Home : Networking : News

Social networking is now more popular than porn

Study reveals that the major social networking services are generating more traffic than pornography sites.

By Belinda Goldsmith, Reuters, 16 Sep 2008 at 17:18

Social networking is popular, that is undisputable, but figures revealed today suggest that the success of sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo is now outstripping the most popular of online services – porn.

According to Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at web stats firm Hitwise, who has analysed stats from over 10 million web users, the trend is clearly heading away from filth and towards trivial socialising online.

Web searches provide an almost real-time view of how society and people are changing and some of his findings are great trivia, such as the fact that elbows, belly button fluff and ceiling fans are on the list of people's top fears alongside social intimacy and rejection.

"There are some patterns to our internet use that we tend to repeat very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to dresses, to what we do around the holidays," Tancer said.

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."

Email to a friend

Print this page

< Previous Networking : News Next >

1 comments

You need to Login or Register to comment.

There is now more to do than just porn

The research is interesting. It that people are spending more time on social networking and so less time on porn. I think these findings are more about the way that the web is changing. We used to just be able to read information that others published - and so it was an ideal environment for getting access to information or content you couldn't easily find elsewhere. It was in this environment that porn flourished. Now the web is about interacting. We can do so much more these days, and we are d

By Ip_matthewrhodes on Tuesday Sep 16