In September 2003, filtering software provider N2H2 declared that there were approximately 260 million pornographic web pages on the net.
Whoo hoo!
Okay, let’s get real. As mentioned N2H2 is a company which sells filtering software so that users can block porn from their systems. Their programs Bess and Sentian both work from a database. This database is the one from which N2H2 derives their 260 million porn web page count. According to N2H2 they catalogued 14 million web pages in 1998. The new 2003 count signifies a growth in porn pages of almost 1800 percent in just five years.
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"People in our business don't necessarily want to be inventoried by outside monitors." |
What’s interesting about the N2N2 report is the repeated usage of the term "web pages". Not once in their press release picked up by all the major news carriers- does N2H2 use "sites" or "domains" in the description of their findings. ThIs could be an editorial oversight on the part of N2H2’s public relations department. Surely when N2H2 refers to 260 million they must mean whole porn web sites, not individual pages.
Here’s where you might expect me to declare that those N2H2 figures are highly inflated all in an effort to sell filtering software. Whereas I do think the pages-instead-of-sites ploy is pretty sneaky, I don’t think the figures are over inflated. I think N2H2 grossly underestimated the numbers.
See the problem with statistics like those from N2H2 is they’re an attempt to measure an industry, which doesn’t want to be measured. I’ve seen countless webmasters ask for hard statistics on the adult web, but have yet to see any stats.
People in our business don’t necessarily want to be inventoried by outside monitors. We have enough monitoring from government, law enforcement, billing processors, moralists and filtering software providers. As for absolute numbers on how much money this industry generates, well good luck on finding them.
We might brag on message boards about our new boats or houses or cars but not one of us will admit to exactly how much we earn from slinging cyber porn. Some adult webmasters throw out a figure or two but it’s hard to discern boasting from the truth on a forum. All statements about numbers and monies made are pure speculation.
Then we have the guidelines of statistics to deal with. Should net porn be counted by individual pages, whole websites, domains or servers? For example, take the TGP gallery builder. Many of them don’t operate actual, whole sites. They build individual gallery pages, which (in totality) probably receive more traffic than all free, adult sites combined.
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TGP gallery builders create new pages every single day and they done this for the past five or so years. The majority of these galleries -save the non-nude/bikini pages- qualify as porn. Quite a few gallery makers don’t even attempt to optimize their pages for the search engines. N2H2 says in their press release that they calibrated their findings through Google research. They used two keywords "porn" and "xxx" and found results of around 80 million for the first and roughly 76 million for the latter. That kind of calibrating seems rather specious.
What about non-adult sites which simply contain the words "porn" or "xxx"? What about all the other myriad keywords/search terms porn surfers use? Would search terms such as "MILF porn" or "gay xxx" be considered an overlap in the count? Do filter makers, such as N2H2, include adult resource sites, online content providers or porn webmaster message boards in their databases? What about paysites and AVS sites? How deeply does a filter examine a paid-only access location?
I’ll tell you the only semi-hard numbers I know. Back in 1999, Crow from PornCity told me they had about 33 thousand individual webmaster accounts on their free hosting service. In September 2003, GFY celebrated two million posts accumulated since January 2001. Cozy Frog currently contains 3001 listings for adult resources. On my best gallery day, I received a little over 85 thousand unique hits. Given those numbers, when I try to estimate the stats, I get a math headache.
As for N2H2’s 260 million? I seriously doubt there are 260 million actual, whole, existing, commercial sites. One hundred million? Doubt it. If one is counting by the enumerators of whole, existing, commercial sites then I make the uneducated guess of one or two million max.
If N2H2 is counting individual pages, then 260 million seems to be a very low number. Some gallery makers create and submit as many as ten new pages a day. I’m betting there are at least 30 thousand serious gallery makers out there in our worldwide community.
It would be interesting to know the hard, unbiased numbers when it comes to cyber porn. Numbers like the ones that come from N2H2 are semi-hard at best.