Porn | How Much Of The Internet Is Actually For Porn

Starting today , .XXX domains are for sale. (That is, if you own a porn site or a trademark to protect – the rest of us have to wait till December 6 and hope nobody scoops our name first).

It's like the internet is growing up a bit. There's certainly enough porn to justify .XXX, if .biz gets its own extension.

But the arrival of .XXX begs the question:

How much of the internet is actually for porn?

Plug the question into Google and you reach an abandonred corner of the net: an article from 2005, a mess of answers from 37-80% and the Avenue Q Wikipedia page.

Surely there must be a better way.

So I asked Ogi Ogas, one of the amazingly nerdy neuroscientists behind A Billion Wicked Thoughts , who says he and co-author Sai Gaddam are sitting on what they think is "the most comprehensive collection of porn-use stats on the web."

(At least, till they stopped counting last July. Now they're busy with their book tour.)

So Ogi: How much of the Internet is actually for porn?

There are a couple ways of thinking about the proportion of the Internet that is porn:

- In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That's about 4% of sites.

- From July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content.