Skip to main content

When something is ubiquitous, it is present, appearing, or found everywhere.

omnipresent, ever-present, present everywhere, everywhere, all-over, all over the place, pervasive, all-pervasive, universal, worldwide, global, rife, prevalent, predominant, very common, popular, extensive, wide-ranging, far-reaching, inescapable

Trying to ascertain exactly how much porn is on the web produces a myriad of conflicting results. One article indicated that claims vary from 4-30% of the Internet being sex or porn related, depending on how Internet traffic is measured. A press release by Optenet in 2010 suggested this was even higher, citing that pornography makes up 37% of the total content on the Internet.

The book Billion Wicked Thoughts puts this much lower and reportedly found:

  • In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That’s about 4% of sites.
  • From July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content.

Then consider that in 2013, Sintef reported that a full 90% of all the data in the world has been generated over the last two years. That means that any stats from 2010 are a gross underestimation of what is actually available now. It’s virtually impossible to keep up with how much data and porn is available.

Backtracking to 2006, an analysis of Google data found that more than 1 in 5 searches on mobile phones were for adult content. Sample queries from these searches include: “porn”, “sex”, “free porn”, and “playboy”. It was speculated that this high number of searches for adult content on mobile devices was due to people perceiving it to be more personal or private, with less probability of others discovering search behaviour.

Mobile porn users should take on board results from a new study that has revealed porn surfing on a mobile device is one of the biggest security threats to mobile users. A number of porn sites have been targeted in malvertising attacks, including Xhamster, PornHub and YouPorn users being subjected to a mobile assault. The top three most common mobile malware forms are becoming more vicious with ransomware, Potentially Unwanted Software (similar to spyware, but often disguised as antivirus software), and information leakage (where rogue apps monitor and report on your activities).

According to just one of the myriad of porn website’s available, PornHubs 2014 year in review revealed that it had:

  • 78.9 billion video views through 2014, considerably surpassing 2013 63.2 billion views.
  • This translates to about:
    • 1 million visits per hour
    • 35,000 visits per minute
    • 5800 visits per second
  • Top 10 countries with per capita page views:
    1. USA – 123
    2. Canada – 119
    3. UK – 115
    4. Ireland – 112
    5. Norway – 98
    6. New Zealand – 97
    7. Australia – 96
    8. Iceland – 95
    9. Sweden – 92
    10. Denmark – 90

Unfortunately, this data could be easily misconstrued. Porn sites want people to believe that every single person is watching porn. By PornHub translating their data to ‘per capita’, they are trying to give the impression that every single person in each country is watching porn. For example, these stats are trying to tell us that every single person in Australia has viewed PornHub 96 times in 2014. I suspect many people would object to that gross inaccuracy.

Whatever the stats, Ubiquitous Porn is an apt way to describe it. For adults, teens and children alike, there is no shortage of availability and no limits to accessing porn.


THANK YOU to everyone who has been sharing these blog posts and for all your great feedback.  If you have a topic you would like me to blog about, send an email me or ASK ME through Vidoyen. If you would like to enquire about my availability and professional speaking fees to present at your school, in-service, conference, community, youth or church event, enquire via email.  If you are looking for sex education support, find us at Youth Wellbeing Project and sign up to receive our newsletter.

Liz Walker

International authority on porn harms, education and advocacy.