Leading ratings company Nielsen Online released figures for web activity in October, and compared to the same month a year ago, the percentage of employees who look at adult content while at work has increased from 23 percent to 25 percent.
Experts speculated on why this increase may have happened. Analyst Dawn Adams of the consulting firm HResults said that managers just don't have to time to monitor their employees all the time.
"Managers are dealing with so many issues right now, that sometimes people are able to hide out and no one knows what they're doing," she said.
TopBucks' Q Boyer told XBIZ that the numbers' significance would depend on how they were gathered. According to UPI, the numbers come from data tracking gathered by Nielsen, which would make them slightly more important.
"It's a fairly small increase, really – so it might be something that can be explained by a normal deviation within a typical range," Boyer said. "If it is a legitimate increase, it could be another indicator of a growing acceptance and 'mainstreaming' of pornography. I might be out of step with much of the industry in saying this, but I would not treat this as good news; if workplace productivity is perceived to be dropping due to online porn, that could pave the way for a corporate backlash of sorts. The last thing we need is for major employers to be lobbying Congress to further regulate online porn under a battle cry of 'Save our productivity!'"
Boyer also added that in the event that Nielsen simply polled a sample of users about their web-surfing habits, these results might be statistical noise within a margin of error.