Online Adult Industry

Internet pornography is pornography that is distributed by means of various sectors of the Internet, primarily via websites, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups.

While pornography had been traded over the Internet since the 1980s, it was the invention of the World Wide Web in 1991 as well as the opening of the Internet to the general public around the same time that led to an explosion in online pornography.

Like videotapes and DVDs, the Internet has proved popular for distributing pornography because it allows people to view pornography more or less anonymously in the comfort and privacy of their homes. It also allows access to pornography by people whose access is otherwise restricted for legal or social reasons.

Lets have an in-depth look at this industry.....


Some key facts of the online adult industry:

• In any given week, about 70 million people worldwide view at least one adult Web site.

• Approximately 100,000 adult sites are supported by U.S. businesses and there are roughly another 400,000 adult sites that exist globally.
  

• According to the Nielsen/Net Ratings, in February 2002 nearly 16 percent of visitors to adult Web sites were younger than 18 years of age.

To attract visitors, adult Web-site operators might:

 

• Advertise through unsolicited e-mail (spam)

• Create subscription e-mail lists

• Place ads on other sites

• Use sexually oriented words that can be found by search engines

• Pay search-engine companies for prominent placement in results

• Buy domain (Web-site) names based on sexually oriented words or misspellings of common Web-site names

• Buy expired non-adult sites that were once popular

• Use everyday words such as “doll” or “girl” to attract attention

• Pay other Web sites to get consumer traffic (often by a method known as mousetrapping) 

Evolution:
As the Internet gained in popularity, the number of adult oriented websites exploded exponentially and a business model was born; using the same subscription model used television, sites were established that allowed users to pay a fixed fee and have access to instant content.

Obviously as technology improved the adult industry followed - faster connections brought around an increase in video and said goodbye to premium-rate dialers. However, with the second dot-com boom (the often cited "web2.0 boom") the whole industry started to shift.
 
Web2.0 was a term banded around to represent user generated content and various forms of data syndication; it was obvious once Youtube became popular that a user-generated pornography video site wouldn't be far behind. User submitted content could then be uploaded to the site and served for free.

Suddenly sites such as Youporn, Pornotube and Redtube sprung up and changed the business model. Users could see all content, all the time. No subscriptions, no fees, just user submitted content.

Are adult sites really dangerous?

Popular free anti-virus software maker Avast, recently released a study that attempted to answer the question surrounding the "dangerous" reputations of adult sites. In their study they found 99 infected mainstream web pages for every one infected adult web page, making the safety ratio 99:1.

"We are not recommending people to start searching for erotic content but the statistics are clear - for every infected adult domain we identify there are 99 others with perfectly legitimate content that are also infected," commented Avast CTO Ondrej Vlcek.

Worrying Statistics: 

• 9 out of 10 children aged between the ages of 8 and 16 have viewed pornography on the Internet, in most cases unintentionally (London School of Economics January 2002).

•  Average age of first Internet exposure to pornography: 11 years old (Internet Filter Review). 

• Largest consumer of Internet pornography: 12 - 17 year-old age group (various sources, as of 2007).

•  Adult industry says traffic is 20-30% children (NRC Report 2002, 3.3). 

• Youth with significant exposure to sexuality in the media were shown to be significantly more likely to have had intercourse at ages 14 to 16 (Report in Pediatrics, April, 2006).

•  "Never before in the history of telecommunications media in the United States has so much indecent (and obscene) material been so easily accessible by so many minors in so many American homes with so few restrictions."   - U.S. Department of Justice, Post Hearing Memorandum of Points and Authorities, at l, ACLU v. Reno, 929 F. Supp. 824 (1996).