by Неизвестный
DISTRIBUTION AND CONSUMPTION
Internet pornography does not differ substantially from other pornography in the manner of production, but rather in the manner of distribution. Today, with high-speed internet connections quite common across the United States, it consists of (sometimes quite large) digital files containing videos or photographs, distributed to consumers through as many as 40,634 websites around the world.1 Some videos and photographs are identical to those that can be purchased through pornographic print media or pornographic video vendors, but others are only distributed through the internet.
Pornographic photographs either can be downloaded and stored on the consumer’s computer or viewed directly from the website without downloading. Some videos can be downloaded and stored on the consumer’s own computer, but others, presented in a “streaming” format, can be viewed but not downloaded. Some streaming videos claim to be live video feeds from a “webcam” that is currently filming pornographic activity.
The websites that distribute this pornography may roughly be divided into three categories: pay sites that allow users to consume pornographic content for a fee, often paid for by credit card; free sites that allow consumers to view either samples or the full photographs and videos without paying; and various versions of YouTube that cater to pornography consumers.
The pay sites usually charge anywhere from $10 to $100 per month for access.2 Some are connected with massive webs of gateway sites. Users who stumble upon one of these gateway sites will be led by a series of links to the main site, where they will have the opportunity to pay for pornographic content.3 The sites that give away pornography for free may be for-profit ventures typically supported by advertising or personal homepages that contain (sometimes illegally copied) pornographic content without earning any advertising revenue to pay for their maintenance. The pornographic versions of YouTube are for-profit ventures, and the pornographic content on them is sometimes produced by amateurs.
Thus, there are three revenue models for internet pornography: the end-user model (in which pay sites charge customers for personal access), the advertiser model (in which websites distributing pornography support themselves by selling advertising space, sometimes to other pornography sites), and the model of various free pornography sites that may not be profitably supported by either end-user subscriptions or advertising.
CONSUMPTION FOR PAYMENT AND FOR FREE
Before one can analyze the likely effects of pornography on society, it is important to get an estimate of the industry’s total revenues to make progress in understanding its effects—without reliable numbers, there is little hope for assessing its impacts. The industry publication AVN reports that total internet pornography revenues for 2005 were about $2.5 billion.4 Although many mainstream news sources take AVN’s numbers at face value, some academic sources claim that the pornography industry has enough of an incentive to exaggerate revenues that their numbers simply cannot be trusted.5 In light of this problem, it is necessary to evaluate the industry’s revenue reports using independent data.
First, using information from the US Census Bureau on 2005 e-commerce revenues by industry sector, the reported $2.5 billion amounts to 18% of the total e-commerce revenues earned from publishing, arts, entertainment, and recreation services, 2.5% of the total e-commerce revenues earned from all business-to-consumer “service” industries combined, and 1.3% of the total e-commerce revenues earned from all business-to-consumer industries combined.6 These percentages do not seem too large.
Furthermore, a simple ratio can determine the reliability of both the AVN revenue numbers and the Pew Internet and American Life (PIAL) Project’s internet pornography consumption numbers. According to the PIAL 2005 May tracking poll, 66% of Americans age 18 and over used the internet, and 11.25% of those (about 16.7 million) accessed pornography. According to the May 2004 tracking poll data, 20% of internet pornography consumers admit to paying for online content, which, combined with PIAL’s finding on consumption, yields about 3.3 million paying internet pornography consumers in 2005.
These numbers could be an underestimate, because people may fear revealing themselves as an internet pornography user during a telephone survey.7 But dividing the revenue estimate by the pornography consumer estimate helps evaluate whether either of them seems to be biased in the directions we fear.
So I divide the $2.5 billion by 3.3 million consumers to get $737 per paying customer per year, or $61 per month. Pay sites charge $10 to $100 per month (in 2007, for example, Vivid.com charged $30 per month), so $61 per month is a fairly reasonable average.8 Thus, the $2.5 billion in annual internet pornography revenue and the 3.3 million internet pornography paying customers seem reasonable estimates. Since this was calculated using the Pew pornography consumption data, it indirectly suggests that Pew’s 11%-to-15% rate of total internet pornography consumption is also not too low.9
These numbers reveal a potentially important fact about internet pornography consumption: Most users are using it for free. Of the 14% who admitted to consuming it during the May 2004 Pew survey, only 20% said that they pay for it.10 In the February 2007 Pew survey, 4.5% of internet users admitted to watching online adult videos, but only 10% of them said that they ever pay to access them.11
Finally, “hits” on internet pornography websites are broadly distributed, with “the top five hundred sites account[ing] for only 56% of all visits to the adult category,” even though only a few firms bring in most of the revenue.12 These two facts can be reconciled if a large number of the hits on pornography sites are users downloading free material. It is also possible to reconcile them by noting that some central sites register innumerable gateway sites that link to the central site.13
In short, the evidence suggests that a large number of internet pornography consumers—probably the vast majority—are usually consuming free internet pornography. This free material consists of samples of the pay material, illegally copied versions of the pay material, and amateur material.
WHO IS CONSUMING INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY?
The number of consumers and the total dollars of revenue both can be estimated fairly reliably by combining independent data sources, in spite of the potential for aggregate measurement error. But in order to analyze the demographic characteristics of these consumers, I would have to evaluate whether measurement error is distributed unequally across demographic groupings. For instance, are men more willing to admit the truth about their pornography consumption than are women?
It is impossible to do justice to this question in this paper, but comparing results across independent sources of data can provide an answer. Claims about pornography usage consistently reported within each of these sources over time and across each are less likely to be the results of chance or survey methodology, and are more likely to be accurate. There are three main sources of data: the General Social Survey (GSS), administered since 1972 across the United States; the PIAL Project telephone surveys, which have occurred several times a year since 2001; and data from ISPs, collated by Bill Tancer of the internet tracking firm Hitwise.14
Table 1 collects pornography usage data from the May 2004 PIAL survey and the GSS. In both surveys, men more frequently claim to be pornography users than do women, and the young more often than the old, while the married and the widowed are less likely than people of other marital status to claim to use it. Each of these patterns is largely confirmed by data from four other PIAL surveys dating from February 2001 through May 2005. Furthermore, the data from ISPs, which may be less likely to have differential measurement error across demographic groups, confirms that men are more likely to use internet pornography than are women.15 Table 1 shows that admitted pornography consumption varies considerably across religious groups.
All three sources are consistent with a decline over the last several years in the proportion of people consuming pornography. Figure 1a shows a small decrease between 2004 and 2006 in the proportion of respondents who claim to have seen an X-rate
d movie during the past year. Figure 2 shows a small decrease from May 2004 to May 2005 in the proportion of respondents who report using the internet to visit adult websites. Finally, Figure 3 shows that the pornographic website market share has declined from 17% of all visits to websites in September 2005 to 11% in September 2007.
This decline in market share is consistent with constant consumption of pornography and an increase in the consumption of other services, but it is also consistent with a continued decline in pornography consumption. Nevertheless, as shown in Figure 1a, over the long term, the consumption of pornography has increased since a low point in the late 1970s up until the latest year of 2006. This is even more obvious in Figure 1b, where 54% of men age twenty-nine or under used pornography in 2006 (the most recent pornography usage figure), almost twice the usage during the low point in 1978.
SUMMARY FACTS
There are at least 40,634 websites that distribute pornographic material on the internet. About 11% of all internet visits are to one of these sites. About 14% of the online population in America (17 million Americans) visits these sites, spending on average 6.5 minutes per visit.16 About 80% to 90% access only free pornographic material. This free material consists of samples of the pay material, illegally copied versions of the pay material, and amateur material.
The remaining three million Americans who pay for internet pornography pay an average of about $60 per month. This generates $2.5 billion in annual revenues for the internet pornography industry, making its revenues a very small percentage of total e-commerce revenues. While this number is frequently cited as an overestimate,. it is reasonable when estimated by independent data sources, and in fact severely underestimates the total amount of consumption, because of the prevalence of free material. Most of these revenues are apparently earned by a small number of top firms.17
Most of the consumption, on the other hand, is spread widely across a number of websites, with the top 500 of these 40,000 websites earning only 56% of the total traffic. Consumption of pornography is spread unevenly according to gender, age, marital status, and religion, and has no clear relationship with education or income. In spite of a recent decrease in consumption, a considerably higher proportion of the population consumes pornography than it did at the recent low point in the late 1970s, especially among young men.
THE EFFECTS OF CONSUMPTION
Does consuming pornography affect behavior? There is not yet convincing statistical evidence in favor of either a yes or a no answer. In an ideal experiment (ideal for identification, not ethics), people would be randomly exposed to pornography and their sexual and criminal behavior (if any) observed. Without doing this, some random variation in access to, exposure to, or temptation to use pornography must be found—that is, a variation in the “price” of consuming pornography that can be correlated with behavior. This is the most difficult requirement in studying the effects of the consumption of pornography (positive or negative). Two recent papers claim to have found such variation, and with it evidence that pornography does affect behavior, but their evidence is not convincing.
The first, a working paper by Todd Kendall, formerly an assistant professor at Clemson University, uses variation in state internet usage over time to proxy for variation in the “price” of accessing pornography.18 His first claim is that the difference in the speed of internet adoption between states is largely attributable to reasons unrelated to rape. His second is that this variation led to variation in the rate of rapes across states. His final claim is that internet pornography consumption caused the link between internet usage and rape.
Each of these claims is difficult to prove empirically, and the fact that Kendall has found some evidence in support of them is impressive. Nevertheless, there remain important concerns about his approach. The first problem is an old one: endogeneity. In Kendall’s natural experiment, differing rates of usage of the internet should create differing rates of access to pornography. But changes in internet usage could be caused by changes in other variables related to rape, such as preferences and unobserved demographics. Normally, what a researcher would do in this circumstance is find an “instrument” for internet access: a variable that would lead to random variation in internet usage but that would not directly affect outcome variables such as rape. Kendall could not find such a variable, so he relied on the older technique of simply including controls for whatever potentially related variables he could find. Given the prospect for omitted variable bias here, this is a serious issue.
The second problem is an odd one: Kendall controls simultaneously for changes in the internet and computer usage within states over time. So the results are driven by states in which internet usage has risen by either more or less than their increase in computer usage. Since we do not know why some states experience slower increases in internet usage (relative to their increase in computer usage) than others, we cannot assume that this variation in relative internet usage is unrelated to important variables Kendall did not include.
The second paper, by Winai Wongsurawat, is entitled “Pornography and Social Ills: Evidence from the Early 1990s,” and was published in 2006.19 Wongsurawat uses variation in availability of post office boxes as an instrument for variation in the overall psychological “cost” of subscribing to Penthouse magazine. The theory is that, ceteris paribus, greater ease of obtaining a private post office box will make other people less likely to notice one’s Penthouse consumption, thereby lowering the psychological cost of subscribing, and that if pornography affects behavior, then places where post office boxes are more easily acquired will have higher rates of rape. In order for this instrument to reliably reveal something about the effect of pornography, the effect of post office box availability on subscriptions must have a statistically significant effect on Penthouse consumption, and not be related through another mechanism to the incidence of rape.
In the previous paper there wasn’t any instrument, but in this paper the instrument is not convincing. Wongsurawat demonstrates that in fact post office box availability does not have a strong effect on Penthouse subscriptions, but rather has a borderline-strong effect on subscriptions and individual (e.g., newsstand) sales. This implies that availability mainly affects the individual sales, which strongly suggests the existence of an unmeasured third variable affecting both post office boxes and individual sales. Furthermore, he admits that the F-statistic on the joint significance of the instruments is not quite at the level sometimes used as a rule of thumb for avoiding the weak instrument problem. Finally, Wongsurawat finds that the availability of post office boxes has a statistically significant and apparently positive effect on Discover magazine subscriptions, and thus has no way of ruling out the possibility that subscriptions to Discover magazine rather than Penthouse connects availability to rape.
While both papers point out inadequacies in much of the statistical evidence that consumption of pornography does not affect behavior, their own evidence that it does is not convincing. In both cases, their results are driven strongly by their techniques for obtaining variation in the “price” of pornography consumption, and in both cases this variation is unlikely to be exogenous. Therefore, their results are not a substantial improvement on the older literature that showed positive effects of pornography consumption on rape.
Nevertheless, more can be done to use statistical evidence to measure the effect of pornography consumption. The first step would be to find a useful instrument for pornography availability or consumption: one that has a strong and measurable effect on pornography usage, and is also unlikely to have an independent effect on the behavior being measured. One example of this would be variation in broadband internet availability that comes from a known source. Another example would be using the similarity in take-up rates of technology over time.20 In fact, this approach is being used in ongoing work.21
CONSUMPTION THEORY AND CONSUMPTION EFFECTS
Samuel Cameron asks, “Why . . . should we be spending time trying to de
fine porn in the first place? If individuals are rational utility maximizers, then why do they need to be barred from pornography?”22 The answer, as Cameron himself later admits, is that pornography may be addictive, and thus it may be optimal for the state to attempt to reduce consumption. “We’re seeing it [addiction] with epidemic proportions now, particularly with regards to cybersex,” says Mark Schwartz, psychologist and former director of the Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis, Missouri.23
Consumption theory typically assumes that anything a person chooses to consume will be the precise choice (subject to the relevant scarcity constraints) that makes that person best off. This assumption implies that those who choose to consume pornography are improving their own well-being by doing so. Thus, adding an additional constraint to their decision-making (such as raising the price of pornography or making consumption a punishable offense) would necessarily reduce their well-being by decreasing the frequency of their choosing pornography.
In fact, there is a lot of money being made helping people overcome their “sex-addiction,” a condition that increasingly refers to the use and abuse of internet pornography.24 There are numerous self-help books on breaking pornography addiction, in addition to numerous internet filters designed to prevent temptation. People feel the costs of their addiction are so high that they pay for services such as X3 Pure’s $165 counseling sessions for married men, or Covenant Eyes®’ $55 per year accountability software. There isn’t any money being made helping people with tooth-brushing addiction, or kite-flying addiction. All of this evidence should be sufficient to convince us that using pornography can result in great costs for the person consuming; costs not incurred by truly innocuous activities such as brushing one’s teeth.
