Internet Pornography Stats
Check out this video from Good Magazine that shows a number of stats about the Internet pornography industry, in an "almost" not safe for work format. It is staggering how much actual money flows through porn and how many people are involved in the industry:
Context & Ripple Effects
Three weeks after Computers.net reported social networks pulling ahead of adult sites in raw traffic, TechCrunch points readers to a Good Magazine video tallying the Internet pornography industry's revenue, spending, and workforce. Read together, the two stories frame the open question of mid-2007: the web's biggest audiences may be migrating to social platforms, yet the dollars still concentrate in paid adult content.
The video's pickup was modest — one syndicated repost on Somewhat Frank alongside TechCrunch's own — so this is less a news event than a data-point moment: mainstream-style statistical explainers applying audience measurement logic to an industry usually covered by anecdote.
First-order effects
- Good Magazine converts a statistics video into tech-audience reach as TechCrunch and Somewhat Frank both push it to readers on the same day.
- Adult-industry operators get a counterweight to the April 'social networking dethrones sex' framing: the video argues revenue and employment in pornography remain enormous even as pageviews drift elsewhere.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and investors comparing attention metrics against monetization now have two conflicting data points from the same month — traffic charts pointing at social networks, revenue figures pointing at adult content — complicating where budgets and pitches aim.
- Social platforms' traffic gains put pressure on subscription-based adult operators whose economics depend on payment, widening the gap between where users spend time and where they spend money.
Third-order effects
- If free, social, user-generated platforms keep absorbing the hours once spent at paid adult destinations, online pornography faces the same unbundling pressure hitting other paid web media in 2007 — a shift from charging for access to monetizing scale, with regulation of user-generated adult content as the unresolved variable.
The trend: Web attention is migrating toward free social platforms faster than spending follows, leaving paid adult content among the web's largest revenue pools even as its traffic dominance erodes.