30% of web’s total traffic is for porn: tech magazine

by Patrick B. Craine

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 12, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Anyone who uses Google knows that porn is all over the web. But how pervasive is it really?

After an investigation, the popular technology magazine ExtremeTech estimates that porn websites account for as much as 30% of the web’s total traffic. The largest porn sites out there outpace everything but the “Googles and Facebooks of the internet,” writes Senior Editor Sebastian Anthony.

Xvideos, the world’s largest porn site, gets 4.4 billion page views per month – about three times as many as CNN.com. But there are dozens of porn sites on the web’s top 500 destinations, writes Anthony.

And page views are only just the beginning.

“It’s only when you factor in what those porn surfers are actually doing that the size and scale of adult websites truly comes into focus,” Anthony writes.

Each of those visitors spends vastly more time on porn sites than others: an average visit is around 15 to 20 minutes, compared to three to six minutes for a news website.

And the amount of data transferred is “astronomical,” Anthony says, because while most websites are just text and images, porn sites are mostly streaming videos.

While loading a news article might involve 500 kilobytes, a video is more like 100 kilobytes per second, or 90 megabytes over 15 minutes. At this rate, considering the number of visitors, Xvideos is likely averaging around 50 gigabytes per second, or 29 petabytes per month, says Anthony. Later in the article, he admits it’s probably closer to 35 or 40 petabytes per month.

For comparison’s sake, he notes that an internet connection at home normally only transfers a couple of megabytes per second.

“In short, porn sites cope with astronomical amounts of data. The only sites that really come close in term of raw bandwidth are YouTube or Hulu, but even then YouPorn is something like six times larger than Hulu,” he writes.

YouPorn, the second most popular porn site on the web, alone accounts for around 2% of the web’s traffic, he says.

“There are dozens of porn sites on the scale of YouPorn, and hundreds that are the size of ExtremeTech or your favorite news site. It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet,” Anthony writes.

“The internet really is for porn.”

Check out the full ExtremeTech report: Just how big are porn sites?