By Peter Berton

YNOT — Common sense tells us that porn is big on the internet. But there’s nothing like some third-party verification of this view to make us all feel a little bit smarter.

This verification comes in the form of Sebastian Anthony’s research-based article, ‘Just How Big Are Porn Sites?’ Posted to ExtremeTech.com, a favorite of power users and geeks galore, his research concludes that “porn sites are some of the most trafficked parts of the internet.”

Using data from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner, “which tracks users across the web with a cookie,” Anthony reports that “dozens of adult destinations populate the top 500 websites.” He adds that “Xvideos, the largest porn site on the web with 4.4 billion page views per month, is three times the size of CNN or ESPN, and twice the size of Reddit. LiveJasmin isn’t much smaller. YouPorn, Tube8, and Pornhub — they’re all vast, vast sites that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks of the internet.”

As anyone in porn will tell you, size isn’t everything: Duration also matters. In Internet terms, duration is judged by the average time spent surfing a specific website. The results: “For a news site like Engadget or ExtremeTech, an average visit is usually between three and six minutes; enough time to read one or two stories,” says the ExtremeTech article. “The average time spent on a porn site, however, is between 15 and 20 minutes.”

More data: YouPorn, “the second largest porn site on the web,” told Anthony that it hosts over 100TB of porn, and serves over 100 million page views per day.

Time for some number-crunching, and again the results are impressive: “All told, this equates to an average of 950 terabytes of data transfer per day, almost all of which is streaming video. This is around 28 petabytes [PB] per month, which means our 29PB estimate for Xvideos is on the low side; it probably serves 35 to 40PB per month,” Anthony writes.

“It gets better!” he continues. “At peak time, YouPorn serves 4000 pages per second, equating to burst traffic in the region of 100 gigabytes per second, or 800Gbps,” says Anthony. “To put that 800Gbps figure into perspective, the internet only handles around half an exabyte of traffic every day, which equates to around 50Tbps — in other words, a single porn site accounts for almost 2% of the internet’s total traffic.”

Pausing to catch his breath, Sebastian Anthony concludes, “There are dozens of porn sites on the scale of YouPorn, and hundreds that are the size of ExtremeTech or your favorite news site. It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet… the internet really is for porn.”