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The Internet Idle Technology

Over a Third of the Internet Is Pornographic 247

Th'Inquisitor writes "Pornography makes up 37% of the total number of web pages online, according to a new study published by Optenet, a SaaS provider. According to the report, which looked at a representative sample of around four million extracted URLs, adult content on the Internet increased by 17% in the first quarter of 2010, as compared to the same period in 2009."
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Over a Third of the Internet Is Pornographic

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  • by Kitkoan ( 1719118 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:21PM (#32594448)
    Thats more porn then you can shake a fist at...
    • by paeanblack ( 191171 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:23PM (#32594480)

      I'm sure somebody has tried to get a grip on it.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:36PM (#32594724) Homepage

      You really have to wonder though, if that market can be oversaturated. After all, porn changes the least over time so if there's already 100GB+ or 1TB+ of whatever fetish rocks your boat on the market, how much room is there for yet another standard flick with quite "standard" girls - for porn anyways?

      I guess there'll always be the Jenna Jamesons but most of that market I think will disappear. At least here in Norway the two major production companies have folded, there's just not enough money in it. Porn is definitively a race to the bottom (pun intended).

      • by Kitkoan ( 1719118 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:42PM (#32594796)
        To be honest, I doubt the market can truly be over saturated. It like books, movies and music, no matter how many are made, someone will always be willing to buy more. As for those production companies that have folded, I've heard of this issue and the big issue seems to be that too many people are making their own 'home-made porno' which is flooding the market with too easy 'cheap/free' porn.
        • by quantumplacet ( 1195335 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:53PM (#32594956)

          Regrettably, it’s true. Standards have fallen in adult entertainment. It’s video, Dude. Now that we’re competing with the amateurs, we can’t afford to invest that little extra in story, production value, feeling.

          Of course, you do get the good with the bad. The new technology permits us to do exciting things with interactive erotic software. Wave of the future, Dude. 100% electronic.

          • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @04:07PM (#32595164)

            I just wish they wouldn't try to outdo each other by making porn more extreme and less erotic in the process. Please stop the gross spitting and choking that seems to have taken over. That is about as sexy as a day at Gitmo.

          • by Knara ( 9377 )
            The first company to come out with fully interactive, fully immersive tactile VR body suits will have a CEO with wealth that rivals Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Get on it!
            • The first company to come out with fully interactive, fully immersive tactile VR body suits will have a CEO with wealth that rivals Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Get on it!

              No, the first company that makes a fully VR body suit that can clean itself will have that money. Would you really want to clean that suit out yourself every time?

          • by kimgkimg ( 957949 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @07:56PM (#32597472)
            Yes, it's such a shame that the intrigue and drama in the porn plot lines have suffered so. I was always on the edge of my seat because who ever knew why the pizza delivery boy was there at the mansion? And the anguish and inner conflict experienced by the pool boy or gardener as they struggle with the business/client relationship. Should they pursue the relationship with the housewife who's there alone, but yet pays their bills?
        • by thrawn_aj ( 1073100 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:54PM (#32594984)
          Indeed. Of course, I find it amusing that big porno companies are decrying this "loss of quality" in the field, as if they were actual artists. To them I can only say - drop the delusions of grandeur if you want to survive today's market and give the people what they want - that's literally your only function (indulging the will of your consumers). There are no connoisseurs to grant you protective patronage nor any sympathy to be had from a society that detests you in public (while using you quite shamelessly in private). Sad but that's how it is.
          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by bertoelcon ( 1557907 ) *
            Some porn is as close to art as most movie's showing at the theater. Not the "just porn" stuff but some have the storytelling elements and decent acting. Pirates and Pirates 2 are probably the best examples of that type.
            • I guess so and yes, I really should rein in my snark in this respect =]. After all, if someone's making a film, they have the right to (a priori at least) assume they have created art. It's just that I doubt very much whether that sort of art would have many patrons (for the art's sake). Which means that there won't be anyone to protect that art form if, no ... when it does start dying out due to the homebrew/amateur stuff, which satisfies the consumers' main need (the need that drives them to porn in the f

              • by Artifakt ( 700173 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @08:28PM (#32597696)

                Art is certainly rare in porn, but it's pretty rare in commercial television as well - perhaps the real question is, is it getting rarer? Satire and Parody tend to count as artistic values. I don't know if there's anything like parodies coming out nowdays, but back during the 70's - 80s, there were. Many films had titles such as '8 to 4' (parodying '9 to 5'), or Flesh Gordon (which ended up being distributed as nonporn or at least softcore, because the funny parts were, well, funny enough to stand on their own.) You could just about bet there would be a porno version of some films, because you could see how some of the parts that could easily be parodied would be sexual humor.
                        As for "minor", for some people, everything short of Shakespeare or at least Beckett is minor. Tons of directors could aspire to make the great XXX commentary on the human condition, and it's quite possible not one of them would hit such a high mark. Devil in Miss Jones definitely aspired to say something about religious repression of natural human desires, but did it actually say anything at all important? I doubt anyone in the porn industry today is even aiming that high, but I doubt that people in the TV industry get as much freedom and/or resource commitment when they try to break out of cliche land as they once did. Maybe porn is facing the same problem as video media in general, more than something unique to porn.
                     

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

          People "buy" porn? When did they start doing that again?

          Porn is free for those who look, and has been for the better part of the last decade. It's so prevailant that it's difficult to avoid. The market is, for all intents and purposes, "saturated".

          Porn is not like books, because books cost money to produce and can be sold for only so much. There are publisher controls on how many get printed each year, and so on, so as to not overwhelm customers and create a glut of supply.

          Will the amount of porn go down? G

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            That depends very much what you mean by "good", which is why (I'm guessing) you put it in quotes. "Amateur" is an entire fetish of its own anyhow -- one which people pay for, oddly enough.

      • You really have to wonder though, if that market can be oversaturated. After all, porn changes the least over time so if there's already 100GB+ or 1TB+ of whatever fetish rocks your boat on the market, how much room is there for yet another standard flick with quite "standard" girls - for porn anyways?

        You can apply virtually the same arguments to books, films and music. The point here is that as the world and culture changes, the products in that culture must also change in order to stay accepted and contem

    • It is really in your face.

  • How stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by click2005 ( 921437 ) * on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:22PM (#32594460)

    FTFA... Web sites that contain violence have grown by 10.8 per cent, terrorism content by 8.5 per cent, and illegal drugs purchase by 6.8 per cent, and are continuing to grow, according to to the study, although it failed to define what it means by these terms.

    So a gaming site mentioning GTA4 could be counted as violence, drugs & porn.

    Rotta reckons, "There is a growing trend for online role-playing games to encourage negative behaviour, by rewarding violent and brutal activities within the online games."

    Yes because Crocheting & Knitting RPGs would sell so well.

    Internet shopping pages have increased by nine per cent this year, but Rotta managed not to find this worrying. What might kids be buying? Has she thought of that?

    She finds shopping sites worrying? Dont most of them still require a credit card for payment?

    according to a new study published by Optenet, a SaaS provider which delivers "on-premise" security.

    So they will sell you software to protect you from teh interwebs?

    Now I just need software to protect me from bullshit slashvertisments posing as articles.

    • by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:30PM (#32594604)

      >Yes because Crocheting & Knitting RPGs would sell so well.

      There is one!!! ZOMG!!1! Gimme the link! At last I can use my +3 Knitting Needles Of Purling!

      What's the story like? I'll bet that RPG spins quite a yarn!

    • by blair1q ( 305137 )

      So a gaming site mentioning GTA4 could be counted as violence, drugs & porn.

      Yes. It could.

      That game is violent, glorifies drugs, and treats women as prostitutes fit only to be murdered and robbed.

      You may not need "protecting" from that, but your apparent attitude that it is not what it is could be a result of your having been propagandized by it.

      • It simulates violence, and those aren’t really women, they’re bits and bytes.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Umm... no?

        It treats the prostitutes as prostitutes, who -can- be murdered, robbed, or slept with, because freedom is the entire theme of the game.

        It treats random woemn on the street as random women on the street. You can murder and rob them if you want to, but there's no unique incentive for it. They dress nicely. They talk to each other about their likes and dislikes. They have places to go. They dress differently in different areas. It's a rich, complex, and -satirical- simulation of a large city.

        The
    • by bmo ( 77928 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:47PM (#32594870)

      Yes because Crocheting & Knitting RPGs would sell so well.

      Bitches don't know about my cross-stitch porn.

      --
      BMO

    • Rotta reckons, "There is a growing trend for online role-playing games to encourage negative behaviour, by rewarding violent and brutal activities within the online games."

      Yes because Crocheting & Knitting RPGs would sell so well.

      Have you never heard of Farmville? I'd say that with the right positioning, a virtual knitting game might be - well - no less unlikely than a virtual farming one.

    • Yes because Crocheting & Knitting RPGs would sell so well.

      Grandma Theft Auto?

  • 37%? (Score:5, Funny)

    by hoboroadie ( 1726896 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:22PM (#32594464)

    I clearly need to spend more time surfing the web.

  • Rule 34 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Applying Rule 34 in reverse, one could say that all of the internet is pornographic. I mean, there's got to be someone who gets off reading papers on arXiv, right?

  • by commodore64_love ( 1445365 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:24PM (#32594500) Journal

    A lot of sites are nothing more than naked bodies. I'd estimate only about ~20% are actual porn (sex).

    I wish people would stop confusing the two, because they are not the same.

    • by Kitkoan ( 1719118 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:28PM (#32594578)

      I'd estimate only about ~20% are actual porn (sex).

      You also have to remember the difference between porn and erotica, the differences being of course the lighting.

      • by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @04:03PM (#32595114) Homepage

        You also have to remember the difference between porn and erotica, the differences being of course the lighting.

        I thought that porn is naked, whereas erotica is nude.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        >>>porn and erotica

        I don't see any difference. If there's a real or fake dick being inserted in a hole, or a pussy being licked, then it's sex and qualifies as "porn" for me. i.e. Not something I'd show children under age 13.

        On the other hand nudity is just that - a body without clothes. Lots of cultures think nudity is acceptable, and a photo of that nudity is not "porn" (or evil as some Puritan-americans claim). I don't care if my kid sees it.

      • by bwcbwc ( 601780 )

        The lighting...and the focal length on the camera. If you use a macro lens it's porn. If you use a wide angle lens it's erotica. A zoom lens can be either.

        • Actually, from what little I've seen it seems that some pornographers have taken to using "fisheye" lenses for their porn, and making sure to keep things that are supposed to seem big in the right spot (to take advantage of the distortion caused by fisheye lenses).

    • by geekoid ( 135745 )

      thanks for defining pornography for the world~

    • I highly, HIGHLY doubt that almost half of the nudity online is non-erotic. I think your estimates are whack. Nudity as art or lifestyle or what-have-you probably accounts for 5% or or less of that figure, not ~17%.
    • by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @04:08PM (#32595192) Homepage Journal

      What difference does it make anyway?

      Personally as long as i find the content i need, i don't care what else is there.

    • Jon Stewart's "America" notes that Justice Potter Stewart said "I shall not today attempt further to define... [hard-core pornography];. But I know it when I see it..." Later, he settled on the more descriptive "That which gives me wood."*

      So I guess we'd have to dig up Potter Stewart to decide if your definition is right or wrong.

      * pretty sure JS made that last part up though.

    • by Itninja ( 937614 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @04:52PM (#32595844) Homepage
      "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

      Pornography is not exclusively depictions of sex. From a big-boy dictionary:

      "1 : the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement
      2 : material (as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement"

      Pornography is any iamge that is intended to arouse sexual desire in someone. Depiction of a sexual act is not required. In fact the image doesn't even need nudity. For example, a website showing pictures of little girls in their undies, published for the intention of arousing the audience, would be pornography.
  • by Vekseid ( 1528215 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:25PM (#32594522) Homepage

    Always frustrating to see them littering all over the place.

    Glad for the RPG mention though. Good to know I'm part of what's corrupting America.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      Unfortunately? TGPs kick ass. How else could I quickly become acquainted enough with pornstars/producers that I like so that I can find torrents of them? Forums I suppose... but IDK... porn forums are kind of creepy. Oh LOL... I just noticed your sig.
  • Was I the only one surprised at how low 37% seems?
  • by greywire ( 78262 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:30PM (#32594606) Homepage

    FOR PORN!

    Ooops, sorry..

  • Wait... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:30PM (#32594608)
    Does this [victoriassecret.com] count as a "porn site"?
  • Web sites that contain violence have grown by 10.8 per cent, terrorism content by 8.5 per cent,

    Let me guess, they just classified every web-page containing Arabic characters to be "terrorism content", didn't they?

    • by geekoid ( 135745 )

      yep, those pesky Arab Numerals.

      • Amusingly enough, Arabic numerals (0123456789) aren’t used in Arabic-language writing. These [wikipedia.org] are.

        Slightly offtopic, I realise, but what on Idle isn’t?

        • by treeves ( 963993 )
          I thought it interesting that the Eastern Arabic character for eight is the same as the Japanese character.
    • Agreed. "terrorism content" is such a broad term. I wonder if, for instance, an exiled North Korean citizen blogging about the overthrow of the North Korean Government would fall into "terrorism content"?

      But it does make good "frighten the masses" material. I suspect some politician will be citing "a recent study". Complete with unorthodox rounding....

      "40% of the internet is porn and 10% is linked to terrorism!!!!!! We need to control this!!!!!"

      And later in the campaign...

      "Half! I'll repeat. Half of the int

  • by amstrad ( 60839 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:32PM (#32594648)
    Dr Cox: I'm fairly sure that if they took all the porn off the Internet, there'd only be one website left, and it would be called bring-back-the-porn.com
  • no content (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:32PM (#32594652) Homepage Journal
    There is no content in this article, just a statement of random unsubstantiated statistics.

    And what if the random trivia is true? What if half the internet is for adults? Aren't half the people in the world adults? Why should they not have a representative portion of the internet? So we have to sanitize the world for the developmentally challenged that have never seen a real vagina or penis.

    And then, what is pornographic? If I write a story with a plot and gratuitous sex scene is that pornographic? We want definitions.

    This is just a useless piece of fluff intended to make people who aren't getting laid mess in their pants. Oh, think of the kids. Oh, Oh, the kids. We have to protect, the Oh, kids.

    We already know that 99.99999% of the interent has no useful content. Yahoo is evidently becoming the ultimate porn site by advertising it is the place of entertainment news. Pretty soon the only safe place to be will be /. Even XKCD can't be trusted. Fuck.

    • Oh, think of the kids. Oh, Oh, the kids. We have to protect, the Oh, kids.

      fap fap fap ... yes, go on...

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Locke2005 ( 849178 )
      Pretty soon the only safe place to be will be /. No chance of seeing any naked women on /., but there ARE a lot of dicks!
  • I'm both surprised and feeling more hope for humanity.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:33PM (#32594680)

    "Ana Luisa Rotta, director of child protection projects at Optenet"

    So they have a commercial interest in this topic and to make things even worse, they claim to be "child protection"... those are the worst. I don't trust this study or them at all.

  • by rundgong ( 1575963 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:39PM (#32594758)
    According to the report, which probably looked at a well chosen sample of around four million extracted URLs, adult content on the Internet increased by 17% in the first quarter of 2010, as compared to the same period in 2009."

    When someone tries to sell you software to protect you from the evil porn that you might accidentally see on the internet, I'm not sure I'm gonna believe their claims of how much porn there is.
  • How much of that is malware disguised as porn?
  • I read the internet for the articles.
  • by fyoder ( 857358 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:47PM (#32594864) Homepage Journal

    James Joyce defined pornographic art as art created with the intention of inspiring desire to possess the object. By this definition, advertising art is pornographic [starvingartistguide.com], and there's no shortage of that on the web! Perhaps a third of the content on the web isn't pornographic.

  • This is dire news indeed. I wish the article has discussed possible solutions to the lack of porn found on the internet
  • Awesome. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jaysyn ( 203771 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:47PM (#32594868) Homepage Journal

    Awesome, that means we only have 2/3rds left to go!

  • What about traffic? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sirrunsalot ( 1575073 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2010 @03:54PM (#32594986)

    The interesting question, if you ask me, is how much traffic is devoted to porn. This is the result of a survey of four million URLs, but I could set up thousands of sites about pomegranates if I wanted, and it wouldn't have much to do with interest in pomegranates. (Don't ask why pomegranates. I just thought a pomegranate sounded good right now. Too much darn work though.) I suppose in large volume the quantity correlates with the size of the industry, but that still doesn't take into account the number of sites required to meet the needs of the people. Other people, that is, am I right?

    • by JAZ ( 13084 )

      exactly... looks like manipulating the parameters of the test to get the desired dramatic outcome. pages and even sites are really cheap to put up, getting used is much harder.

      Bandwidth used or percentage of total ecommerce would be a more meaningful statistic.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    At first I thought, "no way", but then I considered that they were saying web pages, not web domains. No doubt, any single porn website might have thousands of individual pages, whereas most websites only have a few dozen. So yeah, I could see 37%.

  • Has anyone asked Netcraft if 2010 will be the year of the porn desktop?
  • MUCH of this porn is being made by pretty good looking women with utterly no self respect and clearly no standards insofar as that goes.

    My question is then: why don't I *ever* sit next to them on the plane/bus/park bench?

    • by COMON$ ( 806135 )
      You probably do and haven't realized it. Having worked IT in law enforcement, I can attest that you CANNOT judge a person's sex life by their appearance. That sweet girl on the plane or straight laced guy could be into some freaky stuff and you would never know.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by cosm ( 1072588 )

        You probably do and haven't realized it. Having worked IT in law enforcement, I can attest that you CANNOT judge a person's sex life by their appearance. That sweet girl on the plane or straight laced guy could be into some freaky stuff and you would never know.

        Not being snide, but what instances in your law enforcement IT experience point to that conclusion? Just looking for the scandal, humor, etc...Could you enlighten us with the correlation for the purpose of comedy and more jokes against the state (TM)?

  • This statistic really underlines the need for better filtering software. If 1/3 of the internet is porn, that is fully 2/3 of most people's time that is wasted on news, technology, sports statistics and the like. We really need a reliable filtering algorithm that will allow us to filter out that useless 2/3rds.

  • Therefore, only 2/3rds of the internet is a compleat waste of time.
  • We're going to need a bigger hard drive.
  • What is a representative sample of URLs? Due to dynamic content, the internet has an infinite number of URLs so surely the percentages you come up with are all about the methods you use to obtain the URLs. If you include enough precision in decimal degree of latitude and longitude, there's probably more of the internet just in google maps than in porn.

  • Martin Rimm? Is that you [wikipedia.org]?

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