Could Anything Be More Popular Than Porn?
By Emily Rutherford - Sep 19th, 2008 at 10:09 amThere are a couple lines in a David Sedaris essay (unfortunately, I can’t recall which one) where he declares that he was very skeptical about the Internet until one of his sisters showed him that you could use it to download porn. Popular opinion has it that this was the sort of attitude on which the Internet became popular, and as the musical Avenue Q sagaciously pointed out, “the Internet is for porn.” But some believe that the traditional uses of the good old series of tubes might be giving way to new media: according to the Globe and Mail, a “data geek” named Bill Tancer has observed that web searches for porn have been surpassed by searches for social networking sites:
He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 per cent of searches from 20 per cent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.
“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24-year-old age group particularly was searching less for porn.
“My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.”
Aside from the fact that the second paragraph doesn’t scan, I found this rather unbelievable. Not only does it seem unlikely that the bread and butter of the Web has been that compromised by Facebook, I suspect that Tancer’s methods could be flawed. Granted, I haven’t read the book in which he details his findings, but the Globe and Mail article reports that Tancer was measuring search engine results–maybe using a tool like Google Trends. If I plug the terms “porn” and “facebook” into Google Trends, yes, I do find that Facebook has far outstripped porn in 2008. But that’s not the whole story.
I can’t really comment on how the majority of Internet users search for porn, but I’m betting they’re looking for something more specific than just “porn.” That’s a bit different from Facebook–if you’re looking for info about a particular social networking site, you can’t really get much more specific than that. Furthermore, free, downloadable porn is not found on the World Wide Web, which is what something like Google Trends (and, I’m guessing, Tancer’s study) analyzes. While social networking sites are by definition websites–so analyzing search engine results really is the best way to measure web surfers’ interest–the Internet also hosts terabytes of P2P filesharing, epitomized by such clients as LimeWire and BitTorrent. P2P is the way most people access large files such as, ahem, images and videos, especially those they might like to have good-quality copies of–and P2P traffic certainly wouldn’t be picked up by Google.
This is something that technologically savvy 18-to-24-year-olds know. Young people aren’t turning to Google for their sexual stimulation (though that curvaceous logo is a little sexy) because they are the broadband generation, and The Pirate Bay is their friend. Facebook may be extraordinarily popular, but pornography has had a tenacious grip on human culture for hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years. Why would a few status updates change that?
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