6 Ways That Porn Runs The World
This world is rife with moral decay. Doubters need only look to the vacant church pews and surging Cracked readership for confirmation. That, and the fact that the porn industry utterly dominates all others.
Think we're exaggerating? We've got the numbers to back it up. As big as you think porn is, it's bigger, and its influence on modern society is deeper. As Jules Verne once said, "Some day, this whole thing is gonna be titties."
Porn > Hollywood
The Long, Hard Facts
Hollywood cranks out around 500 movies a year to an international audience of 2.8 billion. Its closest competitor, India's Bollywood, makes about 1,000 movies a year, but 50 percent aren't released and 95 percent of those released are financial flops. This is unfortunate considering every Bollywood clip we've ever seen has been absolutely amazing.
In 2008, The Dark Knight alone grossed $533 million domestically and over $1 billion internationally, certifying it in the top five highest grossing films of all time and a crown jewel in the Hollywood empire. It's just further evidence that the institution of Hollywood cannot possibly be bested in any way, and certainly not by the data in the following paragraph.
The Moneyshot
As early as 2002, about 11,000 adult movies were released per year--more than 20 times the mainstream movie production. Of course, it's not really fair to compare them in that regard since Hollywood has to worry about dialogue, special effects and plot, while porn only requires a handcam, titties, and maybe a pizza delivery guy costume. To meet current demand, a new pornographic video is being created every 39 minutes in the U.S. We don't know if that includes filming Giada De Laurentiis handling zucchini, eggplants or eclairs for various shows, but it damn well should.
I'm not sure that eggplant is clean yet, Giada. Give it another quick rubdown, wouldya?
When it comes to cinematic preferences, people let their money do the talking. Since mainstream theater chains won't show The Crotchmen in wide release, we're forced to use other means of comparison. And every time, porn wins.
For example, in hotel chains that offer in-room X-rated content alongside major Hollywood releases, porn movie rentals represent 55 percent of the overall pay-per-view usage. Porn consistently generates more revenue than the hotels' mini-bars, though that probably wouldn't be the case if the hand-lotion was locked up in there too.
In 2005, there were approximately 425 films released in Hollywood, including a Star Wars prequel and a Harry Potter movie, with domestic grosses of $8.597 billion. That's very impressive. In 2006, the cumulative grosses for porn videos in the U.S., leveraging video sales, rentals, mobile phone content and Internet revenues--came out to....
Are you ready?
About the same, and that's minus the billions Hollywood spends on promotion. Oh, and we're going to take a wild guess and say that the combined budgets of every porno shot that year wouldn't even pay for the CGI in the opening credits of a Harry Potter movie. So, yeah, we're thinking that $8.65 billion is pretty much all profit.
Porn > Barack Obama
The Long, Hard Facts
In the digital age, there is no better snapshot of the zeitgeist than Web search trends. They allow you to view the ebb and flow of fads and news stories, as well as identify moments of hysteria:
If you examine top search trends in the U.S. over the last year an unsurprising amount of traffic was dedicated to coverage of the presidential election. We could have probably saved the electorate a lot of time by declaring Obama the winner when the search term "McCain" was trailing in popularity behind "American Idol," but apparently the constitution doesn't have those kinds of provisions.
The Moneyshot
Barack Obama was not only the front-runner for much of the presidential race, he garnered some attention as a "celebrity" along the way, particularly among the young people and internet users.
But it wasn't enough to make him number one. Most people just didn't feel they could fully absorb the nuances of presidential politics without rubbing one out first.
To illustrate this, we compared the volume of searches over the last year for "Sex" to those for "Obama" and "Iraq." We also added "Color Me Badd" because we thought it'd make them feel good just to be included, despite effectively serving as a statistical baseline:
Look a the poor red Obama line, looking like the ocean floor under blue sea of sex. It's no surprise, considering that in any given second, approximately 372 Internet users are typing "adult" search terms into search engines. Note the brief spike for Obama at point E up there. That's election day. It took a black man becoming leader of the free world to wrangle the collective consciousness away from sex for roughly 23 minutes.
Porn > Diamonds
The Long, Hard Facts
To further illustrate how utterly porn dominates the internet, let's give you one more.
Domain names are to Internet commerce what location is to real estate. That's why corporate giants like Toys 'R' Us shelled out $5.1 million for Toys.com. The difference between toys.com and toysrus.com is the difference between a house in Hawaii and a house in Dipshit, Michigan.
We do apologize to the good people of Dipshit.
The Moneyshot
So toys.com, that's got to be the most expensive domain name ever, right?
Not even close. Not even the 1999 sale of business.com at $7.5 million (a record at the time) makes the top. No, topping them all is, you guessed it, Sex.com, at a jaw-dropping $14 million.
Courtesy of sex.com and porn.com, smut sits pretty in the top five most expensive domains, trumping the keyword-monsters diamonds.com and creditcards.com. One could even argue that diamonds.com likewise qualifies as porn, if the sensation of being vigorously boned in the wallet while browsing there counts.
Porn + USA > Everybody Else
The Long, Hard Facts
If Michael Phelps demonstrated anything in the 2008 Olympics, it was that the United States Of America is pretty much the best at everything. OK, not so much education or health care or manufacturing things. But we rule at swimming. Oh, and internet porn. We produce more than anybody on the planet. Even adjusted for population, not even Japan can touch us.
Now, we know what you're saying: as a country we probably just produce more websites in general, and porn happens to be one variety. Not so. As early as 2003, Germany was producing 84.7 websites for every 1,000 members of their population to America's 63.7. In 2006, Israel was number one in the monthly hours spent on the Internet. Even Luxembourg, Germany, and Ireland lead in broadband penetration, a statistic so upsetting that we refuse to use it as a segue to a perfectly tuned dick joke.
And this is just a picture of Germany.
Things aren't looking much brighter going forward. China overtook us in total users by nearly 30 million in 2008 (of course, everyone knows the Chinese multiply by binary fission, so raw usage doesn't count). At least we're number one in is percentage of population using the Internet ... well, as long as you don't count Japan, Australia and Canada. That's right, we're losing the Internet war to our freaking hat.
The Moneyshot
But then, we have porn.
America has produced the most pornographic webpages of any country, or any 10 countries for that matter. At last count, we were responsible for 244,661,900 pages of perversion. Our nearest neighbor in that respect is Germany with 10,030,200 pages, but given the depraved material they're renowned for one can safely assume most of those pages have only been visited once or twice.
But we probably just lead because we have a higher population, right? Wrong; based on the current U.S. population, there is approximately 0.8 porn pages per U.S. citizen, six times the average of Germany. And if you think we're stopping before it's a one to one ratio, don't forget that there's a little Michael Phelps in ALL of our pornographers. U-S-A! U-S-A!
Porn > Productivity
The Long, Hard Facts
It is nearly impossible to quantify the effect that the desktop computer has had on production in modern business. Their capacity to automate, error-check, schedule tasks and intercommunicate are the very core of productivity. Even the inclusion of solitaire on most systems is vastly more efficient than breaking out a deck of cards and clearing the desk to play.
Three monitors, two towers and a laptop. Fuck you, procrastination.
The Moneyshot
There is no question that computers make our lives more efficient. After all, the staggering amount of pornography browsed at work probably cuts down on the time finding it at home significantly.
According to a 2008 Nielsen Online study, 25 percent of employees with internet connections use them to visit porn sites, which is up 23 percent from the previous year. M.J. McMahon, publisher of Adult Video News Online, further reports that hits on adult content peak during office hours. Its prevalence at work is blamed on the availability of non-subscription sites, a growing sentiment in the younger generation that pornography is not taboo, and those hydraulics on office chairs that let you ride low enough to facilitate covert wanking.
"Titties!"
It's not just a syndrome here in the Land of the Free (hand). Queen's University in Belfast conducted a survey of employees at 350 businesses in the U.S., U.K. and Australia for the porn-filtering firm SurfControl. Overall, 28 percent admitted to downloading sexually explicit content from the Web while on the job, though U.S. employees were slightly less likely to do so. Or they were smart enough to deny it.
The good news is you don't have to worry about that lagging work ethic hurting the economy. The porn industry employs about 12,000 people in California and pays over $36 million in taxes every year, so every clandestine tug is helping, really.
Porn > Everything
The Long, Hard Facts
Remember at the beginning when we said as big as you think porn is, it's actually bigger? We meant it.
Microsoft, purveyor of the operating system used on most of the computers in the world, reported 2008 profits in excess of $16 billion. ExxonMobil, the world's largest publicly traded company and number five on Forbes' top 2000 companies, posted 2008 profits of $40.6 billion. Though there is little in common with their industries, they do share one common bond: porn revenues spank them both, and then poop on their chest.
Secretly, Microsoft kind of enjoys it.
The Moneyshot
In 2006, the sum of international revenues from pornographic videos, sexual novelties, magazines, "dance" clubs, pay-per-view and Internet was approximately $97 billion.
Can you even wrap your mind around that number? Try it this way: that's larger than the combined annual revenues of the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball. Think about how many stadiums full of furiously masturbating people that is. Just don't think of it the next time you're at a game.
Still not impressed? Well, our domestic revenues for pornography are larger than the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink combined.
This means $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography internationally every second. To put that in perspective, when ExxonMobil posted a quarterly profit of $11.7 billion last year, the largest in American history, they were effectively making $1,947 less per second than the world of filth mongers. Worse, Astroglide is water-based, so Exxon isn't even getting a cut of the lube commodities market.
When you start talking about money this big it's not even fair to compare individual companies, so we just made the jump to entire fucking countries. If you compare porn revenues to Gross Domestic Product, the market value of all final goods and services from a nation in a given year, it is bigger than Morocco. And with mobile porn estimated to grow to become a $3.3 billion business by 2011, it's only a matter of time before Kazakhstan goes down like...
Well, you know.
Want to find out where you are on the global scale of contributors? Then check out The 10 Steps to Porn Addiction: Where Are You?. And find out how Japan is doing its part to curb this downward spiral into moral decay, in The 10 Most Perverted Old School Video Games.
And now it's time for some boobs! Go to our Top Picks section to see some!
