An article by Felix Walker in CashDaily, a Swiss daily newspaper, caught my attention indicating that Facebook and other social networking platforms are stealing audience from porn websites. Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise and author of Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters says „[Y]oung users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites. … As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased.” Tancer explained that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching for 10 percent less for porn than ten years ago, where adult content made up 20 percent of all searches.

Stan Schroeder of Mashable.com wrote that „social networking sites can be so time consuming that many users don’t have time to do anything else, let alone browse for porn. My theory, however, is that the interest for porn hasn’t declined, but the lack of time simply has made everyone more efficient at finding it – and perhaps less picky.“

Dan Frommer described in his September 17, 2008, blog entry, “For argument’s sake, let’s say Tancer’s stats are accurate. We still have a hard time with his analysis — that people are so busy with MySpace that they don’t have time to look at porn. Instead, we think the answer has to do with the growth of the Web, and other changes in the way people use the Web. Fleshbot’s Lux Alptraum takes a stab at it:

• The Internet is bigger than it used to be, and more people are using it, especially kids, so it makes sense that relatively fewer people are looking at porn.
• You can look at Facebook at work, while you probably can’t look at porn at work.”

Nonetheless, it seems that certain adult content providers are feeling the pressure of the social networking portals (or maybe simply see their potential for information) and try to get a hold of their data. “A Canadian Internet porn company has agreed to pay Facebook half a million dollars after it allegedly hacked the popular social networking website’s computers,“ said The Canadian Press on July 14, 2008.

As Felix Walker explained in his article, virtual contacts might lead to actual sex, whereas surfing on porn sites wouldn’t. That’s what I’d call Dating 2.0.