On my Yahoo reader page today this mid-day – the news of the travails of ePorn:

[Bill] Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

“My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.”

Yeah right. (Actually, I’d argue that the pornification of our culture over the last 10 years, and the sort of stuff some people are putting up on their SocNet pages makes it largely unnecessary to hunt down peek-a-boo pornsites )

More seriously, Porn is suffering from the same problems of all other Mainstream Media – YouTube-alikes like YouPorn are allowing User (de)Generated Content and pirated movie clips to be uploaded, thus destroying the credit-card economics of Porno 1.0. Added to that, the competition for wallet and attention from other adult sports like gambling, gaming and gene tracing.

The Porn industry has typically been a bellwether for other types of mainstream media and online technology, so it will be fascinating to watch (as it were) what the industry does next.

More seriously, at the end of the article, Tancer notes the increasing need for filtering, something we have been banging on about for quite a while:

But Tancer said the speed at which information spread on the Internet had meant in some cases it was consumers generating the story and the media is last to record it — or fact-check it.

“With the explosion of this type of false information on the Internet I think we will see someone come forward and develop a new type of software that can filter for the most accurate information,” he said.

“Maybe accuracy is the next thing we will all search for.”

After the United debacle, that would be a very good idea.

Tags: consumers, information, Internet, Network, Networking, research, Software, Technology