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!)"

Equally important...

[Phexro]

Of the percentage of traffic that isn't porn, how much is warez?

Stuff

[littlerubberfeet]

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?

Re:A real answer

[mbogosian]

"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....

P2P stastics and optimization

[jasonrocks]

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:Margin of Error

[JWSmythe]

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.

Re:do this

[JWSmythe]

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..

Re:Some numbers

[larien]

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.

look at webcollage...

[dotgod]

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.

more than you'd think

[dieMSdie]

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 ;)

Re:Equally important...

[hafree]

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...

Re:How much porn is stashed on peoples machines

[slaker]

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..."

Re:do this

[slaker]

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.

commodity money

[urbazewski]

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. . .