Comments on: Facebook More Popular than Porn on Internet

By: tony

tony — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:55:55 +0000

Yeah, those fiqures are just based on search engine queries. As a whole porn would still be more popular by a very wide margin.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:13:50 +0000

Thanks Matt!

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:47:46 +0000

“I’m curious, though, if this finding is reflected in visits/page views or simply in Google searches.”

Tancer wrote about this last year on a Time blog. The below quote regards hits, not searches.

“for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth.”

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1678586,00.html

By: Bruce Etling

Bruce Etling — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:54:21 +0000

Agree completely.

By: Robert Kosara

Robert Kosara — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:16:11 +0000

While facebook may be higher than any single term, we’d have to know how these terms overlap (i.e., appear in the same query) to figure out if their sum is higher than fb.

But I mainly commented because I felt that this is shaky data to jump to such conclusions from. Search terms are one thing (and they’re difficult to analyze well), but there must be more meaningful metrics like money spent, etc.

By: Bruce Etling

Bruce Etling — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:34:42 +0000

And in the US, Myspace and Facebook are still far ahead of searches for the terms sex and porn. So the hypothesis that social networking sites beat out porn seems to hold.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=facebook%2Cmyspace%2Cporn%2Csex&geo=US&date=today%2012-m&clp=&cmpt=q

By: Bruce Etling

Bruce Etling — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:23:48 +0000

Fair enough. I assume Tancer has better data on this in his book, and I just wanted to see if a quick search on google insights would have similar findings. However, if you do an expanded search on google insights with some additional terms as you suggest, for example with the words facebook, porn, sex, and xxx, you still get higher results in September 2008 for facebook than any other single term.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=facebook%2Cporn%2Csex%2Cxxx&geo=&date=today%2012-m&clp=&cmpt=q

By: Robert Kosara

Robert Kosara — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:19:52 +0000

The problem with this is that it only captures searches for the word "porn" vs. the word "facebook." There are probably other terms you would search for if you were looking for porn, though, and those are not shown here. Also, it's interesting that this is for the world overall. If you filter down to US only, porn is still ahead. So I would suggest that this trend is mostly due to the sudden rise in popularity of facebook outside the US, and that any increases in searches for porn in other languages are not captured by picking a single English word.