That pornography has always been a subject of extreme relevance on the internet, this has never been a secret to anyone. But do you have any idea how big it is? According to numerous reports, the net worth of the world's pornographic industry is estimated at about 97 billion dollars.
That's endless money! Enough to feed 4. 8 billion people a day.
Every year, Hollywood releases about 600 films and makes 10 billion dollars. Do you have any idea of how much the porn industry makes in the period? 13,000 films and about 15 billion dollars: A greater number than the combined revenues of Major League Baseball, NFL and NBA.
PornHub alone, one of the largest providers of pornographic content in the world, had 28. 5 billion visits in 2017, generating 24. 7 billion searches in the year, or 50,000 searches per minute the same number of hamburgers sold by McDonalds in that same time.
The most searched words on the website in this period were: "lesbian", "hentai" and "milf". PornHub posted, in fact, 4,052,543 pornographic videos in 2017 including 810,000 amateur videos. that would require 68 uninterrupted years to be watched by a single viewer.
In practice, there are more PornHub posted videos than are people visiting the Wall of China every year. In total, if we were to add up all the hours of videos watched on the site in just a 12-month interval, we would reach over 500,000 years. Brazil is the tenth country that consumes the most porn on PornHub in the world.
The busiest day around here is Monday. Saturday is the most empty. Pará is the state that, on average, spends more time online.
Pernambuco is the one with the shortest time connected it is also the state with the fewest pageviews. 35% of PornHub's audience in Brazil is female. We are the second country in the world with the highest proportion of women attending the site we lost only to the Philippines in this one.
On RedTube, we are the consumer champions in "transsexual pornography" the 4th most popular topic among Brazilians. In 2017, 3,732 Petabytes of files were transfered by PornHub, enough to fill the memory of all iPhones in the world. In fact, every 5 minutes, PornHub broadcasts more data than the entire content of the 50 million books in New York's public library.
Yet there is porn democracy. Throughout 2017, 120 million votes were counted in PornHub videos, of which almost 80% positive. That is 1 million more votes than registered in the last US presidential election.
And that’s because we’re talking about ONE single provider. All the world’s pornographic sites combined get more visitors per month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter together. In fact, XVideos alone is larger than the sum of Drpbox, CNN, and the New York Times audience.
35% of all internet downloads are related to pornography. Together, the top 5 sites in the industry receive about 6 billion visits per month, almost one for every inhabitant on the planet. In fact, it's almost impossible to disassociate the internet from pornography.
Just look at its history. Maybe you weren't even watching this video right now if it wasn't for it. To begin with, part of the very popularization of network access itself has its past closely tied to pornography.
The greater was the demand for porn content in the 1990s, the greater was the pressure on dotcom companies to increase their Internet infrastructure to meet all this demand. The great proof of this is that Penthouse itself, one of the largest pornographic magazines on the planet, even distributed modems to its consumers to strengthen its online content in the early days of the Internet. Point for Penthouse!
But that influence wasn't just restricted to infrastructure. In 1995, Danni's Hard Drve became the first virtual store in history: a website where people paid to access the material produced by porn actress and former stripper Danni Ashe. It was in the 90s, by the way, that the American Richard Gordon created Electronic Card Systems, a pioneer in the field of online credit card payments.
The model was created to make the sale of online pornography easier. That means, if you're one of those who can't resist an online sale, thank the porn industry for making it possible. Neither streaming nor social networks managed to scape.
Way before Netflix or Youtube took over the world, over twenty years ago a Dutch porn company called "Red Light District" launched the world's first video streaming platform on the Internet. The Bulletin Board System, on the other hand, long before Facebook or Twitter, can be considered the father of social networks: an extremely popular system in the 1990s, full of people producing and trading - that's right - erotic content. At this point, you must have already realized: Pornography is undeniably a protagonist in the history of the Internet, not only helping to develop and popularize some of the key technologies for its operation, but consuming an endless amount of time of billions of people connected around the world.
Yet, governments seeking to control it are not uncommon at all. In countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, Botswana, Bangladesh, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Nepal, Ethiopia, Morocco, Turkmenistan, Sudan, Uganda and Papua New Guinea, it is simply forbidden and can lead to imprisonment which means say that nearly 1 billion human beings live in regions of the planet with no legal access to pornography, forced to smuggle erotic videos fighting police raids Egypt, for example, is the champion of Pornhub's video consumption in the Middle East, even with the ban. Elsewhere, as in Japan, pubic hair and genitals must be pixelated or censored which provokes in the porn industry, in attempt to circumvent the prohibitions, the highlight of issues and genders almost always forgotten in the West, from sex involving tentacles to mangas.
Summing up, even with its setbacks, this is the size of online pornography: LARGE. Unquestionably much larger than the headquarters of any government or religion interested in controlling it.
