• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Porn's Popularity Replaced By Social Networking

Posted on: Tuesday, 16 September 2008, 13:05 CDT

Social networking has replaced pornography as the major attraction on the Web according to a new report by Bill Tancer.

A self-described “data geek”, Tancer looked at information from over 10 million surfers to find that Web activity resembles society.

Tancer has included his findings in a new book, “Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters”.

He said it matters because he found that people’s Web activities tend to reveal a wider picture of society and behavior.

"There are some patterns to our Internet use that we tend to repeat very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to prom dresses, to what we do around the holidays," said Tancer, who is the general manager of global research at Hitwise, and Internet tracking company.

He noted one of the biggest shifts over the past decade was the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.

Surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites, he said.

"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."

Tancer also noticed what people as a society are preoccupied with and affected by.

"I noticed in our data that some of the top search terms are about tropical storms in the United States," said Tancer.

"Before Hurricane Katrina rarely would you see a search on tropical storms but the devastation from Katrina has made us as a society much more sensitive to tropical storms."

Tancer said the current obsession with celebrities was also reflected through web data, with celebrity websites garnering more attention than sites devoted to religion, politics, well-being and diets combined -- and no sign that this is waning.

This celebrity mentality had also overlapped into the November presidential election in the United States with surfers looking for images of Republican vice presidential candidate Sara Palin rather than looking for her policies.

"A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is and also to search for their families," he said.

"You have to get far down in the search terms to link the search for a candidate with any issue."

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

More News in this Category