CRUISING for SEX - It's Getting Bigger: Guardian Writes About Porn Data Visualization

This came in my email today and I thought I would pass it along for you. Someone from The Guardian did a study about the growth of porn on the Internet, including some nifty charts and graphs and such. There's so much more than you could ever imagine! :)

Here's the intro, and you can go on to see the complete article for yourself:

Quote:

Porn is one of the biggest yet worst-covered topics in popular discourse. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that sits at the heart of human sexuality in the 21st century. Many people watch it, though few talk about it, and for better or worse it exerts a major influence over our culture; but we know relatively little about it.

What if we could find some big source of data? The website Clips4Sale.com is one of the leading commercial porn sites on the web. It’s home to thousands of studio selling millions of clips. All the clips are indexed with metadata about their price, file size, fetish category, length, title, description and so on, and the site’s permissive robots policy allows web crawlers to trawl the content. How much useful information could you dig out from it? What interesting things could you find?

The other weekend I wrote a script to find out. It crawled the site gathering data on 4,814,732 clips, which is rather a lot of porn and probably means I’m on some BT blacklist now. The earliest clips date back to late 2003, which makes the Clips4Sale corpus a 12-year history of paid porn on the Internet. Each month’s data is like a ring in a tree trunk, telling us what the market was like at that time. It’s not perfect – older clips may have disappeared or been deleted – but it’s enough to give us a rough picture.

Read the rest: Porn data: visualising fetish space | Science | The Guardian