Porn Passed Over as Web Users Become Social: Author
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CANBERRA (Reuters)
- Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet,
dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people
communicate, according to a web guru.
Bill Tancer, a self-described "data geek", has analyzed information
for over 10 million web users to conclude that we are, in fact, what we
click, with Internet searches giving an up-to-date view of how society
and people are changing.
Some of his findings are great trivia, such as the fact that elbows,
belly button lint and ceiling fans are on the list of people's top
fears alongside social intimacy and rejection.
Others give an indication of people's interests or emotions, with an
annual spike in searches for anti-depression drugs around Thanksgiving
time in the United States.
Tancer, in his new book, "Click: What Millions of People are Doing
Online and Why It Matters", said analyzing web searches did not just
reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society
and people's behavior.
"There are some patterns to our Internet use that we tend to repeat
very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to prom dresses,
to what we do around the holidays," Tancer told Reuters in a telephone
interview.
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."
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