by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Porn For Women
Back in the late 90s, when someone told you porn sites (in the aggregate) received more traffic than the biggest search engines and news sites combined, it’s possible they were telling you the truth.
When someone tells you today that porn sites get more traffic than say, Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined, they’re just paraphrasing an old cliché which runs counter to every available internet metric we have at our disposal.
As Wired noted in a surprisingly excellent article about the online porn industry (not surprising because it’s from Wired, surprising because most mainstream articles about the porn industry get it so wrong it’s not even funny), the amount of data transmitted by Netflix is insane.
Read on…
It’s Not 1998 Anymore; The ‘Mainstream’ Internet Is HUGE
In examining claims about the relative size of the online porn industry to other popular online entertainment sectors, Wired used the Pornhub network as a point of comparison, which is appropriate because I don’t think anyone disputes the fact Pornhub is the biggest dog on the porn block in terms of both daily visitors and data transfer.
Dominant though it may be in the porn sector, compared to Netflix, Pornhub is the corner bodega to Netflix’s Walmart.
“Pornhub says its network receives about 100 million visits a day, and at least on part of the network, the average visit lasts about nine minutes,” Wired reports. “If you extrapolate, that’s somewhere in the range of 450 million hours of viewing a month. Meanwhile, Netflix serves 60 million subscribers, and these subscribers watch over 3.3 billion hours of programming a month (10 billion a quarter). Youtube claims hundreds of millions of hours of viewing daily.”
Sure, Pornhub is just one network in a large ocean of porn sites, but it’s by far the largest, and its success has come at the expense of other such networks – especially those which have the temerity and audacity to require customers to pay for porn. (The nerve of some people, right?)
Remember: Tube Sites Are Called What They Are For A Non-Porn Reason
While I agree with critics who have chuckled and raised their eyebrows at YouTube choosing to call their new premium subscription service “Red” due to the way it invokes a popular porn tube site, it’s worth pointing out the porn site is only called ‘RedTube’ because of its founders choice to nick the YouTube brand name in the first place.
In many ways, the runaway success of YouTube presaged the decline of the online porn industry as a content-selling industry, by setting the precedent for unfettered distribution of copyrighted materials as a business model.
I’m not saying what YouTube is now is a cesspool of copyright infringement (although there’s still plenty of renegade IP on there), but when the site first began to acquire a large audience, copyrighted materials being displayed without the permission of the rights-holders was unquestionably the main draw to consumers.
When YouTube’s porn imitators first showed up, it was the same way, only even more extreme; virtually every video on Pornhub was pirated in its early days. It drove the studios who actually created the porn in question absolutely crazy – just as YouTube drove the MPAA and Viacom nuts (and probably still does, despite the settlement).
What has happened over the years is the industry has adopted the “If you can’t beat ‘em….” line of business thinking, so now many of them provide their content to the tubes in exchange for some promotion of their company on the tubes, so they can at least get some branding in the bargain, instead of just sitting there wanting to strangle someone as they watch the views add up on pirated copies of the same videos.
Porn Isn’t a $97 Billion Industry, Either
Of all the inflated, exaggerated statistical claims about the porn industry which get thoughtlessly repeated, the one which most aggravates me is the one about porn being a “$97 billion dollar a year industry.”
No. Porn is NOT a $97 billion a year industry, and it never has been.
At its absolute peak, the global porn industry might once have generated in the vicinity of $9-$12 billion a year – and even this is probably too high.
For the most part, people who cite the $97 billion figure can’t even tell you the source of the figure, I happen to know exactly where it came from, after spending some time debunking it about eight years ago: An old bullshit infographic published by a site called Top Ten Reviews. More specifically, it appears on a subdomain where the site reviews (what else?) internet content filters.
And what does the website cite as its source? A “2006 study.”
That’s it, no other detail than it’s a “2006 study.” A study by whom, or of what, using which methodology – obviously we don’t need to know all that trivia.
So that’s all you get for attribution on a claim which has been repeated and cited countless times, often by people who really ought to know better.
Does (Porn Industry) Size Matter? Depends On Who You Are
Part of the problem with figuring out how big the online porn industry is (or perhaps was) is in the early days of the online porn industry, it was commonplace among company owners and representatives to overstate their own success.
Ironically, the extent to which the industry has dialed back its own claims of runaway opulence might be one of the better measures of how the industry is doing today, in comparison to the online porn sector’s best years (which I’d mark as roughly 1998-2005).
In the late 90s and through the early aughts, there seemed to be an unstated competition among online porn companies to create an impression of rolling in the dough.
Over the course of two years, I saw trade show booths transformed from folding tables with paper skirts to 600 square-foot temporary nightclubs. One such booth (I shit you not!) was made of glass blocks with neon tubing running through them – and inside the booth, it sported not one but two fully-stocked bars.
These days, adult industry trade shows are far more understated, as well as far more lightly attended, than they were in years past. And, by and large, company owners do a lot less bragging and lot more bitching when it comes to the subject of sales and revenue.
These days, the people really pushing the idea porn is a massive money-maker are those opposed to the industry. These critics inflate their estimates of the porn industry’s size for several reasons, not the least of which is to emphasize the enormity of the “porn problem” from their perspective.
The funny thing is, if these same anti-porn activists had any idea how much the industry has declined in recent years, and could fathom that most adult producers aren’t particularly happy about the easy availability of free online porn, either, they might even find an ‘odd bedfellow’ to support their arguments about the need to do more to restrict access to porn, because believe you me, a LOT of porn producers would LOVE to see the likes of Pornhub and RedTube wiped off the face of the internet.
The chances of this happening are nil, of course, because to work with the industry, its critics would have to stop thinking of pornographers as monstrous capitalists who chew up and spit out human flesh with callous disregard, and start thinking about them as actual people.
Sadly, that’s not likely to happen.
What will happen, I can guarantee, is we’ll continue to hear about the porn industry being bigger than Netflix, Hulu, every sports league and the International Monetary Fund combined – not because it’s true, of course, but because it fits an agenda which has very little to do with the truth.
Erotic Cinema For Discerning Adults
Anonymous Adult Search