FaceBook.com is Sticking it to the Online Porn Industry

The Porn industry hit its stride once the Internet came around. I can’t think of a better platform for the industry to make a home on.

facebook pics replacing need for porn

For consumers of the porn industry the Internet provides an all inclusive environment to find, pay, view, and enjoy porn products.

Perhaps this is why the Internet revealed once and for all that porn is the most popular form of literature on the planet. Perhaps people would be more comfortable calling it content rather then literature. After all they offer much more then just pictures and words. You can find pictures, stories, video, art, escorts, live shows, many offline products and reviews, as well as a million and one ways to increase the size of your…


…well your…

…penis.

Ha I wrote it.

So what could possibly throw the online adult industry for a loop, and how in the heck could FaceBook.com have anything to do with it?

Well ever since FaceBook.com really started to gain momentum page views of porn sites have been plummeting. I mean they have really just been dropping faster then two blonde's on an old Ron Jeremy flick.

A large population is finding what they are looking for right on Facebook.com; well at least a part of their appetite. That’s right user photos and videos are becoming a widely used portion of the online spank bank of cyber space.

Now it is just not facebook.com it is really any social networking site. Also YouTube.com and the like are big contributors.

I have read about this notion several times over the last six months or so. But the most compelling evidence of this unforeseen phenomenon comes from my own research (not what your thinking).

Alexa.com, which has been purchased by Amazon.com, is a popular website amongst webmasters, developers, and bloggers a like. They provide site rankings that are completely unbiased to content.

This means that it does penalize a site for spam, advertising, plagiarizing, having adult themed content such as porn, or any other common penalized attribute that many other like ratings and ranking sites will penalize a given web property for employing the use of in its marketing efforts.

Alexa.com ranks a site based on traffic numbers, they look at time spent on a site, and page views, as well as number of visits. They track a lot of other variables as well but traffic ranks are calculated by the simple meat and potato metrics that should be used in such a calculation.

Rank is calculated by and number of visitors, visits, views, and time spent viewing.

Now as a blogger and site developer Alexa.com is a very interesting, fascinating, and necessary resource that I use on a regular basis. I am familiar with almost every aspect of it. Many of the folks that earn part or all of their living online also know quite a bit about it and how to both use and interpret the data and rankings that are offered by it. I realize that nobody else will likely have a clue so I will give a quick crash course on reading Alexa.com rankings and what those rankings imply.


Basics of Alexa and Site Rank

Alexa.com ranks around 30 million sites publicly and probably closer to 30 billion non publicly.

It ranks sites by country as well as globally. The global traffic rank is the bread and butter of what they offer and what folks like me want to see.

There are said to be over 100 million active websites. This number is actually more then that from what I hear now but for the simplicity of this article just assume that 100 million websites care about themselves at least a little.

This means that there is a active website for every 60 people on planet earth. This also means that there is a Alexa.com ranking for every 180-200 people on earth and there is a top million ranked website for every 5,000 – 7,000 people on earth.

I am telling you all this information so that you will have some perspective if you choose to check Alexa.com out and check some rankings of your favorite sites. Generally speaking a website in the top 1 million websites is a great competitive website that deserves a pat on the back.

The Drastic Shift From Porn to Social networks

When I first found a interest in web development the Alexa.com rankings for the top 100 websites in the world were dominated by porn. It was crystal clear that porn was the most viewed topic or niche on the web with really no close competitors besides email and search. At that time Yahoo.com was # 1 and Google.com was # 2 and RedTube.com was # 8 and was the first of many porn sites dominating the top 100.

In fact porn sites dominated the top million websites; porn was the Internet for all intensive purposes if one was purely researching page views and traffic stats of the World Wide Web.

I not one to be offended by porn or grotesque humor or any of the like, was ashamed to be human. I was appalled at my fellow human being. I went on to the RedTube.com profile page to investigate this serious global problem in more detail.

What I found was that about 60% of RedTube.com traffic was indeed male and 40% of their traffic was female. The population as a whole were of upper middle class incomes.

Their viewers, though slightly male dominated, were for all practical purposes the same demographics as the typical American homeowner. In short the viewers of RedTube.com were the same viewers of Google.com or Yahoo.com or any other common everyday website that appealed the Internet viewing population.



Since then the scene is much different...

• Google.com is now # 1
• FaceBook.com is now # 2
• YouTube.com is # 3
• Yahoo.com is #4
• The first adult site is LiveJasmine.com which is # 41
• Redtube.com is now # 107
• The first real traditional porn site is PornHub.com which is # 57

These changes are much more drastic then they may seem to the average person. The next best ranking is going to take twice as much traffic to leapfrog then it took to leapfrog the one prior. So 30-40 slots which is nothing if you are in the 3 millions is on the contrary quite a hike when you are talking the top 100.

So what is this doing to the porno industry online or off?

Well it seems as if the consumer is demanding the experience become more and more real, believable, and authentic even if this means sacrificing some content control that the traditional porno flick provides.

The porn industry seems to be responding two ways:

 First is that the porn online site offerings now offer sites that claim to be the facebook of porn and the like. They are designed and setup to be more like a facebook.com look and feel.

Also the content is much more facebook.com like then porn star like. The site will claim to have hacked accounts or have content contributed by guys getting back at ex-girlfriends.

They will have a Upload Your Content button as well as a remove content button.

The second way in which the porn industry is changing is that it is pushing online community sites that are adult orientated like adultfriendfinder.com or sexsearch.com or the like. These sites are like adult dating sites that are suppose to be sex crazed as can be.

So the industry is simply getting a reality effect boost per the demand of the porn consumer.

Still there is no doubt that some where along the lines someone is missing those page-views that YouTube and facebook.com and MySpace and the like have taken. Surely the cpm publishers who make money on a per page-view scale have increased their available inventory and advertisers of non adult products are able to now advertise on page views that they use to would have had to forfeit just for public image reasoning.

There is little doubt that the social networks have gained from these shifts of traffic.

The only thing I am unclear on is just how much of a financial hit have the porn and adult industries taken online?


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