time, but due to the beliefs and customs of the society and religion he has been exposed to his entire life, he's had to build up this anti-pronographic personality. It seems he's taken it to the extreme. But it showed to me the problem with pornography: its definition differs so widely between different individuals.

A few calculations

[el_womble (779715)]

My maths isn't great, but I did a few simple calculations and that is still a metric fuckload of porn.

Feel free to convert it into imperial. I think rods would be an appropriate measure.

More than one percent porn spam

[yancey (136972)]

It may be true that only one percent of pages on the Internet contain porn, but porn-related spam gets to much more than one percent of Internet mailboxes.

Of course it's only 1% of sites...

[Phat_Tony (661117)]

I'm not in the least surprised it's only 1% of sites. I think the interesting thing is, what percent of traffic is it?

Millions of people can belong to one huge site and spend all their time there. Dozens and dozens of "mini" sites all just feed into the same big site, and depending on how they counted this, those might all be "one site." A whole ton of the porn out there probably isn't indexed, because you have to have an account and log in to the one accessible page the crawler saw to get to the ten million pages of porn behind it. A huge amount of the porn online probably never has anything to do with the web, as it's moving over bittorrent, usenet, gnutella, etc.

Estimates I've seen of the percent of internet traffic that's porn have been much, much higher than 1%.

Quote From TFA

[MightyYar (622222)]

``What we are learning about the Internet is that it reflects life and that the Internet is not -- contrary to what some people might think -- more sexual than people are in general.''

That might be the most insightful thing that I've read all week...

ONLY 1% Porn?

[gambler_mtu (1006967)]

Given the size of the Internet, I find that rather sad. Too many people's lives are damaged/ruined by porn for even 1% to be acceptable. It would be better for society if that number were 0, we'd have a lot less child predators and rapists on the streets. I'm not saying that people shouldn't have the right to debase themselves...I just think it is sad that it is made so easy by the internet.

Re:ONLY 1% Porn?

[StoatBringer (552938)]

If it cheers you up, I find this thread difficult to masturbate to.

No surprise

[sacrilicious (316896)]

In what surely comes as a complete and utter surprise to everyone here, a new calculation shows that only one percent of web pages contain pornography.

Doesn't surprise me. Less than 1% of my house's floor space is occupied by dining room chairs, yet somehow I manage to spend nearly 10% of my time in these chairs daily. Likewise, the percent of waking time spent by our household watching the 0.1% of our wallspace occupied by the television is a (disproportionate) 10%.

Internet by Diebold

[shirizaki (994008)]

1% Porn
40% Useless meme and trivia
59% George W. Bush

Porn vs Mac

[scrotch (605605)]

I'm not sure what this says about me, but it occurred to me that Apple has better market share than porn...

I want to know....

[hcob$ (766699)]

How did they search the whole internet for porn.... And can I have some of the links.

I'm tired of wasting 10 minutes to.... errr.... Wasting 10 minutes to search a topic and finding nothing but porn. I need those links to err.... block the porn... yeah.

How do you define pornography?

[eno2001 (527078)]

Considering the wide array of the kinds of porn and pecadillios out there... I'd say that the study is very likely flawed. To some people, the following are pornography:

1. Bare tit
2. Celebrity nipple slips
3. Non-detailed butt/bum shots
4. Up the skirt panty shots

To others who are more extreme in their anti-porn views, the following would qualify:

1. Females under the age of 18 wearing skimpy clothing and too much makeup on MySpace
2. Anything with a female of any age wearing clothing that starts above the knee and doesn't cover the legs, or exposes the midriff
3. Anything that celebrates female sexuality in terms of sexual pleasure. It's OK to celebrate it, if it's related to child bearing. Witness the number of couples who tell all their friends and family "we started trying to have a baby a few months ago" without batting an eye, but you wouldn't see them saying "we started trying to increase the quality and frequency of orgasm for both of us a few months ago". With "both" implying that she gets to have a lot of fun too.

The two groups above very likely would comdemn people to death for looking at images of activities like:

1. Gay/Lesbian Sex
2. Orgies
3. Bondage and Dicipline/Sado-Masochism
4. Female Domination
5. Infantilism
6. Furries/Yiff (sexual scenarios utilizing anthropomorphic animals in cartoon form)
7. Bisexual activity of any kind (forced homosexuality in the domination scene all the way to "lesbian" activity in the swingers scene)
8. Cross dressing
9. Extreme body play (super large anal and vaginal insertions. Think: bowling ball in ass or eggplant in vagina. It's been done. Many times. You'd be amazed at how much human tissue can stretch without breaking)
10. Nullo (the voluntary or involuntary removal of genitalia)
11. Amputation (removal of limbs for sexual pleasure)
12. Scat (sexual activity focused on fecal matter)
13. Bestiality (sexual activity with animals)
14. Hentai (anime with a strong sexual focus possibly even including "tentacle sex" and mutilation (typically of females))
15. Hirsute women (women with a lot of body hair who don't shave it off. As some men put it, "wool panties")
16. God/Goddess/Wife worship (people who literally worship their masters, mistresses and spouses in the BD/SM scene and take the worship very seriously)
17. Swingers (real people who engage in free exchange of sexual partners. Typically lots of straight couples and singles with bisexual activity between women. There is very little homosexual activity between men and some groups discourage it due to health concerns based around the lie that AIDS is a "gay" disease.)
18. Cybelle (Wife as goddess figure. Husband must submit to being a literal "human toilet" and ingest urine and feces of wife. Husband is also cut off crom all sexual contact with wife, while wife has right to take many lovers. Husband is also in financial bondage and all money he earns go to wife for her use only. Hehehe... I expect some guys here will say that that's why they got divorced in the first place. ;P)
19. Foot fetish
20. Hotwife/Cuckold culture. Wives sleep with other men and their husbands photo/video them for sharing on the net both free and pay. The cuckolds never get to have sex with their wives.

And that's just a smattering of what I've scene in my 16 years on the net as an amateur sexologist/enthusiast. All of the above activities/groups publish photos and text online that the simpler folk of our society would find appalling and unacceptable. Hell, even I was shocked when I found the Nullo, Amputation and Cybelle stuff. But, then after looking at these things I realized that this stuff has ALWAYS been around long before the first bits poured out onto the internet. And as long as humans exist, these things will continue to be around. In the past people did this stuff underground and kept their images, written words and fantasies to themselves. If they were caught, they were likely i

Re:Other figures:

[vidnet (580068)]

Many of them overlap. Take Bush supporters and Potty humour for instance.

1% by number of pages, 99% by bandwidth consumed

[mrops (927562)]

On a more serious note: So what makes up the Internet? Webpages or the data that flows over networks.

Re:1% by number of pages, 99% by bandwidth consume

[penix1 (722987)]

Add to that the different avenues to pr0n (P2P, Usenet, IRC, etc) that this study didn't even consider that is likely to raise that 1% some. All-in-all, I still think (right or wrong) that pr0n is a big motivator for Internet access especially broadband.

B.

Re:1% by number of pages, 99% by bandwidth consume

[east coast (590680)]

All-in-all, I still think (right or wrong) that pr0n is a big motivator for Internet access especially broadband.

Come on now, you know Joe Sixpack got broadband to watch the MIT OCW lectures. Don't bring him down with bad noise. He needs all the encouragement he can get.

We don't need no steenking suits...

[Kozar_The_Malignant (738483)]

>Ok, bad phonetic pun, sue me.

We here at the Slashdot Language Police do not use lawsuits for such offenses; we prefer flogging. There is a strong minority opinion that bad anatomical puns should be punished by flaying of the referenced anatomical part. Fortunately for you, the number of Slashdotters able to recognize a pun such as yours playing on rules of spelling and pronunciation is far less than the alleged 1% porn content of the internet, so you're probably safe. This time. You have been warned, however.

Re:1% by number of pages, 99% by bandwidth consume

[MyOtherUIDis3digits (926429)]

AKA "1% by number of pages, 99% by disk space on my computer"

Re:1% by number of pages, 99% by bandwidth consume

[MyOtherUIDis3digits (926429)]

WTF?!? I know I selected "post anonymously"! Umm, I mean, hey! Someone hijacked my /. account!

Re:1% by number of pages, 99% by bandwidth consume

[Kozz (7764)]

So what makes up the Internet? Webpages or the data that flows over networks.

Answer: Yes.

Re:Only 1%?

[somersault (912633)]

has experienced that one percent

Re:The other 99%

[binarybum (468664)]

thumbnails that claim to lead to porn that really only lead to more thumbnails that then lead to pop-up technology so sophisticated that it validates the existence of a higher being, and apparently he doesn't want us getting to that 1% very easily.