7 ms·

How much of the internet traffic is actually pornography in general? I have heard a lot of anecdotal hearsay that it constitutes a majority.

by euix 6y ago

BurningFrog 6y ago
How would anyone know that? My guess is most of traffic is various intelligence agencies copying all other traffic in the world.
barrkel 6y ago
I'm pretty sure it's 80% spam, 80% pornography and 80% streaming video.
- dylan604 6y ago
  The 80-20 rule strikes again. Such an amazing statistic.
elorant 6y ago
The thing about the online porn industry is that it's highly diversified which leads a lot of people into making wild assumptions about its size. I doubt porn traffic is that high. Stats show that one in three Internet users are viewing porn, but the thing is that porn isn't something you can spend more than 10-20 minutes consuming[1]. So if we say that the average user spends some three hours online on average every day[2], then porn is about 5% of that time. So one in three users online spend 5% of their time watching porn. In total I'd guess that doesn't account for more than 10% of global traffic, taking under consideration that video consumes much more bandwidth than other forms of content. That's all back of the envelope calculations off course. [1] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review#traffic https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review#traffic [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/319732/daily-time-spent-online-device/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/319732/daily-time-spent-...
- whatsmyusername 6y ago
  Maybe YOU can only spend 10-20 minutes :D
tyingq 6y ago
This article doesn't guesstimate by bandwidth, but by "use", and seems reasonably well researched. It ends up with "somewhere between 4 and 15 percent of web use involves porn." There's some interesting sub-stats on percentage of porn related searches, etc. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201611/dueling-statistics-how-much-the-internet-is-porn https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201611...
- gowld 6y ago
  That's grossly inflated. Their source is that 4% of the top million websites are porn. That doesn't mean at least 4% of web use is porn.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Thats not the only number in the article. They appear to have tried several different angles, including the somewhat flawed one you mention. For example: "Ogas and Gaddam also tracked web searches from July 2009 to July 2010. The proportion that involved porn: 13 percent. Finally, they interviewed officials at the major search engines about the prevalence of porn searches. Those estimates: 10 to 15 percent."
    - gowld 6y ago
      Still seems dodgy. 3hrs per day on Facebook and Netflix and Youtube corresponds to very few search engine searches. Very few people are spending a comparable fraction of time on porn; it's a self rate-limiting activity. Beyond leisure time, a huge portion of people use Internet for work some or all day. Millions of people stream music all day. Porn is the least optimized search target so you'd expect more porn searches per session than other topics searches per session. 4+% of "things people do" in some sense? Sure.
prionassembly 6y ago
Even the word "pornography" is ill-defined.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
At least in the US, Netflix and Google/YouTube represent over 50% of web bandwidth use, I believe. Somewhat old statistics here: https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-youtube-gobble-up-half-of-internet-traffic/ https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-youtube-gobble-up-half-of-... and https://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/11/21/netflix-now-accounts-35-overall-us-internet-traffic/ https://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/11/21/netflix-now-accounts-... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/05/28/netflix-now-accounts-for-almost-37-percent-of-our-internet-traffic/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/05/28... (all from Sandvine, mind you) I would have to imagine that, also being a streaming video service, PornHub and the rest of MindGeek's properties consolidated probably take up another decent portion. Those of us just posting on Internet forums, reading news, and sending emails use a tiny minuscule portion of Internet traffic comparatively. There's a reason ISPs want to charge extra/differently for high bandwidth streaming video: It's the vast majority of what's loading up their networks.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > There's a reason ISPs want to charge extra/differently for high bandwidth streaming video: It's the vast majority of what's loading up their networks. Why not just charge by the byte and be done with it?
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    That's actually more or less my preference: Straight metering. People who use the network less pay less, people who use the network pay more. And ISPs could then deliver all users access at the highest speeds their network can handle, rather than artificially speed throttling traffic. Internet billing should look more like your electric and natural gas bills.
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      That's not possible: CDNs exist not just to reduce latency, but to reduce data-transfer costs by having content within the ISP's own network where data transfer is literally gratis to the ISP because it's running on their own hardware: they just charge companies like Netflix and Akami rent to sit within their network. By your proposal I would be paying the same per-byte rate for both Netflix and Vimeo, even though Netflix has a CDN and Vimeo doesn't - so Comcast would be profiteering from Netflix both ways and the Netflix data doesn't cost Comcast anything. That puts Vimeo at a disadvantage. Utility systems in most countries work on a grid system: natural-gas and electricity is pumped into the grid by supplier/producer companies, managed by the grid-infrastructure people, and measured at the point of consumption. This works because both natural-gas and electronic-potential are both fungible and do not originate on your utility-grid company's premises (assuming your utility-grid company is not also an energy-producer). Bytes transferred over the internet are not fungible, so it is incorrect to compare residential gas and electricity billing to residential Internet billing. Also consider that just as data itself isn't fungible, the value of that data varies tremendously: A high-quality VOIP connection is probably 128kbps and needs modest latency needs, but it absolutely has to always work - whereas Netflix et al. is high-bandwidth but not latency sensitive and occasional outages and poor routing is acceptable; disregarding network QOS, I'd still gladly pay far more per-byte for a hyper-reliable VOIP 128kbps connection than a 1Gbps link for Netflix.
walrus01 6y ago
It's not a majority, if you look at the traffic patterns for a medium sized ISP, the vast bulk of the evening peak traffic these days is what I would call "legit" non porn video. For residential singlehomed customers it's a huge amount of youtube/google AS traffic and Netflix traffic. And a lot of other stuff like people downloading 200GB Xbox one games, Steam games, etc. To the point that a very small ISP that is singlehomed to a Cogent or HE type transit provider, can halve its monthly IP transit bill by joining an IX such as the NWAX and establishing settlement-free peering BGP sessions with just google and netflix.

How much of the internet traffic is actually pornography in general? I have heard a lot of anecdotal hearsay that it constitutes a majority.

by euix 6y ago

How much of the internet traffic is actually pornography in general? I have heard a lot of anecdotal hearsay that it constitutes a majority.

BurningFrog 6y ago

How would anyone know that? My guess is most of traffic is various intelligence agencies copying all other traffic in the world.

barrkel 6y ago

I'm pretty sure it's 80% spam, 80% pornography and 80% streaming video.

dylan604 6y ago
The 80-20 rule strikes again. Such an amazing statistic.

elorant 6y ago

The thing about the online porn industry is that it's highly diversified which leads a lot of people into making wild assumptions about its size. I doubt porn traffic is that high. Stats show that one in three Internet users are viewing porn, but the thing is that porn isn't something you can spend more than 10-20 minutes consuming[1]. So if we say that the average user spends some three hours online on average every day[2], then porn is about 5% of that time. So one in three users online spend 5% of their time watching porn. In total I'd guess that doesn't account for more than 10% of global traffic, taking under consideration that video consumes much more bandwidth than other forms of content. That's all back of the envelope calculations off course. [1] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review#traffic https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review#traffic [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/319732/daily-time-spent-online-device/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/319732/daily-time-spent-...

whatsmyusername 6y ago
Maybe YOU can only spend 10-20 minutes :D

tyingq 6y ago

This article doesn't guesstimate by bandwidth, but by "use", and seems reasonably well researched. It ends up with "somewhere between 4 and 15 percent of web use involves porn." There's some interesting sub-stats on percentage of porn related searches, etc. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201611/dueling-statistics-how-much-the-internet-is-porn https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201611...

gowld 6y ago
That's grossly inflated. Their source is that 4% of the top million websites are porn. That doesn't mean at least 4% of web use is porn.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tyingq 6y ago
  Thats not the only number in the article. They appear to have tried several different angles, including the somewhat flawed one you mention. For example: "Ogas and Gaddam also tracked web searches from July 2009 to July 2010. The proportion that involved porn: 13 percent. Finally, they interviewed officials at the major search engines about the prevalence of porn searches. Those estimates: 10 to 15 percent."
  - gowld 6y ago
    Still seems dodgy. 3hrs per day on Facebook and Netflix and Youtube corresponds to very few search engine searches. Very few people are spending a comparable fraction of time on porn; it's a self rate-limiting activity. Beyond leisure time, a huge portion of people use Internet for work some or all day. Millions of people stream music all day. Porn is the least optimized search target so you'd expect more porn searches per session than other topics searches per session. 4+% of "things people do" in some sense? Sure.

prionassembly 6y ago

Even the word "pornography" is ill-defined.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

At least in the US, Netflix and Google/YouTube represent over 50% of web bandwidth use, I believe. Somewhat old statistics here: https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-youtube-gobble-up-half-of-internet-traffic/ https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-youtube-gobble-up-half-of-... and https://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/11/21/netflix-now-accounts-35-overall-us-internet-traffic/ https://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/11/21/netflix-now-accounts-... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/05/28/netflix-now-accounts-for-almost-37-percent-of-our-internet-traffic/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/05/28... (all from Sandvine, mind you) I would have to imagine that, also being a streaming video service, PornHub and the rest of MindGeek's properties consolidated probably take up another decent portion. Those of us just posting on Internet forums, reading news, and sending emails use a tiny minuscule portion of Internet traffic comparatively. There's a reason ISPs want to charge extra/differently for high bandwidth streaming video: It's the vast majority of what's loading up their networks.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> There's a reason ISPs want to charge extra/differently for high bandwidth streaming video: It's the vast majority of what's loading up their networks. Why not just charge by the byte and be done with it?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  That's actually more or less my preference: Straight metering. People who use the network less pay less, people who use the network pay more. And ISPs could then deliver all users access at the highest speeds their network can handle, rather than artificially speed throttling traffic. Internet billing should look more like your electric and natural gas bills.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    That's not possible: CDNs exist not just to reduce latency, but to reduce data-transfer costs by having content within the ISP's own network where data transfer is literally gratis to the ISP because it's running on their own hardware: they just charge companies like Netflix and Akami rent to sit within their network. By your proposal I would be paying the same per-byte rate for both Netflix and Vimeo, even though Netflix has a CDN and Vimeo doesn't - so Comcast would be profiteering from Netflix both ways and the Netflix data doesn't cost Comcast anything. That puts Vimeo at a disadvantage. Utility systems in most countries work on a grid system: natural-gas and electricity is pumped into the grid by supplier/producer companies, managed by the grid-infrastructure people, and measured at the point of consumption. This works because both natural-gas and electronic-potential are both fungible and do not originate on your utility-grid company's premises (assuming your utility-grid company is not also an energy-producer). Bytes transferred over the internet are not fungible, so it is incorrect to compare residential gas and electricity billing to residential Internet billing. Also consider that just as data itself isn't fungible, the value of that data varies tremendously: A high-quality VOIP connection is probably 128kbps and needs modest latency needs, but it absolutely has to always work - whereas Netflix et al. is high-bandwidth but not latency sensitive and occasional outages and poor routing is acceptable; disregarding network QOS, I'd still gladly pay far more per-byte for a hyper-reliable VOIP 128kbps connection than a 1Gbps link for Netflix.

walrus01 6y ago

It's not a majority, if you look at the traffic patterns for a medium sized ISP, the vast bulk of the evening peak traffic these days is what I would call "legit" non porn video. For residential singlehomed customers it's a huge amount of youtube/google AS traffic and Netflix traffic. And a lot of other stuff like people downloading 200GB Xbox one games, Steam games, etc. To the point that a very small ISP that is singlehomed to a Cogent or HE type transit provider, can halve its monthly IP transit bill by joining an IX such as the NWAX and establishing settlement-free peering BGP sessions with just google and netflix.