“Finally, Some Actual Stats on Internet Porn” said the June 1 headline of a blog post on Gizmodo. As a stats-obsessed, long time member of the Internet porn industry, I couldn’t pass that headline by without taking a closer look.
My enthusiasm for reading died near instantly, however, with a single quick glance at the USA Today-style infographic.
“Ugh…. here we go again,” I muttered to myself.
Do NOT buy into these bullshit stats, folks. The infographic they are presented on hails from onlinemba.com, but the data the graphic contains comes by way of multiple sources of very questionable merit. I’ve seen them before, many, many times, and they are no more valid today than they were when they were when originally published by the sources cited – and what “sources” they are!
If you squint closely at the bottom left of the image, you’ll see that their sources are the same that have been debunked repeatedly by a variety of analysts/authors, myself included. Specifically, the graphic cites internet-filter-review.com (a site that sells filters, so naturally they want you to think there’s a major need to filter), nationalcoalition.org (anti-porn group for whom porn is the root of all evil), safefamilies.org (see previous parenthesis), a non-scientific/non-random survey conducted by the Salt Lake Tribune, and several newspaper articles that include statistics offered by anti-porn groups without any reference to how or where those groups came up with the stats that they report.
The bottom line: here all aggregate porn industry-related stats amount to nothing but projections and estimates, and virtually every one of those estimates and projections is founded upon woefully simplistic assumptions and derived through deeply flawed methods.
The same critique applies to many of the stats reported in our own industry’s trade journals, as well, btw. IMO AVN and XBIZ make a better attempt at accuracy than the sources cited in this case, but their efforts are severely hampered by the fact that the vast majority of adult companies are privately held, and therefor virtually impossible to get reliable, unbiased data on.
The porn industry itself doesn’t do a much better job, by the way; with apologies to my friends and former coworkers at porn industry trade publications Adult Video News and XBIZ, the industry-wide stats reported those two publications typically suffer from the same deficits in methodology that plagues the anti-porn group reporting, I’m sorry to say.
In short, don’t buy the hype, friends; these numbers aren’t worth the jpg they are printed on.
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