Trend: Social Networking passes Porn

by Joshua Porter  |   23 Comments

An interesting statistic from this week’s print version of The Economist: social networking sites will soon overtake porn as the most visited properties on the Web in the U.S.

Economist

This Hitwise data from February suggests that, FOR THE FIRST TIME!, porn may fall to #2 on the rankings list to the growth of social sites like MySpace and Facebook.

There are a couple interesting tidbits about this:

  1. Many sites that would be considered porn (such as AdultFriendFinder) are definitely social in nature. My guess is that these were included in the porn stats.
  2. It’s more likely that the change in percentage is due more to the insane growth of social networks and not the drop off of porn.
  3. The article also mentions an interesting tidbit about porn…that there’s a lot going on in peer-to-peer networks, so much of what could be counted as porn wasn’t.
  4. The article is bare on details…and I couldn’t dig up the original Hitwise data…as the Hitwise site is opaque. (side note: why aren’t there infographics out the wazzoo on the Hitwise site? Infographics are great link bait, because they distill lots of data into a quick read…Tufte, anyone?)
  5. Heather Hopkins of Hitwise blogged about the same data showing that Search passed porn in the U.K.

This is just further fuel for the fire that social networking has gone mainstream and is here to stay.

But what now? Where are we headed?

Well, the growth of social networks is amazing, but my guess is that designers are working to integrate social features into so-called “regular” sites as much as they are building the next MySpace. It’s becoming clear that MySpace and Facebook are outliers, and their success will probably not be duplicated by more than one or two sites every few years. That makes it a poor investment to try to replicate their success. What is more likely is to take an existing application model that already works for people and to add social features to it, gradually, making it sociable.

I’ve heard lots of “we’re going to make the MySpace of X” discussions, supporting this idea of taking lessons from the social networking sites and adding them where appropriate to existing applications.

Comments ( 23 Responses so far )

1.  Deanna on April 24th, 2007 (Comment) #

One of the things that gets glossed over when studies like this come out is that it’s talking about web traffic only… as you point out, there’s a lot of P2P traffic happening that blows web stuff out of the water, and email is still the most used internet application.

Especially considering that a lot of porn can be had via BitTorrent now, these stats aren’t so surprising. You can go to a torrent site (prolly not categorized as porn), find your dirty-dirty torrent, download the torrent and be done with your web traffic… that’s far less web interaction that older models of porn distribution.

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2.  Mark Johnson on April 24th, 2007 (Comment) #

I might suggest that one of the reasons that social networking is eclipsing porn is that social networks cause more sexual relationships to happen. Porn is a stand-in for sex; so if you give people easier ways to find sex, then they’ll gravitate towards those. Why sit and watch someone having sex when you can find someone to have it with?

Another contributing factor might be the explosion of naughty pics taken by cell phones, web cams, and digital cams. . . uh huh.

3.  Seyora on April 24th, 2007 (Comment) #

Great, one evil surpassed the other.

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4.  Gort on April 25th, 2007 (Comment) #

People will never remove a porn from the PC

5.  Johan on April 25th, 2007 (Comment) #

and how does spamming fit in this picture? Spamming leads the way to many content niches, and comment spam does a good job at spreading the F-word …

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6.  Brent on April 27th, 2007 (Comment) #

There seems to be some cynical feedback about this, but let’s remember, social networking is infinitely flexible. With porn you’re pretty much limited to the smut. With social networking, if you don’t like the way it is being used, change it! It is our responsibility to share content that has substance and is worthwhile. The beauty of social networking is in its virtually unlimited potential, much like the internet itself.

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7.  Disabled on May 5th, 2007 (Comment) #

Today in russia day mourning, moderate;temper first president Boris Elicin
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Today in russia day mourning, moderate;temper first president Boris Elicin
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8.  Manuel on May 31st, 2007 (Comment) #

I Hope that happens and people just forget about porn, and internet become clean place. But thats a tough thing to happen for sure.

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Bokardo is the blog of Joshua Porter, a web designer/developer, researcher, and writer. I live in Newburyport, MA, USA.

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Social design is design that focuses on the social lives of users. It deals with the activities, behaviors, and motivations of people who work and play together through software interfaces. It is built on the observation that many of the decisions we make are greatly affected by those we surround ourselves with in our social lives: our family, friends, and colleagues. Exploring our motivations and how to design interfaces to support them is what the Bokardo blog is all about.

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