Move Over Porn, Social Networking is Taking Over
Porn (adult industry) and gambling historically pushed the technology boundaries of the web. Without these two industries, the web may have evolved into something totally different than what we have today.
In a recent article on Time.com, writer Bill Tancer writes that Facebook (social networks) are more popular than porn on the web.
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.
Maybe Bill is onto something. I’m not an expert in the adult industry and haven’t ran a Comscore ranking of top-sites, but I used Vivid Entertainment and Thumbzilla as sites to compare to Facebook. See below.
The comparison isn’t really close at all. 24M vs. 2M? 12X multiple of viewers. Muhammed Saleem touches upon this trend in his posting back in April of this year. Saleem deduces that the resulting implication is that the internet has matured as a medium for disseminating information, and therefore people are switching from using the internet for pornography to other uses.
It seems that social-networking sites have not only usurped porn in popularity, but they’ve also gobbled up time Gen Y-ers used to spend on traditional e-mail and IM. When you can reach all of your friends through Facebook or MySpace, there’s little reason to spend time in your old-school inbox.
This is much easier to understand. Gen Y-ers, as described by Wikipedia, were born between 1985-1995. These young adults grew up on email, IM, and instantaneous interaction. They are used to technology and have the inate ability to adapt their lifestyle to account for new technologies that emerge.
Kids are also inherently lazy and they want everything together. Facebook bridges many forms of communication which is extremely appealing to this generation. Is email or IM as standalone utilities going to disappear? No, at least not anytime soon.
It’s fascinating to me to watch how this generation adapts itself to social networks (whether it’s Facebook or not) and to see what utility these networks provide over time.
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