While visits to adult entertainment websites are down 20 percent in the U.K., according to Hitwise Vice President Heather Hopkins, the decline in numbers doesn’t necessarily translate into a lack of interest in adult content.
The data indicates a larger trend toward social networking and P2P sites, Hopkins said, adding that users interested in adult content and music — which saw traffic drop 18 percent in the U.K. — find what they want elsewhere.
According to Hopkins, search engines and social networking sites began to overtake adult websites in October, with the gap growing to 1 percent in December.
The gap is likely to widen, Hopkins said, because adult websites were among the first to populate the Internet. The change is that more mainstream offerings are coming online, which decreases adult’s market share.
Hopkins did not yet have data on traffic to adult websites from U.S. users. But she said the trend in the U.K. likely mirrors what’s going on in the U.S.
To compile its data, Hitwise uses a representative sample of Internet users. U.K. data came from a sampling of more than 8 million users.