Well, I’ll be dipped in Astroglide! I would never have thought this possible, but according to Internet trend-watchers out there at Hitwise, the trend towards social websites such as MySpace and Facebook appears to be overtaking the porn industry:
Smart Mobs: Social networking to surpass porn as most popular web activity
Last year about 13% of website visits in America were pornographic in nature, according to Hitwise, a market-research firm. For comparison, search engines account for about 7% of site visits. Yet the Hitwise data suggest that sex sites are now being dethroned. In Britain search sites overtook sex sites in popularity last October—the first time any other category has come out on top since tracking began, says Hitwise. In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised “net communities and chat”
Now, before we get too over-stimulated, a few points need to be mentioned. For a start, if we’re talking about raw hits, it bears mentioning that almost a third of the traffic on MySpace is people trying to sell you porn. That hardly constitutes a shift in social mores. Also, the characteristics that define a “social website,” as opposed to a swinger’s club are no more easily distinguished as those of journalism and blogging: there are websites like xPeeps that basically provide an all-adult service similar to that of MySpace, or PornoTube, which is analogous to YouTube. And of course, people blog on all of these networks.
Not that I know about these sorts of things. I just overheard people talking about them at the public library. . . . Oops!
Wait, wait. . .
if ( xPeeps == MySpace || Blogging == Journalism || Swinger == xPeeps || MySpace(Blogging)) {
Swinger == Journalist;
}
Am I wrong?
Technorati Tags: Pornography, Internet, Web, MySpace, xPeeps, PornoTube, Culture
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