What Percentage of Internet Traffic is Pr0n?

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!)"

Gogle seemed to find info without a problem...

[Matt Amato]

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

[Devil's BSD]

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.

A real answer

[polyiguana]

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.

USENET

[Cerebus]

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.

Voyeurweb vs MaeEast stats

[JWSmythe]

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)

80%

[kruczkowski]

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.

Re:Gogle seemed to find info without a problem...

[markatwork]

Hey .. I know this guy he really is a retard .. I would mod this one up even higher as "insightful" if I only had mod points ...

Re:Learn to use Google better

[Wolfger]

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.