Report: The Internet Really Is for Porn

LOS ANGELES — A new report is calling attention to the widespread consumption of online adult entertainment, and is opening eyes with some startling claims.

It won’t come as much of a surprise to many of our readers, given the breathtaking bandwidth consumption now being reported by free tube sites offering streaming videos, but broadband and booty-shaking go hand-in-hand.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Sebastian Anthony wrote for ExtremeTech, “that a person in possession of a fast Internet connection must be in want of some porn.”

Stating that “the Internet really is for porn,” Anthony set about illustrating the reasons for his assumption; based upon the best numbers available — a task which he notes is not the easiest to accomplish, given the typically secretive nature of the industry’s privately held companies.

Anthony compiled data from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner to reveal that XVideos is currently the largest adult website, boasting 4.4 billion page views per month; with other adult sites, such as LiveJasmin, YouPorn, Tube8 and Pornhub all commanding vast expanses of market share, “that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks of the Internet.”

These facts highlight porn’s global appeal, which crosses all demographics.

It’s not just a matter of page views, however, but “stickiness” — the measure of how much time a visitor spends on a website — that sets adult sites apart from non-adult sites; with Anthony comparing a 15-20 minute average porn site visit to a three-to-six minute visit on a news site as evidence of adult’s stickiness.

To put the scope of online porn’s appeal into perspective, however, requires a look at the amount of bandwidth being pushed by these top-tier adult sites, which predominantly feature large streaming video files.

Anthony uses the example of a low resolution video stream of 100kbps, which over the course of an average 15 minute visit, consumes approximately 90 megabytes. Using this figure, he deduces that XVideos’ 350 million monthly users consume somewhere near 29 petabytes of data monthly (around 50 gigabytes per second), but notes that at its peak traffic times, XVideos may burst to 1,000Gbps (1Tbps) or more.

“To put this into perspective,” Anthony explains, “There’s only about 15Tbps of connectivity between London and New York.”

Anthony states that while the amounts vary, typical adult websites contain 50 to 200 terabytes of porn and are responsible for nearly a third of all Internet traffic.

“The Internet only handles around half an Exabyte of traffic every day, which equates to around 50Tbps — in other words, a single porn site accounts for almost two percent of the Internet’s total traffic,” Anthony stated. “It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30 percent of the total data transferred across the Internet.”

Huge numbers indeed, but are they accurate?

Pink Visual’s Quentin Boyer notes that while the report does a pretty good job of relating the scale of some of the industry’s largest sites, the various estimates, projections and averages it offers seem to assume that most adult sites are significantly larger than they are, both in terms of traffic and content.

“On balance, I think the report is OK,” Boyer told XBIZ. “The author just doesn’t have enough information about the industry at large to come up with reliable assumptions and estimates concerning what ‘most’ sites are like, or what the ‘average’ size really is.”

For example, most video streams today run at well in excess of 100kbps, while most adult sites offer nowhere near 50 to 200 terabytes of content. Anthony’s own estimate for XVideos’ traffic may be way off, with his revised numbers placing the actual amount of data being transferred at up to 40 petabytes per month.

More accurate perhaps is the analysis of the hard- and software behind the scenes.

Anthony notes that on the infrastructure front, Redis databases and Nginx-powered web servers housed in dedicated data centers, or cloud providers such as Amazon AWS are the only ways to handle these site’s high load demands.

YouPorn, which claims to be the second largest adult website, told Anthony that it hosts more than 100TB of content, serving more than 100 million page views daily, or up to 4000 pages per second, for around 28 petabytes per month. Its system, YouPorn says, will handle up to 200 million views per day; and while originally running Perl with a MySQL backend, was upgraded in 2011 to run PHP and Redis, under Nginx, with load balancing provided by HAProxy and Varnish.

Beyond the technology that enables it, the huge popularity of tube sites, while a bane to adult content producers plagued by piracy, offers a number of “silver clouds” to those operators that can see opportunities in new markets.

According to Wasteland.com owner Colin Rowntree, one of the unintended windfalls of sponsors putting promo content on tube sites is that sponsors are no longer incurring the large cost of “feeding bandwidth to the world.”

“Since the decrease in the number of affiliates using hosted videos and galleries (a lot of them seem to have migrated to text and editorial based ways to promote their sponsors), we’ve seen a pretty pleasant decrease in bandwidth for free video hosting,” Rowntree told XBIZ. “It seems to be a nice win-win as affiliates ‘in the know’ have stopped even trying to compete with the tubes and rely more on hand crafted reviews and editorial with some photos and short trailers, whilst the large tubes are blasting out the bandwidth at a much more favorable bandwidth fee for the bulk they are purchasing.”

So it seems that today, bandwidth isn’t everything — but it is a necessary expense as well as a yardstick to measure the success of a company — a yardstick that represents a website’s potential customers.

“I’d rather have the traffic and the bandwidth bills than neither,” Boyer concluded.

Regardless of the real numbers, however, the one indisputable truth that Anthony uncovered is that “the Internet really is for porn.”

Copyright © 2023 Adnet Media. All Rights Reserved. XBIZ is a trademark of Adnet Media.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited.

More News

Conservative AGs Send Letter to Aylo About Supposed Moderation 'Loophole'

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, along with 25 other attorneys general largely from Republican-controlled states, sent an open letter to Pornhub parent company Aylo on Friday demanding explanations about a supposed “loophole” that allowed users to post CSAM.

FSC Calls on North Carolina Governor to Veto Age-Verification Bill

Free Speech Coalition (FSC) has sent a letter to North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, asking him to veto House Bill 8, to which a Republican legislator attached a copycat age-verification amendment.

Leading Free Speech Groups File Brief Blasting Texas' Age Verification and Mandatory Labeling Law

Several leading free-speech groups, led by the ACLU, urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Thursday to block the Texas age verification law that requires adult websites to post anti-porn propaganda, contending that this violates the First Amendment.

Pre-Nom Period for 2024 XBIZ Awards Ends Saturday

The deadline for pre-nomination entries for the 2024 XBIZ Awards, the adult industry's biggest night, is Saturday at midnight, PDT.

Erolabs Launches Adult Mobile Game 'Star Lusts'

Adult game studio Erolabs has released the first six chapters of its latest mobile title, "Star Lusts."

French Government Report Urges Criminalization of Adult Industry

A sensationalistic report released this week by a French government office is urging immediate state censorship and broad criminalization of the adult industry in France and worldwide.

North Carolina Group Backing Age Verification Bill Admits Law Is Actually 'Anti-Pornography'

A North Carolina religious conservative group backing just-passed age verification legislation, which a Republican state senator snuck into an unrelated bill last week, has admitted the copycat amendment is in fact an “anti-pornography provision.”

JuicyAds Introduces 'Adsistant AutoBid' Tool

JuicyAds has launched its new Adsistant AutoBid tool, which allows advertisers to move an advertiser's bid up and down to maintain a specific bid position.

FSC Sets Calendar for Upcoming Board of Directors Election

Free Speech Coalition (FSC) has set the calendar for its November election for Board of Directors.

New Report Warns Against 'Rising Tide' of Conservative Censorship

A new report published last week by the Chamber of Progress, a U.S. trade group representing many of the leading technology companies, issued an urgent warning against the “rising red tide” of digital censorship promoted by conservatives.

Show More