SAN FRANCISCO - As the next generation of Internet surfers enters their college years, they are more likely to visit a social networking site than an adult pay site, according to a new book from Bill Tancer, the general manager of Global Research at Hitwise.
In "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters," Tancer researched information from more than 10 million Internet users and their online habits. Part of that data reveals that online searches for adult material have dropped to 10 percent, after peaking at 20 percent 10 years ago. These days, surfers are more likely to visit social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook, he said.
While Tancer noted that "sex" is still one of the most popular terms typed into search engines, search results point to more than just adult pay sites.
"If we look back two years, when social networking sites were much smaller than they are today, searches for ‘sex' went to a variety of sites, including sites dedicated to sex education (www.sexetc.org) and articles about sex (www.salon.com)," he writes in the book. "If we fast-forward to the summer of 2007, that same search term drove traffic to online video sites (www.metcafe.com and video.google.com), a social encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.org), and social network MySpace, indicating that consumption of adult content has moved from the world of static display of images and video to the world of Web 2.0, where consumer-generated media and social networks now play a key role."
"Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters" is available for purchase at major retailers and online. For more information, visit Hitwise.
