What percentage of the internet is made up of porn?

There are millions of people who have never experienced the feeling of a porn magazine in their hand. A whole generation hasn’t experienced a grainy video cassette with janky music and who-knows-what hardcore sex to follow.

The internet has been the home of porn since the internet was invented. Even in countries where porn is banned, everyone knows how to go find porn online. With sex on so many minds and available on so many computer and phone screens, how much of the internet is porn content?

It’s question as murky as some of the dodgy sites out there, but we’ve done as much digging as we can to find internet porn use numbers for you. We’re going to look at:

• How porn and the internet developed
• How many major porn sites there are online
• How much porn people tend to watch online
• What you can do to find how much of the internet is porn

The history of how much of the internet is porn

Years ago, there were estimates that anywhere between four to 37 percent of the internet is porn.

It’s a pretty broad spectrum of possibilities and even the BBC who reported that information acknowledges that it’s not exactly easy to know how much of the internet is porn.

The study that decided 37 percent of the internet is porn was released in 2010. The four percent stat was also determined in 2010 – makes sense.

The history of internet porn goes all the way back to 1994, probably. The website sex.com was registered by the founder of match.com, Gary Kremen. Back then, there were only 2,793 websites so at least 0.002793% of the internet was porn.

It’s not quite as simple as that, though. Porn was more common on the internet back when it was accessible mainly to people who were interested in computers and technology, and had a reasonable amount of disposable income.

20- and 30-something men were the people who could access porn and they propagated it on the internet.

Think about your life back in 2010 – did you have the internet in your home? The first smartphone able to access the internet only happened in 2001 and the first iPhone was launched in 2005. YouTube began in 2005 and Facebook only opened to the public in 2006.

Point is, there wasn’t a whole lot of content online back when these studies were done so it’s believable to think that a decent chunk of the internet was pornography back then.

Statista pulled together some research and created this chart to show the difference in how much of the internet is porn – but the data stops at 2010 as well.

How many porn websites are on the internet?

It would be impossible to know for sure how many porn websites there are on the internet. It’s super easy for someone to create their own website, take some nudes, and bam! there’s another porn website on the internet.

We can’t measure the whole of the internet, but we can look at some of the biggest websites in the world.

Here are the top 10 most visited websites according to SimilarWeb:

As you can see, out of the most popular sites in the world, only one porn site makes it into the top ten.

It’s worth pointing out that Twitter is packed with porn though, and that’s the fourth most visited site and second most popular social network. Although it only has 436 million users and is ranked fifteenth in terms of users, plenty of people visit the site. Could the reason be the hot porn on there?

Move down to the 11^th to 20^th most visited websites, and we get:

• XNXX in fourteenth place
• Pornhub in seventeenth place
• Reddit in nineteenth place

Yup, Reddit is definitely a porn website. When one Redditor ran the numbers, 22% of subreddits with over 100,000 users were NSFW.

Doing the math, this means that 25% of the most popular websites on the internet are porn. The average visitor to these sites spends around nine and a half minutes watching, which we reckon is just about enough time to bash one out.

How many people search for porn on the internet?

As easy as it is to make a porn website and as popular as the big sites are, it’s useful to know how many people are out there actively looking for porn.

The internet is like any market; if people are looking for it, there will be a site that has what they need.

The web tool Ahrefs gives us an insight into how much search traffic these websites get. Of the top three porn sites:

• Xvideos gets 1.2 billion visits from search each month
• XNXX gets 2.8 billion visits from people searching per month
• PornHub gets 1.5 billion visits after an online search each month

Putting that into context, Instagram gets about 1.6 billion search visits per month, so they’re on par with the big players on the internet.

How much porn is on the internet?

There are lots of ways you can measure how much porn is on the internet. The total number of websites is pretty bogus since there is huge churn on how many sites are being made and getting deactivated all the time.

Looking at the most popular sites on the internet is a good indicator – this shows us how much of the internet is used for porn. Looking at the traffic that gets to the sites through searches shows us how many people are actively seeking porn.

We’re not going to put a percentage on how much of the internet is porn, but we do know the internet is packed with porn because people most definitely are looking for it and watching it.