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Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

Wait why? Porn sites are hugely profitable. Pornhub rakes in more monthly traffic than Google and FB combined.

It's only as profitable as what advertisers will pay. Porn is at the absolute bottom for ad value.

My use of “dead” was since (obviously) Tumblr’s business model did not include serving porn. It did include appearing to be one of the most popular websites globally.

> Pornhub rakes in more monthly traffic than Google and FB combined.

traffic measured in visitors or bytes downloaded? any source?

Even in bytes that's a notable metric. What's your point?

In bytes it's even less believable. More traffic than Google, which owns YouTube? What are they doing, serving all the video in 8K?

Even as someone who really doesn't have a problem with porn, I'm not going to spend 3 hours watching it, while I definitely have spent 3 hours watching youtube on many many occasions. There's also only one of the two that's going to be serving as background noise during working hours... Or that someone is going to put on to entertain their kids.

Fair point - didn't really think of it like that before.

I suspect it's bullshit.

> The company employs around sixteen hundred people, and the online platforms it owns, which include Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, and Brazzers, received approximately 4.5 billion visits each month in 2020, according to a company spokesperson—almost double Google and Facebook combined.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/20/the-fight-to-h...

That is a source, but I very much question those numbers. Google alone gets 89 billion visits a month.

https://www.oberlo.com/blog/google-search-statistics

I assume they meant uniques. I agree, it's a ridiculous stat and probably exaggerated ... OTOH, porn traffic numbers from the "official sources" are way underreported for obvious reasons. Is it believable that half the people on Earth visit one of these sites every month? Probably not. Is it possible they are pulling Google-scale traffic? Yes quite likely IMO.

It stretches credulity that they could get anything near 4.5 billion unique visitors when their most popular site only gets 0.4 billion [0]. But even if that were the case, 4.5 billion is still less than Google and Facebook combined. (Of course it's not valid to stack Google and Facebook's visitors as disjointly unique, but the same is true of Pornhub and its properties.)

Regardless, you're totally right that their numbers are relatively impressive and indeed "Google-scale" if we interpret that as within an order of magnitude. If the metric they used was "unique visitors per employee," then even with official source numbers they would be around 10x as successful as Google!!

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201889/most-visited-web...

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