That’s right, Bill Tancer Manager of Hitwise, has officially announced that Social Networking has overtaken pornography as the most searched for category amongst internet users.
“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.”My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.(NSFW)”
Though, to be fair, this could be misleading data, since it is based upon the fact that porn has dropped in percentage of searches from 20% on 1998 to 10% in 2008. But does that just not mean that there is a wider range of categories? And do blog sites themselves not count as networking?
I think that whilst there may be a propensity towards more social networking, YouPorn (NSFW) being 42nd in Alexa’s Global Traffic Ranking is probably more demonstrative that people are going direct to site perhaps. Or that porn blogs (NSFW) just don’t count as porn…
