LOS ANGELES—UK husbands must be getting their porn fixes in before the crackdown begins in earnest and they have to answer to their wives. A survey commissioned by the Guardian has found that legal porn sites received more traffic in June than any destination but search engines and “arts and entertainment" sites, accounting for a total of 8.5 percent of all clicks in the UK.
“The figures,” reported the paper, “which do not include traffic from mobile phones, were compiled by SimilarWeb, a web measurement company based in Tel Aviv which tracks clicks online rather than total volume of traffic. Otherwise, the figures would be distorted by the sheer size of video files such as YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer, which is classed under 'news and media' because it sits within the BBC's website.”
SimilarWeb also compiled data on click ratios in other countries, but headlines are touting the UK numbers in the aftermath of Prime Minister David Cameron’s announcement of harsh new measures meant to prevent easy access to porn by minors. In terms of clicks to legal porn sites, the UK ranked third, behind Germany and then Spain.
According to Daniel Buchuk, head of brand and strategy at SimilarWeb, which tracks data by way of a browser plug-in, "Traffic on adult sites represents a huge portion of what people use the internet for, not just in the UK but around the world. It is astonishing to see that adult sites are more popular in the UK than all social networks combined."
Ratios include visits to Tumblr blogs that contain porn, added Buchik, but not “illegal searches for child abuse, which typically travel over secret networks such as Tor [Torrenticity], or use peer-to-peer technology to try to hide the abuser's identity,” per the Guardian.
