Calico Rudasil is a feature columnist for Sssh.com, the award-winning porn site for women & couples. With over 18 years’ experience under her belt, writing about and for the adult entertainment industry, Calico qualifies as something of a Web Porn Dinosaur; similar to a tyrannosaurus, only with far more attractive arms and a less pronounced overbite.
During the GOP convention last week, Pornhub was happy to report that it experienced a massive surge in usage from within the Cleveland area during the Republican National Convention. The report has led to a predictable smattering of articles from outlets using the factoid as clickbait for readers who aren’t turned on by things like plagiarism, fearmongering, xenophobia or Scott Baio.
I’ll admit, I had to fight off the temptation to snicker and mutter something about the sexual hypocrisy of social conservatives before I could ask myself a salient question which really should be asked by every media outlet which repeats it: …. who really gives a shit?
This Is The Porn Industry We’re Talking About; ALL Stats Are Questionable
Back in the late 90s, the idea online porn was a legitimate “get rich quick” market was an exciting one to the media. Interviews with perceived market leaders began showing up from month to month in publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to WIRED and all points in between.
In one such interview, a site operator claimed their his was converting visitors into customers at a rate of something like 1 in 60, receiving over 250,000 visitors a day and had a membership retention of over 95%. At the same time, this same person estimated the site’s total number of current members to be just over 150,000.
The publication in question swallowed these numbers whole, clearly not even bothering to extrapolate these statistical claims to check their veracity. How do I know the publication did this? Because I extrapolated the numbers myself – and they make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
If your website receives 250,000 visitors a day and one out of every 60 visitors joins your site, this means your site is signing up approximate 4166 new members per day, which works out to 124,980 members in a 30-day month.
If you retain over 95% of those customers from month to month, this means that at the end of a 60-day period in which those numbers had a chance to play out just twice, the site’s membership would be over 237,000 even if the site had only been in existence for those 60 days. The site in question had been around far longer than that, so presumably had significantly more than 0 members prior to the date of the interview.
See the problem here? If your site has just over 150,000 active members, it’s impossible for it to have both 124,980 new signups a month and a retention rate of over 95%, unless the site has existed for less than two months.
This was far from the only line of pure, unmitigated porn industry statistical bullshit spewed in the direction of the mainstream media which made its way into print unchallenged, of course. Another which immediately springs to mind was a Business 2.0 interview with the then-owner of Sex.com, a lovely chap named Stephen Cohen – who, as would later be proven in court, had stolen Sex.com from its rightful owner.
In the interview (which unfortunately seems to have been lost to history as I can’t find an online version to link to), Cohen spit out a list of nonsense server specs which were designed to dazzle readers into believing he was running quite the impressive operation and handling quite a lot of traffic on the domain. Unfortunately, Cohen listed server specs which were absurd on their face – claims which had the IT staff at the internet porn company I worked for at the time laughing themselves silly as they read.
“Don’t these guys have fact-checkers?” asked one dismayed systems administrator, shaking his head. “This is embarrassing.”
Even If It’s True…. So What?
To be fair to the outlets which have run articles about the alleged GOP Convention/Cleveland porn traffic spike, this claim isn’t one which can be easily debunked by simply doing math, nor is it particularly unbelievable.
In this case, I wouldn’t be one bit surprised to learn the tube site is giving us all the straight dope, in part because when the population of any given area increases substantially due to a large number of people visiting the area for a major event, we shouldn’t be surprised to see an increase in all manner of online activity during the same period of time, just as we aren’t surprised to find that vehicular and foot traffic increases in the same area for the same reason.
In other words, more people means more people doing things people do, whether it’s eating at restaurants or watching porn on the internet (uhh…. but hopefully not both at the same time).
I suppose the reason we’re all supposed to think this Cleveland porn traffic spike is newsworthy is the GOP platform contains anti-porn language in it.
Here’s the thing, though: The platform represents the position of the party, not necessarily the position of its individual members – and there’s a huge difference between these two things.
For one thing, you might be surprised at how many adult business owners are politically conservative. True, you aren’t going to find many socially conservative fundamentalist Christians among them, but what you will find is lots of Libertarians and socially left-leaning Republicans in the ranks of the porn industry.
The assumption many people seem to make is if there’s a spike in porn viewing at the same time as the GOP Convention, it’s because speakers are walking off stage after giving a speech about family values and then jerking off furiously to whatever turns his crank.
My real point is nobody should be shocked to find a lot of Republicans like porn, because a lot of everybody likes porn.
This isn’t to say there are no porn-loving hypocrites among the publicly anti-porn Republicans, just that I think a spike like this is far more likely to represent large numbers of Republicans who aren’t anti-porn surfing tube sites while in town for the convention than it is to be the result of the committee who wrote the anti-porn language voraciously streaming the same videos against which they rail vociferously by day.
Either that, or …nevermind
Calico Rudasil is a Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen) columnist and Sssh will be on Peeperz for fun times again in the near future, meanwhile why not check us out:
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