According to an article on Reuters, Porn sites have been surpassed by Social networking sites for the first time. From what I understood of the article, it was specifically refering to internet searches. I’d love to find out more about their research. My indepth (not really) research didn’t show nearly the same results. Not exactly anyway. I did some additional looking and noted that about 18 months ago, “social networking” was more common than “porn” in News Reference Volume according to Google Trends.
If the claims are true and porn is heading for a cold shower, it would be an impressive defeat considering that currently only 42% of internet users know what social networking is and EVERYONE above the age of 14 knows what porn is.
Personally I think that general widespread consumption of “porn” has gone down – but more specific niches and the advent of Social Networking has led to more specific porn content delivery. So while it may show a general search for porn is declining social networking is doing it’s job keeping it very much alive.