What Percentage of Internet Traffic is Pr0n? 141
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... (Score:3, Interesting)
Warez on the net (Score:1)
How much porn is stashed on peoples machines (Score:1)
While the amounts of what he keeps probably isn't typical, I do see perhaps half the people I know keeping rather large (tens of gigs) pr0n collections.
Re:How much porn is stashed on peoples machines (Score:2)
Re:How much porn is stashed on peoples machines (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How much porn is stashed on peoples machines (Score:2)
Re:How much porn is stashed on peoples machines (Score:1)
I just find too many people are way too obsessed.
Re:How much porn is stashed on peoples machines (Score:2)
I rent a movie, I dupe a movie. Very simple.
Re:How much porn is stashed on peoples machines (Score:1)
Re:How much porn is stashed on peoples machines (Score:5, Interesting)
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..."
commodity money (Score:5, Interesting)
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. . .
Re:commodity money (Score:2)
Some things are so rare they will always be valuable :-)
Re:commodity money (Score:2)
One of my (female) office mates found out about my "collection" and asked for some gay male bondage stuff. Given that she's a young mom, I don't think she's got a lot of time to visit the sex shops where that stuff is easy to come by.
Re:commodity money (Score:2)
Porn might be popular, but it won't work without major other changes to our culture. I know many who are opposed to porn (often, but not always on religious grounds), and who will refuse to traffic in it. They would prefer to be left out of transactions than to have to hold some form of porn. Add in all the people who privatly have porn, but refuse to admit it, and it won't work.
Porn is easy to copy, and with modern technology it is often difficult to tell which is the copy (in the case of digital origionals, impossiable). So we get the Sally and Joe video which nobdoy has be one person, but as soon as it is used as barter, both people have it, and both will then use it, decreasing the value by half.
Money works because there is a limit to how much there is total. That limit can (should? I'm not an expert) expand, so long as the change is minor. Gold works because there is only so much in the ground, and it is work to get at it. It happens to be deseriable to many people, so people won't object to getting it. Because of conterfitting laws (that are enforced) currency without a backing works, though with less than 100 years of testing I don't want to say it works well in all situations.
Re:Equally important... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well..... (Score:1, Redundant)
What else is there out on the net?
Re:Well..... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Well..... (Score:1)
Re:Well..... (Score:2)
Margin of Error (Score:1)
Re:Margin of Error (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
99% pr0n (Score:2, Funny)
My guess.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:My guess.. (Score:1)
Also, pr0n gets released in steady pace, meaning, there's no 'periods' of much pr0n like we have in game releases. What was the first release at 24th of december? Pr0n. What was the first release 1th of 2003? Pr0n.
'Me want your newest game'
'Well, what do you have?'
'I have this semi-new game, agreed?'
'Sorry, got that months ago...'
'Well, I have "Briand Pumper's Pink Pussycats..."'
'Gimeeeeeeeeeeeeee...'
Get it right (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah I know, she lied.
you mean.. (Score:4, Funny)
wow. My brain just exploded..
Re:you mean.. (Score:3, Funny)
OH MY.
I think you need a life. :P
Re:you mean.. (Score:1)
$$$$$exyGal's journal [slashdot.org]
Re:you mean.. (Score:3, Funny)
wow. My brain just exploded..
I think there's a joke to be made here, but I'm just going to put it down slowly and back away...
Re:you mean.. (Score:5, Funny)
wow. My brain just exploded..
You sure that was your brain?
Re:you mean.. (Score:2, Funny)
wow. My brain just exploded..
You sure that was your brain?
Well, it did come out of his head. I'll let you guess which one....
Gogle seemed to find info without a problem... (Score:5, Informative)
Matt
Re:Gogle seemed to find info without a problem... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gogle seemed to find info without a problem... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Gogle seemed to find info without a problem... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Gogle seemed to find info without a problem... (Score:2, Informative)
Some numbers (Score:5, Informative)
P2P stastics and optimization (Score:4, Interesting)
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:P2P stastics and optimization (Score:4, Funny)
An ISP hoarding porn, warez, and copyrighted movies/mp3s? What a lawsuit that would be!
Re:P2P stastics and optimization (Score:2)
Re:Some numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
A real answer (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:A real answer (Score:4, Interesting)
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/hilla
I have no idea what the answers are, I just thought I'd pose the questions....
Re:A real answer (Score:3, Funny)
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 don't know about you, but think the latter should be so heavily taxed that it never gets downloaded, if only for the sake of humanity at large...
Re:A real answer (Score:4, Funny)
Sample Usenet values (Score:4, Insightful)
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:A real answer (Score:2)
run a search for mame roms, warez, or anything like that and you'll be bound to run into dozens of those sites on google(they're pretty easy to filter out though if you spend some time playing with googleapi since they repeat themselfs and have the adverts with same ?id's, because most of them belong just few guys who should have their asses kicked sooooooooo hard)..
another point on the sites on web vs. porno traffic: most of the big traffic(movies) doesn't originate to any web pages, instead they are from private ftp's, irc, and p2p networks.
Stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
... and things (Score:2)
2. I don't think my Grandmother even knows about games.yahoo.com, and I'm not sure I want to get her addicted... good thing she doesn't read
3. oddly enough, this is a more useful question than the porn one. The US is taking an active stance against spam, and the Canadian government is in the midst of informal consideration of the "spam issue". Appraising costs of UCE/UBE is important, and is easier to accomplish.
The actual percentage of pornographic content on the "Internet" can't be measured. Aside from the legal complications in the US, imagine the difficulties in getting accurate measurments in other jurisdictions! Privacy laws, at least in those countries that care to protect privacy, would prohibit any sort of mass content scanning and enumeration. Porn, after all, exists in our perceptions. An image is an image, and the meaning carried is what is pornographic.
You can't merely run a counter for all dirty or skungy packets... but wouldn't it be cool if you could?
USENET (Score:5, Informative)
Of that traffic, 80% was in alt.binaries.*erotica*.
Total traffic as 12-14GB/day. You figure it out.
Re:USENET (Score:1)
Re:USENET (Score:4, Insightful)
It should work the other way around, usenet servers should advertise on porn sites :)
Re:USENET (Score:1)
Re:USENET (Score:2)
IIRC, I was catching an estimated 90% of the spam overall. Most of what slipped by was still in alt.binaries.*, but I think it was clean enough to say that most of the traffic I was seeing was, in fact, porn.
The comments about CD ripping and uploading today is of course accurate. But somehow I doubt people's appetite for pron has abated in recent years.
Re:USENET (Score:1)
so.... !!!
THE ANSWER IS 76%
76% of the internet is porn.
- slashdot 2003 roXors my soXors -
Re:USENET (Score:3, Funny)
That's a whole other Ask Slashdot question!
Re:USENET (Score:3, Funny)
3% of it is me (Score:1, Troll)
Troll? (Score:2, Troll)
What I want to know is ... (Score:3, Funny)
This [google.com] is more like it.
Re:What I want to know is ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What I want to know is ... (Score:1)
Defining the percentage (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Defining the percentage (Score:1)
An ISP's NNTP server gets each picture only once (usually). The ISP's customers can each get the pictures many times, putting no load on the Internet as such, only the ISP. The answer will only ever remain in the realms of hyposthesis.
Re:Defining the percentage (Score:1)
Also thanks for the great tip on using SSH and X11 forwarding when viewing the pr0n, they'll never catch me now
Re:Defining the percentage (Score:2)
nudity
genital photos
simulated sex
real sex
bsdm
What percentage of Ask Slashdot... (Score:2)
[related links]
What percentage of responses to an Ask Slashdot question that can be solved by a proper Google querty mention something along the lines of "Use Google?"
Re:What percentage of Ask Slashdot... (Score:2)
Here's a good way to estimate. (Score:1)
Just take your daily download count and multiply it by 20.
I like your sig better than mine.
The real question.. (Score:3, Funny)
How much of it was because of $$$$exyGirl's Journal [slashdot.org] ;)
More Pr0n Faster (Score:5, Funny)
Once, during an executive meeting one of the engineers raised the issue that really anyone building internet infrastructure was really in the mass pr0n delivery business and thus the company's 'No pr0n on the business machines' was in conflict with their main source of revenue.
"Pornographer! Pornographer! How can you call me that?!? I don't even own a pornograph!"
Re:More Pr0n Faster (Score:2)
If it wasn't for porn, I wouldn't be able to play with so many servers, and play with our fast networking equipment. I'd probably be at po-dunk hosting company exploring the wonders of my T1, and the 3 servers on it..
Re: (Score:2)
Re:do this (Score:5, Interesting)
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..
Hello!!! Off-topic!!! (Score:2)
That being said, thanks for the interesting post. A follow-up Slashdot interview with JWSmythe could ask what he and his colleagues do at work when they're not surfing for porn. 700 Club? Jerry Falwell?
Re:Hello!!! Off-topic!!! (Score:4, Funny)
hehe..
Actually, we frequent Slashdot.com, Shoutcast.com, the major news sites, and dailyrotten.com..
The 700 club blocks us from viewing.. We just get a white page that says "You're beyond saving. Good luck."
Re:Hello!!! Off-topic!!! (Score:1)
Re:Hello!!! Off-topic!!! (Score:2)
OTOH, it loaded very fast, maybe we need to get porn sites to mirror articles slashdot links to.
Re:do this (Score:4, Interesting)
Love your site, though! One of the few I visit with a browser instead of perl+wget.
Re:do this (Score:4, Funny)
Hehe.. Igor writes those himself.. We try to get him to fix the errors, but they always keep popping up.. He uses a WYSIWYG editor.. We've been trying for years to get converted over to something automated. It's written and running, but he still insists on doing it manually..
Explains all the errors, doesn't it?
Voyeurweb vs MaeEast stats (Score:4, Informative)
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
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)
MRTG Falling down (Score:2)
Re:MRTG Falling down (Score:2)
Hmmm.. Looks interesting. I'll check it out more today...
I don't suppose it has an option for importing old MRTG data though, does it.
Re:MRTG Falling down (Score:2)
Re:MRTG Falling down (Score:2)
Not as high as it used to be (Score:1)
look at webcollage... (Score:4, Interesting)
From the web collage source (Score:1, Offtopic)
...
use bytes; # Larry can take Unicode and shove it up his ass sideways.
# Perl 5.8.0 causes us to start getting incomprehensible
# errors about UTF-8 all over the place without this.
...
Re:look at webcollage... (Score:1)
more than you'd think (Score:3, Interesting)
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
30gig day (Score:2)
Futurama and porn (Score:1)
Farnsworth: Actually that's still true.
Woman: "Now that the garbage is in space, Doctor, perhaps you can help me with my sexual inhibitions."
Man: "With gusto."
Fry: "Aww..."
Check out the sound clip here:
http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/Epis
100% (Score:1)
Here's my percentage breakdown (Score:2)
30% Pr0n
30% MP3 trading
20% Spam
10% Warez
10% Everything else
I might be a little low on the Pr0n and spam percentages, though...
80% (Score:4, Informative)
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.
0% = prOn, but much higer for porn... (Score:2)
On a more serious vein, what % of traffic is Spam and popups? Regardless of subject matter being presented.
Porn and Warez is the users doing, but Spam and adverts are just a nuisance.
Learn to use Google better (Score:1)
Re:Learn to use Google better (Score:3, Informative)
http://sfgate.com/net/rosenberg/0706.html
http://www.nationalcoalition.org/stat.phtml?ID=
http://www.sics.se/~psm/kr9512-015.html
http://www.monroe.lib.in.us/~lchampel/netadv1.h
http://www.centerfordecency.org/pornprob_stats.
http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link99
And that's just from page 1 of a well-crafted Google query.
It's not the size, it's how you use it. (Score:1)
How many megawatt-hours per day used for porn? (Score:2)
Now here's something I'd like to know, how much electricity is used in the viewing and distribution of porn over the web? And while we're at it, how much in the distribution of printed porn?
Is the web increasing or decreasing the environmental impact of porn?
And while we're at it, how many dollars per day are spent on porn?
It would also be interesting to compare per capita results for other less inhibited countries, such as scandanavian countries, or germany, france, etc.
The fact is, the US is clearly using a tremendous amount of resources distributing porn. How much better off would we all be (in terms of resources available for other purposes) if we weren't all so sexually frustrated?
Anyone have at a porn company have the power bill?