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."

Irrelevant to policy makers

[regular_gonzalez]

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!"

The other 99%

[Baal Sebub]

are link farms to porn sites.

Supply, Demand, Availability

[Rahga]

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]

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%

Not a good metric

[RISTMO]

People don't view "pages" of porn. They view graphics and videos. Each page might contain several dozen images. Then there are zip files full of images that are never displayed in the page itself and videos that only count as one file. A much better measurement would be the total size of all porn related files vs. the total filesize of the web.

The internet == the web?

[Rogerborg]

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]

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.

Re:I suspect

[ghyd]

What would be interesting is the amount of data transfered.

Re:I suspect

[ajs]

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.

No surprise

[sacrilicious]

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%.

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

[mrops]

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]

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:Don't blame just the policy makers.

[monkeydo]

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:Ok but...

[porcupine8]

But you could argue that that's likely to be balanced out by the non-porn members-only pages. Ever tried to google something in Lexis-Nexis? (I doubt they included scholar.google.com in this search.)

The proof is in the... uh... "pudding"

[shaneh0]

Ok, bad phonetic pun, sue me.

I do agree with you to an extent. Even if many households get broadband for a NUMBER of reasons, my guess is that if we had stats on the first website loaded after the Cable installer leaves, we'd have a fair cross-section of the fetish-porn industry.

Re:Only 1%?

[somersault]

has experienced that one percent

It's what they don't measure that counts

[davidwr]

Google doesn't measure captcha- or password-protected pay web pages.
Google doesn't measure file-sharing networks.
Google doesn't measure web pages that have robots.txt exclusions.

A much more interesting number than "porn sites" is:

1) how likely are you to find porn if you start at a well-known non-porn site and randomly click on links?
2) how likely are you to find porn on the first page of results on a search engine, if you are NOT searching for porn?
3) for the parents of 14 year old boys: a) how hard is it for my child to find porn if he IS looking for it, b) how effective are i) machine-, ii) router-, and iii) ISP-level blocking tools, and c) how easy can my son or his friends evade them without getting caught?

The first two will keep truly-innocent kids and adults from stumbling on porn. #3 demands both a technical and a proper-parenting solution.

That only bolsters the argument though

[snowwrestler]

While it's interesting to think about, the absolute percentage of all existing Web content that is porn is not really the important question. The important question is how much porn the public sees inadvertantly, and whether federal legislation is needed to protect kids from porn when they are online. If most porn content is hidden behind logins, that lends strength to the idea that such a law is not needed.

Also I should point out that there are vast stores of Web-accessible, non-porn information hidden behind member login as well. Like all of Lexis-Nexis, for instance. Or many newspaper and magazine archives.

Is this trend really a surprise though?

[snowwrestler]

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

[JazzLad]

Apparently whatever gives you the result you are looking for.

Re:I suspect

[mini me]

All jobs are based on exploitation. You might work a desk job where your employer is exploiting your knowledge. Or you might do physical labour where your employer is exploiting your energy. Or you might work in porn where the employer is exploiting your abilities to perform in that role. They all exploit equally, and it's up to you to decide which form of exploitation best suits your preferences and abilities.

Re:I suspect

[celardore]

Think of her children on the playground, "Your mommy is a slut!" or "You're a bastard!"

Can work to your advantage too though. My parents were never married, so by rights I'm a bastard. I regard it as my birthright to be the best damn bastard I can be!

Re:I suspect

[metalligoth]

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.

Re:I suspect

[WhiteWolf666]

Well, then, you must be okay with Gay porn.

Re:I suspect

[tomithychen]

Everyone" doesn't look at porn. According to a Harris poll, only 27% of Americans agreed with the statement "All men look at pornography." (Paul, Pornified, P268) MOST men don't look at pornography.

That's horribly flawed logic you have there. All that statistic says is that 73% of Americans agreed that there is at least one man that doesn't look at pornography. How you made the leap from that to saying, "MOST men don't look at pornography" is beyond me.

Re:I suspect

[steelfood]

All jobs are based on trade. Generally speaking, the employee trades a service (the job) for goods (money). We each have certain expectations as to the value of our service, relative to the good that we get back. Which is to say, we expect a certain amount of money for what we do. This is an oversimplification, but for this argument, it will suffice. Exploitation is when one side receives something of greater value than the other side. Get paid too little, your employer is exploiting you. Get paid too much, and you're exploiting your employer.

From this standpoint, being a porn star is like every other job. The service is sex, or nudity, etc. The goods is still money. And whether it is exploitation is still dependent on the value of the service. Some people put great value on the service. Others put little value on the service. Therein lies the true point of contention. It isn't whether people are being exploited so much as it is the value of exposing oneself, or performing sexual acts, etc.

Re:That only bolsters the argument though

[Dhalka226]

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.

Re:Victory?

[PriceIke]

Good god. Look, I don't agree with this person, but modding him TROLL?? wtf. Mods, if you don't agree with him, fine, but USE OF MODERATION AS AN ARGUMENT is a fscking misuse of moderation. This person's arguments are not abusive, on-topic, and clearly stated. If you don't agree with him make your case in a reply. Modding him "troll" is even more cowardly than replying AC.

Re:I suspect

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I suspect that people who weren't abused as children are really a minority- or at least will be in the future as our idea of what constitutes abuse seems to encompass more stuff every freakin' year.