Social Networking surpasses Porn on the Internet: Porn Just Moves On To The Next Technology
September 16th, 2008 by Tad Miller
News came out today that Social Networkings sites have now surpassed pornography, according to Hitwise’s Bill Tancer:
Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.
He said 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.
“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.”
This truly is monumental in the online world. Society finally got bored with Porn and started interacting with each other again. The good news is that people haven’t stopped using the Internet by any means and more “mainstream” use means more opportunities for mainstream businesses to advertise.
Porn isn’t disappearing from the Internet by any means, in fact you can guaranty if there is a new online technology that it can leverage that pornographers will be the innovators of how to use it. Pornography’s history with new media and technology is well established. It takes new technologies, inovates how to use them profitably and that technology usage eventually filters down to the mainstream.
Pornography was instrumental in innovation and profitable mainstream use the printing press, photography, film, Pay Per View and VHS tapes into established mainstream media. It’s role in innovating and monetizing Internet technologies used by everyday business is also paramount:
- The first E-commerce credit card billing platforms
- Online Streaming Video
- Online Streaming Audio
- Online Video Conferencing
- Peer to Peer file sharing
- Online dating
You can bet that it will also have a roll in developing the technology for mobile search in the future. Regardless of what you think of pornography personally and what its effect on society is, the online business world owes a huge debt of gratitude to the porn industry for its innovation.
The bad news for Search Mojo is that it diminishes one of the best stories about my Wife Janet’s SEO prowess. Janet used to work for an online survey company and had a number one ranking on Google for “online surveys”. After achieving that number one ranking, the company’s CEO noticed that the keyword “online surveys” actually had more sites indexed in Google than the word “sex” did. He was very happy to declare that his company was bigger than “sex on the Internet”!
It just doesn’t sound the same to say your bigger than “Social Networking” on the Internet. Ah the Good Ole Days…
Related Posts
 |
|
|
|
 778 views |
|||
|
|||
Tags: innovation, Internet, new media
