Sex Sites: I Love to Hate You!

If you secretly scan online porn sites, yet publicly say "Disgusting!" then you're not alone.

Statistics from a recent CBS.MarketWatch.com telephone poll show that only 17 percent of Internet users say they've ever visited a Web site with adults-only content. Only a fraction of those people confessed to frequent visits. At 23 percent, pornography ranked number one as the "worst thing" about the Net.

"That doesn't sound right to me," said Mark Hardie, senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "If this stuff wasn't so popular, there wouldn't be so much of it out there."

The Searchterms.com site states that "sex" is the number one requested search term, and eight of the top 20 search terms are sexual in nature. In 1998, adult sites earned between $700 million to $1 billion in revenue, which is a little more than 10 percent of the total sales generated by the Internet, according to Forrester Research Inc.

Other Internet concerns of poll respondents were inappropriate site access to children, privacy/security and slow download times.