WORLD WIDE WEB – Pornography Industry Statistics provided by the Internet Filer Review state that the size of the industry is $57 billion world-wide with $12 billion in the US

According to the statistics porn revenue is larger than all combined revenues of all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises in the US and the country’s revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC (6.2 billion). Child pornography alone generates $3 billion annually and the average age of first Internet exposure to pornography 11 years old.

Information provided by Internet Porn Statistics showed there are about 4.2 million pornographic websites constituting 12 per cent of the total websites. The pornographic pages constitute 372 million hits and daily pornographic search engine requests 68 million or 25 per cent of the total search engine requests.

“The pervasiveness of Internet pornography highlights the continued need for effective solutions to prevent liability issues in the workplace, government agencies and schools,” an N2H2 official remarked.

The filtering agency’s database contained 14 million identified pages of pornography in 1998. So the growth to 260 million represents an almost 20-fold increase in just five years.

Statistics derived from the search engine Google support the notion that pornography is pervasive on the Internet.

For example, a search in Google on the word “porn” returned over 80 million pages, and “xxx” returned more than 76 million.

The growth in the number of pornographic web pages is driven by the economics of Internet pornography, as the National Research Council (NRC) found in the landmark study entitled Youth, Pornography and the Internet.

The NRC report concluded, “The revenue models of the adult online industry suggest that broad exposure is needed to attract potential customers, and so the industry engages in tactics that seek to generate the broadest possible audience.”

According to a study large numbers of minors are exposed to the sea of pornography and among teens online, 70 per cent have accidentally come across pornography on the Web.

Many of these minors may stumble onto these sites through “porn-napped” and “typosquatted” websites. Porn-napped sites are expired domain names of innocent sites that are taken over by pornographers. Typosquat websites are those where an unscrupulous pornographer has deliberately registered names with typos to drive unwilling customers to pornography sites.

“Pornography is becoming so prevalent on the Internet that it is now difficult to avoid unwanted exposure, and this makes cybersex addiction more likely, which can lead to a multitude of legal issues for organizations,” said Dr. Kimberly S. Young, executive director of the Center for On-Line Addiction and author of the new book, Tangled in the WEB: Understanding Cybersex from Fantasy to Addiction.

“There is a definite need for tools like filtering software to offer protection for those who want, or are required, to avoid this type of illicit material,” he said.

Internet Pornography statistics become outdated very quickly, especially in the Internet environment where numbers change daily. The following pornography statistics are current as of 2003. These statistics have been derived from a number of different reputable sources including Google, WordTracker, PBS, MSNBC, NRC, and Alexa research.

The statistics provided by Internet Filter Review also showed that 2.5 billion pornographic emails flood the web daily which is 8 per cent of total emails.

There are also over 100,000 websites offering illegal child pornography and 89 per cent make sexual solicitations of youth.

To top it all, 72 million people visit pornographic web sites worldwide annually.

Traffic measurements from Hitwise found that, not surprisingly, males made up the bulk of the visits to the sites in the US adult category (includes all forms of adult erotica and X-rated sites) during August 2003 – 65 per cent compared to 35 per cent – and the average session time was just under 5 minutes. Nearly 72 per cent access the explicit sites at home, while 28 per cent dare to view the content in the workplace.