Bill Tancer, vice president of research of Hitwise, analyzes the demographic statistics of the adult industry in his recent MediaPost Publications article "Media Metrics: Hard Data."
His findings create a statistically average online adult viewer:
He — and he is definitely male more than 72 percent of the time — lives in the Midwest and Friday is the day of the week you can most likely find him in front of the computer. Our average adult viewer does, however, take a break on Thanksgiving and most every Sunday with those dates showing the least amount of sex-based content being delivered. He also is getting older as the numbers of both 18- to 24-year olds and 25- to 34-year-olds are dropping from previous statistical highs.
Among other findings in the article:
- Online dating and social networks are in reverse proportion to adult content. For example, when MySpace.com suffered a two-day outage in 2006, the traffic driven to adult went up proportionately.
- Adult content is distributed by a crowded field of sites. "The top 500 [adult sites] account for only 56 percent of all visits to the category," Trance wrote. In contrast, 76 percent of all retail sites' views come from the top 500 in their respective field.
- Adult is losing some of its popularity. The field of adult content, or the 40,000 sites that Hitwise tracked used to provide 10 of all Internet visits in Aug. 2007. It was 16 percent in Aug. 2005.
- Women do view more porn than men in only one category: erotic literature. 65.5 percent of AdultFanFiction.net's visitors are female and most likely 18- to 24-year-old (54.6 percent).
- Not surprisingly, porn use goes up during the winter in cold-weather states.
- "Red Staters" prefer voyeurism, web cam sessions and wife-swapping sites. Democrats are slightly more face-to-face in their adult preferences clocking more visits to directories of adult entertainers and escorts than their fellow Republican web surfers.