Facebook: More Popular Than Porn

Bill Tancer is general manager of global research at Hitwise examined which websites social network users visit after logging into their profiles, to see their daily patterns in the web. He found that after the users visit Facebook first, the most clicked category of sites were search engines with 11.6 percent of visits, then the most click after sites were e-mail sites with 8.5 percent. Blogs came in third in popularity at 6.1 percent four times more than the number of visits to traditional news sites.

He analyzed which of the 172 web categories tracked by Hitwise gets the most hits from 18 to 24 year olds. One would expect it to be porn sites, but that is not the case it is actually number four on the list. For 18 to 24 years olds, social networks ranks first, followed by search engines, then web based e-mail and with porn sites coming in fourth. Whereas with users age over 25, comes in second after search engines.

Tancer finds Adult Entertainment category has declined the past two years, visits to porn site have dropped from 16.9 percents of all sits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9% in October 2007, a 33% decline.

If one charts the rate of visits to social networking sites against those to adult sites over the last two years, there seems to be a strong negative correlation. Number of visits to social networking sites have gone up at an incredible rate while the visits to adults’ sites are showing decreasing trends.

Tancer said it may be due to the Gen Y’s changing habits, they are too busy chatting with friends on Facebook. They are even spending less time chatting on IMs and sending e-mails, when they can do everything at one place in Facebook. He said social networking is becoming like e-mail 2.0.

Social networking is the way to go, will definitely give porn sites a run for their money. It is here to stay. We are social animals, Facebook like sites makes us more happy than anything else.