[Air-L] facebook more popular than porn?

[Tuszynski, Stephanie]

Basically this guy writes columns for TIME promoting his own company's intel without ever explaining how the company works or collects his data. Bill Tancer also "discovered" fanfiction back in August: 

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2007/08/the_fan_fiction_phenom.html
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1657764,00.html

His clearly-not-scientific inquiry included this gem: "I took a poll around the office... 10 of 10 respondents also had never heard of this category of consumer generated content"

I was a little puzzled that the man's job is to advise companies about online behavior, and yet it took him until August of 2007 to ever hear of fanfiction. I do give him credit, though, that the TIME article accurately cites the history of the phenomenon as pre-dating the Internet. 

He also makes a point in the fanfiction article on TIME to mention adult fanfiction and porn as well, which makes me wonder what expectations he's operating under regarding people's behavior online (the "it's all for porn and sex offenders" meme that won't die). 


Stephanie Tuszynski
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Theatre and Film
University of Toledo




>Readers of Time Magazine must have noted the claim by Bill Tancer:

> Visits to porn sites have dropped from 16.9% of all site visits in the U.S. in
> October 2005 to 11.9% as of last week, a 33% decline. Currently, for web users
> over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming
> in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom
> social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail
> ? with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. If you chart the rate of visits to
> social-networking sites against those to adult sites over the last two years,
> there appears to be a strong negative correlation (i.e., visits to social
> networks go up as visits to adult sites go down). It's a leap to say there's a
> real correlation there, but if there is one, then I'd bet it has everything to
> do with Gen Y's changing habits: they're too busy chatting with friends to
> look at online skin. Imagine.

He's drawing on data from his own company, Hitwise -

the full story is available online:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1678586,00.html

thoughts and comments?