Facebook: More popular than porn

[TheEnforcer]

http://www.time.com/time/business/ar...te-cnn-partner

Facebook: More Popular Than Porn
Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007 By BILL TANCER

When I wrote last week's column comparing the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook, I included a line after my signature stating that I had only 124 friends on Facebook, and urged readers to add me as their friends. As of today I have 261 new Facebook friends, the majority of which are Generation Y college students.
I turned to Hitwise data to find out more about them. By examining which websites social-network users visit after logging into their profiles, we can gain a bit of insight into how sites like Facebook fit into their members' daily online lives. The data showed that after other social networks, the most clicked-on category of sites was search engines, with 11.6% of all downstream visits. Web-based email services were next with 8.5%. Blogs came in third in popularity at 6.1%, claiming more than four times the number of visits to traditional news sites, which logged 1.5% of downstream visits.

Perhaps a more interesting — and more accurate — way to figure out where college students are going online is to assess which of the 172 web categories tracked by Hitwise get the most hits from 18- to 24-year-olds. Here's a shocker: Porn is not No. 1. I've actually been puzzled by the decrease in visits to the Adult Entertainment category over the last two years. Visits to porn sites have dropped from 16.9% of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9% as of last week, a 33% decline. Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. If you chart the rate of visits to social-networking sites against those to adult sites over the last two years, there appears to be a strong negative correlation (i.e., visits to social networks go up as visits to adult sites go down). It's a leap to say there's a real correlation there, but if there is one, then I'd bet it has everything to do with Gen Y's changing habits: they're too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin. Imagine.

[RawAlex]

it's sort of the old trick about changing the measurement system to suit your desired results.

Example: According to surveys taken, pissing is much more popular in sex. When surveyed, people said they pissed much more often during the day, needed it more often, and would sometimes even wake up in the middle of the night in need of a good pee. The same people reported having sex with their spouse or partner not more than 3 times a week average.

Therefore, sex is no longer popular, and everyone should stop.

Yeah, right.

[Hammer]

I would guess the drop is not because less people are clicking to look at porn but more are clicking to look at something else too.

[TheEnforcer]

Still an interesting article though. The habits of people do chaneg over time and it si not unreasonable to think that the next group of people look at porn less than older groups.

[RawAlex]

Actually, I think the exact opposite: more people in the future will look at porn, but they will consider it less of an issue than it was considered 10 or 20 years ago.

Vanessa Hudgens got naked and her (rather yummy) 18 year old body was sprayed all over the place. 20 years ago, the mouse house would have gone nuclear and she would have "never worked in this town again!". Instead, they signed her back up for another season.

People's view of porn is changing, and at some point the sales pitch may have to change because most of the normal stuff won't be all that shocking or forbidden anymore.

[Overkill]

Good point.