Adult Industry Statistics

* Estimated $57 Billion in Revenue
* 72 Million Website visitors DAILY
* 68 Million search engine requests DAILY
* 25% of total search engine requests

Combined revenue from – MSFT, YHOO, GOOG, ORCL, & SUNW didn't stack up to the Adult Industry's estimated $57 Billion in revenue (2003)

Size of the industry:  $57.0 billion world-wide

Escort services:  $11.0 billion

Porn revenue is larger than all combined revenues of all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises.

US porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC (6.2 billion)

Daily pornographic search engine requests 68 million (25% of total search engine requests)

Worldwide visitors to pornographic web sites 72 million daily

US adults who regularly visit Internet pornography websites: 40 million

The following statistics were compiled by the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families (NCPCF) .

Sex is the number 1 topic searched on the internet
Overdosing on Porn, Rebecca Hagelin. www.worldandi.com, March, 2004.

More than 32 million unique individuals visited a porn site in Sept. of 2003. Nearly 22.8 million of them were male (71 percent), while 9.4 million adult site visitors were female (29 percent) (Nielsen/Net Ratings, Sept. 2003).

The two largest individual buyers of bandwidth are U.S. firms in the adult online industry (National Research Council Report, 3-1, 2002).

25 million Americans visit cyber-sex sites between 1-10 hours per week. Another 4.7 million in excess of 11 hours per week. (MSNBC/Stanford/Duquesne Study, Washington Times, 1/26/2000)

From The New York Times, Wall Street Meets Pornography , October 23, 2000:

On the Internet, sex is one of the few things that prompts large numbers of people to disclose their credit card numbers. According to two Web ratings services, about one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visits one of the more than 60,000 sex sites on the Web at least once a month — more people than go to sports or government sites.

The number of people visiting sex sites on the Web doubled over the last year, outpacing the number of new Internet users. Some of the more popular sex Web sites attract in excess of 50 million hits, or visits, a month, according to the ratings services Nielsen/ Net and Media Metrix. About one in a thousand people who visit a site will subscribe, for fees averaging $20 a month, according to some of the leading Web pornography providers and Flying Crocodile Inc., a company based in Seattle that tracks and services the sexual-content market.

From PBS FrontLine, American Porn, February, 2002, updated February, 2004

“It's one of the hottest industries in America. Easier to order at home than a pizza, bigger than rock music, it's arguably the most profitable enterprise in cyberspace. AT&T has been in the business. Yahoo! has profited from it. Westin and Marriott have made more money selling it than selling snacks and drinks in their mini-bars…it boasts the kind of earnings that most American businesses would envy.

It's pornography. And with adult movies, magazines, retail stores, and the growth of the Internet, business is booming.”

Highlights from an April 2001 report by Forrester Research Inc. , which analyzed data from its Consumer Technographics 2001 North America Benchmark Study and found that:

77 percent of online visitors to adult content sites are male. Their average age is 41 and they have an annual income of $60,000. 46 percent are married.

Online perusers of adult content have been using the Internet for 3.3 years and surf 14 hours a week -- slightly more than the general online population.

56 percent of adult online visitors have purchased online in the past three months. They spend $17 more per month buying on the Web than the average online consumer does.

More than half of adult content visitors say they indulge less than once a week, while an insatiable hardcore subset, 26 percent, reports multiple weekly sojourns. Mostly high-income, these frequent users -- 84 percent of whom are men -- spend 17 hours online per week and spend an average of $133 online per month, versus the average online buyer who spends $26 less in the same time period.

Visitors to adult sites do more Web activities. For example, 45 percent of adult content consumers have downloaded music, compared to just 29 percent for households and only 37 percent of sports site visitors. More than twice as many adult content viewers have watched streaming video compared to the overall online population.