The Geek-Kings of Smut

nymag.com

23 points·blantonl··4 comments

Good article, but I call bullshit on this- " Ten years ago, total daily adult-site traffic averaged less than 1 million unique visitors—on the entire Internet".

Really? Really? Only 1 million people on the planet viewed porn on the internet every day circa 2000? No way I believe that. According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, there were around 360 million internet users in Decemeber 2000. So of the people who used the internet, only ~0.3% viewed pornography on any given day?

I believe it. It's not like there was streaming video 24/7. There were dozens of magazines that hadn't yet been disrupted.

Also, internet speed was still pretty bad back then so you were limited to dialing up porn over your landline. Oh yeah, there weren't any mobile devices either back then. So it was primarily a matter of accessibility and alternatives, rather than demand.

I work in the adult industry as a software developer. This article is very, very accurate. And that statistic you have problems with is also true. In 2000 most people were downloading base64-encoded porn from newsgroups or JPGs from modem-based BBSes that hosted multiple adult CDs. Danni's Hard Drive was one of the first adult sites on the web. It got so popular that it created a payment processor called DHD Media, which mostly handles adult membership payments. But like an aging porn star, they're pretty useless now.

Do you have a source for the statistic? I'd like to see it.

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