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!)"

My guess..

[tlund]

"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..

Defining the percentage

[kasperd]

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.

Sample Usenet values

[polyiguana]

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.

Re:USENET

[Monkelectric]

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 :)

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

[jayayeem]

You had google's 'Safe Search' on, the original poster did not.

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

[jayayeem]

Wow... I didn't even read your whole post. What a retard I am.