Facebook More Popular than Porn on Internet
September 22nd, 2008 — Bruce Etling
My own little Google Insights search (Facebook is blue in the above graph, porn is red) confirms that searches for social networks are indeed taking over porn on the Internet, as Andrew Sullivan blogged recently. This is potentially an important moment for the cyber utopian camp that argues the Internet can be a tool for positive change and help us to create and maintain closer social ties online–as opposed to a tool for porn, LOLcats, 419 scams, etc.
I’m curious, though, if this finding is reflected in visits/page views or simply in Google searches. It also seems to reinforce the need in my mind for some more empirical research into the impact of the Internet, including social networking sites, on creating social capital. For leading sociologists like Robert Putnam, social capital, or the building of trust through participation in social and civic groups, is critical to civic participation and democracy. He’s noted an increase in the 9/11 generation’s civic engagement, which also happens to be the largest, if not exclusive, age group using social networks sites. Bill Tancer also has other interesting findings on how we are using the Internet these days in his new book.
Click Here
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
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.
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:23 pm
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
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
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
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:16 pm
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.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Agree completely.
September 25th, 2008 at 9:47 am
“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
September 30th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Thanks Matt!
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:55 am
Yeah, those fiqures are just based on search engine queries. As a whole porn would still be more popular by a very wide margin.