Social networking overtaking porn?

Posted April 21st, 2007 at 3:49pm

If you read any online marketing blogs, you’ve likely come across talk about the latest Hitwise (recently acquired by Experian) data. While it’s interesting to read about the Web 2.0 companies that they think will thrive (Yelp, StumbleUpon, Veoh, WeeWorld, Imeem and Piczo), what’s more interesting to me is the imminent takeover of social networking sites. So is porn on the out?

Not quite.

“Does this mean the internet has matured as a medium? After all, pornographic content is often the first to take advantage of new media, from photography to videocassettes to satellite television. “Sex is a virus that infects new technology first,” as Wired put it back in 1993. Once a new medium becomes popular, its usage is no longer dominated by porn.”

The article at the Economist suggests that the real reason for the shift is, in part, due to porn moving more to P2P sharing networks. Last year, porn sites accounted for 13% of all websites online, whereas search made up 7%. Make no mistake - porn will always be popular, but sites like Facebook and Bebo are clearly a powerful force. Does this point to a demographics shift? In the early says of the internet, adults were much more likely to have access to computers that were online. These days, the MySpace crowd seems to rule.

So if users are clearly comfortable now with the web 2.0/social networking features and technology, what’s next for them? For me, it’s gotta be improvements in relevance and improvements in connecting all of the pieces that make up the web together. Not aggregators pulling news and profiles from different sites, but actually piecing together data from millions of sources to provide better, more relevant solutions for whatever users are looking for (and even what they aren’t looking for, but they actually need). I am looking forward to it.

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