By M. Christian
YNOT – Sex continues to be a driving force for technology, at least according to a recent article at ExtremeTech. Writer Sebastian Anthony revealed a lot of the internet is dedicated to sex — and by a lot we mean a lot.
In “Just how big are porn sites?” Anthony illuminates what the adult entertainment industry already knew, but the scale is still remarkable.
“According to Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner, which tracks users across the web with a cookie, dozens of adult destinations populate the top 500 websites,” Anthony wrote. “Xvideos, the largest porn site on the web with 4.4 billion page views per month, is three times the size of CNN or ESPN, and twice the size of Reddit. LiveJasmin isn’t much smaller. YouPorn, Tube8, and Pornhub — they’re all vast, vast sites that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks.”
Even more remarkable? The amount of time spent on adult sites dwarfs the amount of time users spend on other destinations. On average, users view non-adult sites for three to six minutes — about the time it takes to read a short article. But viewers spend more than double that amount of time on the typical porn site.
Between the number of sites and the average viewing time, the internet has a huge amount of adult stuff: “The only sites that really come close in terms of raw bandwidth are YouTube or Hulu, but even then YouPorn is something like six times larger than Hulu,” Anthony noted.
The end result of this is that adult sites often require a massive amount of storage space: 50 to 200 terabytes on average. When it comes to bandwidth, large adult sites can gobble up 50 gigabytes per second.
While a lot of adult sites play their business data close to the vest, YouPorn was furnished a few details to Anthony: The tube site offers more than 100 terabytes of content, and gets (yes, you may whistle) 100 million page views per day. The daily views represent about 950 terabytes of data served.
At its top end, YouPorn delivers 4,000 pages per second. As Anthony pointed out, the volume is comparable to “transferring more than 10 dual-layer DVDs every second.”
While the actual numbers are kind of slippery, Anthony concludes that adult websites make up more than 30 percent of the internet.
