A few weeks ago I wrote about the new CyberPatrol, spun off as an independent company after the Websense acquisition of SurfControl. Recently CyberPatrol launched a blog, (which I added to my blogroll) and this week they published some of their database stats:
July 2008
New Classified Sites:
· Weapon related: 6,131
· Illegal activities: 18,108
· Gambling: 21,506
· Pornographic: 71,697
· Lingerie: 3,219
· Games: 6,713
· Parked domains: 119,587
Total: 259,770
As can be seen in the above numbers, pornographic sites far and away dominate the unacceptable category. According to TopTenReviews, in 2006 there were 4.2 million pornographic websites-12% of all sites.
70,000 new sites in one month? How is that possible – are there many porntrepreneurs out there? Yes, it’s very possible, and it’s actually a small number of companies doing this. When I worked at Secure Computing, we would find some porn servers (a single numeric IP address) hosting up to 5,000 unique fully qualified domain names – most of them minor variations of the same content. That’s the way the porn economy works – it’s all about volume, volume, volume. A quick search of Google for “porn” today listed 235,000,000 pages.
When I was at N2H2, we once published a study of the five year growth of porn, that was reported on CNN:
Filed under: Filtering, Filtering Companies, Internet Safety, Research
[...] recently validated our Sep 2008 stats with some other research in this blog post. Right now we are tracking over 990,000 active porn domains. Those active domains actually [...]