Porn is a small slice of the internet, not the 30% often quoted. About 4% of the world’s top million websites were porn in c. 2010 data, according to Psychology Today (2016), summarizing research by neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam.
Current traffic data points the same way. Pornhub, XVideos and xHamster took 3.1% of visits to the 20 most-visited websites in September 2026 (our calculation from Semrush estimates).
In this article, we’ll break down porn’s share of websites, web traffic, searches and bandwidth, how many people visit porn sites, how much porn exists, and where the 30% myth came from.
Top Statistics on How Much of the Internet Is Porn
- About 4% of the world’s top million websites were porn in c. 2010 data.
- Porn sites took 3.1% of visits to the world’s 20 most-visited websites in September 2026.
- About 13% of web searches were for porn between July 2009 and July 2010.
- Only 1.1% of web pages in the Google and MSN search indexes were sexually explicit in 2005–2006.
- 29% of UK online adults, or 13.8 million people, visited a porn service in May 2024.
- Pornhub’s 2019 data transfer equalled about 0.33% of Cisco’s forecast for global internet traffic that year.
- The “37% of the internet is porn” claim came from a filtering-software company in 2010.
What Percentage of the Internet Is Porn?
Between about 1% and 13%, depending on what you count. Porn made up 1.1% of indexed web pages in 2005–2006, about 4% of top websites around 2010, 3.1% of visits to the 20 biggest sites in 2026 and about 13% of web searches in 2009–2010.
None of these measurements comes close to 30%.
Here’s a breakdown of porn’s share of the internet by measure:
| Measure | Porn’s Share | Data Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web searches | 13% | 2009–2010 | Ogas & Gaddam |
| Sites in Similarweb’s top 50 | 8% | Sep 2026 | Similarweb (our calculation) |
| Searches returning an adult page in the top 10 results | 6% | 2005 | Stark |
| Top million websites (sex-related) | 4% | c. 2010 | Ogas & Gaddam |
| Visits to the 20 most-visited sites | 3.1% | Sep 2026 | Semrush (our calculation) |
| Top million websites (“porn” in address, title or description) | 2.2% | 2018 | Maris et al. (our calculation) |
| UK porn visitors’ porn time vs average adult’s monthly time online (rough) | 1.2% | 2024 | Ofcom (our calculation) |
| Web pages in Google and MSN indexes | 1.1% | 2005–2006 | Stark |
Ogas and Gaddam themselves estimated that porn is “around 10 percent of the material on the Internet,” a rough estimate rather than a count.
Source: Psychology Today, Semrush, Similarweb, Stark (UC Berkeley), Maris et al., Ofcom
Where Does the “30% of the Internet Is Porn” Claim Come From?
The 30% figure is usually traced to a 2012 back-of-the-envelope estimate by tech site ExtremeTech, which calculated that porn sites generate 30% of all internet traffic, according to a 2013 BBC Mundo report republished by 24horas.cl. The BBC called the method problematic, partly because it underestimated how much data crosses the internet each day.
ExtremeTech built its estimate on XVideos, which had 4.4 billion page views a month at the time, according to Bloomberg (2012). From that, it estimated the site sent at least 29 petabytes every 30 days, Tecmundo reported.
The other big number, 37%, came from Optenet, a company that sells filtering software, in June 2010, according to Gizmodo. It rested on a sample of about 4 million URLs (Dark Reading), and an Optenet spokesperson later told the BBC the statistics were out of date.
Here’s a breakdown of the most-repeated claims and where they come from:
| Claim | Origin | Year | Problem |
|---|---|---|---|
| “37% of the internet is porn” | Optenet, a filtering-software vendor | 2010 | Share of URLs in a sample; the company later called it outdated |
| “30% of internet traffic is porn” | ExtremeTech estimate | 2012 | Back-of-the-envelope maths from one site’s page views |
| “30% of all data is porn; more visitors than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined” | Infographic by a porn website, Paint Bottle | 2013 | No published method |
| “20% of mobile searches are porn” | Google mobile search logs | 2005 | Cell-phone queries before smartphones; PDA queries were about 5% |
| “40% of searches were porn” | Ogas & Gaddam | 1999 | Early-web figure; Excite logs showed 16.8% of queries in 1997 |
The mobile figure has a real but dated origin. Adult queries made up more than 20% of Google mobile searches from cell phones in one month of 2005, according to Search User Interfaces, citing a Google study by Kamvar and Baluja (2006) of more than 1 million requests.
The infographic came from Paint Bottle, a porn website, according to Digit (2013). Advocacy group InternetSafety101 later repeated “30 percent of Internet content is porn” without naming a study, Psychology Today noted.
Source: BBC Mundo via 24horas.cl, Gizmodo, Digit, Statista, Spink et al.
How Many Websites Are Porn?
About 4% of the most popular sites. Ogas and Gaddam counted 42,337 sex-related sites among the 1 million most visited websites around 2010, according to Psychology Today.
A stricter 2018 crawl, published in 2019, found 22,484 porn sites in the Alexa top 1 million, about 2.2% (our calculation), by keeping only sites with “porn” in their address, title or description, according to Maris, Libert and Henrichsen. That’s a floor, since many porn sites never use the word.
Those sites are leaky, too: 93% passed user data to at least one third party, one of the tracking findings behind whether porn sites are safe.
Page counts give an even lower share. About 1.1% of pages in the Google and MSN indexes were sexually explicit in 2005–2006, based on random samples of 11,100 Google and 39,999 MSN pages by Berkeley statistician Philip Stark for a US court case over online age checks. Optenet’s 37% was about 34 times higher (our calculation).
Here’s a breakdown of the main counts of porn websites:
| Study | Data Period | Porn Sites Counted | Base |
|---|---|---|---|
| Morichetta et al. | 2014–2017 | 59,989 adult domains visited | About 15,000 European households |
| Ogas & Gaddam | c. 2010 | 42,337 | 1 million most-visited sites |
| Maris, Libert & Henrichsen | 2018 | 22,484 | Alexa top 1 million |
| Vallina et al. | 2018 | 6,843 | 8,099 candidates from porn directories and Alexa |
Most porn sites are small. Only 1,103 of the 6,843 sites in the Vallina study stayed in the Alexa top 1 million all through 2018, and about 75 reached the top 1,000 at some point, according to Vallina et al. (2019).
Meanwhile, about 15,000 broadband households served by one European internet provider visited 59,989 different adult domains over three years, according to Morichetta, Trevisan and Vassio (2019).
Source: Psychology Today, Maris et al., Vallina et al., Morichetta et al.
What Share of Web Traffic Goes to Porn Sites?
About 3.1% of visits to the world’s biggest websites. Pornhub, XVideos and xHamster had 7.31 billion of the 237.66 billion visits to the 20 sites on Semrush’s global top-websites list in September 2026 (our calculation).
xHamster is 20th on that list, though its own Semrush page ranks it 21st. Google alone took 45.8% of those visits. Leave out Google and YouTube, and the three porn sites’ share rises to 10.6%.
Pornhub ranks 10th worldwide on Semrush with about 3.4 billion visits, about 1.5 times Amazon’s 2.32 billion but below Wikipedia’s 3.8 billion. XVideos follows with 2.27 billion, and the full list of the biggest porn sites by traffic adds Eporner, XNXX and the big cam sites.
Here’s how the biggest porn sites compare with the most-visited websites:
| Site | Visits (Sep 2026) | Porn Site |
|---|---|---|
| 108.9 billion | No | |
| YouTube | 59.97 billion | No |
| 12.21 billion | No | |
| ChatGPT | 8.23 billion | No |
| 6.81 billion | No | |
| Wikipedia | 3.8 billion | No |
| Pornhub | 3.4 billion | Yes |
| TikTok | 2.71 billion | No |
| Amazon | 2.32 billion | No |
| XVideos | 2.27 billion | Yes |
| xHamster | 1.64 billion | Yes |
| Top 20 sites, total | 237.66 billion | 3.1% porn |
The 10 biggest adult video and cam sites had about 11.09 billion visits, 1.7 times as many as Amazon and X combined (6.49 billion). Netflix doesn’t make Semrush’s top 20, so on Semrush’s visit estimates the 10 biggest adult sites out-draw Netflix, Amazon and X combined, though the 2013 line had no published method and Similarweb puts Netflix ahead of Pornhub.
Semrush ranks 7 adult video and cam sites in its global top 100, from Pornhub at #10 to Chaturbate at #77.
Similarweb’s ranking is less porn-heavy. 4 of the 50 sites on its September 2026 top-websites list are adult sites, or 8%, and it puts Netflix at about 1.5 billion visits, 1.25 times Pornhub’s 1.2 billion (both shown under a “last 3 months” heading) (Similarweb).
Source: Semrush, Similarweb, Similarweb (Pornhub), September 2026. Visits are third-party estimates.
What Percentage of Searches Are for Porn?
About 13%, in the most recent large search-log study. Ogas and Gaddam found that 13% of web searches between July 2009 and July 2010 involved porn, according to Psychology Today. Their search data included about 400 million Dogpile searches, among other logs (Ogi Ogas).
Search-engine officials they interviewed put the share at 10% to 15%.
Older logs show the share falling as the web grew. Sexual queries were 16.8% of Excite searches in 1997, 7.5% in 1999 and 8.5% in 2001, according to Spink et al. (2004). By 2006, Spink, Jansen and a co-author put them at less than 4% of web queries (First Monday).
Here’s a breakdown of porn’s share of searches by study:
| Search Engine | Year | Share of Searches | Measure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Excite | 1997 | 16.8% | Sexual queries |
| Excite | 1999 | 7.5% | Sexual queries |
| Excite | 2001 | 8.5% | Sexual queries |
| AlltheWeb | 2001 | 4.5% | Sexual queries (6,000-query sample) |
| AltaVista | 2001 | 3.5% | Sexual queries (5,000-query sample) |
| AOL, MSN and Yahoo | 2005 | 6% | Searches returning an adult page in the top 10 |
| Dogpile and other engines | 2009–2010 | 13% | Searches involving porn |
A different measure gives a different answer. About 6% of AOL, MSN and Yahoo searches in 2005 returned at least one adult page among the first 10 results, according to Stark.
By 2019, much porn searching happened on porn sites themselves. Pornhub alone logged 39 billion searches in 2019, according to IFLScience.
Source: Spink et al., First Monday, Stark, Psychology Today
What Percentage of Internet Traffic Is Porn?
No current measurement exists, but the best clues point well below 30%. Pornhub transferred 6,597 petabytes in 2019, according to Canaltech, about 0.33% of the roughly 2 zettabytes (168 exabytes a month) that Cisco had forecast in 2015 for global IP traffic in 2019 (our rough calculation).
That compares one site’s company-reported data with a forecast, so treat it as an order of magnitude. Pornhub’s data transfer grew 2.1 times between 2016 and 2019.
The main traffic report, Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena, lists video, Netflix and YouTube but not adult sites. Video made up 65% of all internet traffic in 2022, according to Sandvine, and Netflix alone was 14.97% of global downstream traffic in 2018 (Sandvine).
The paper often cited on this question, “The Internet is for Porn” (ICDCS 2016), measured something else: the makeup of more than 323 terabytes of adult traffic from 80 million users over one week on a major content delivery network, according to Ahmed, Shafiq and Liu.
Here’s a breakdown of what traffic studies and estimates show:
| Measure | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Video’s share of all internet traffic | 65% | 2022 | Sandvine |
| Porn’s share of all traffic (estimate) | 30% | 2012 | ExtremeTech |
| Adult share of mobile video traffic, US 3G network | About 15% | Before 2016 | Erman et al., as cited by Ahmed, Shafiq & Liu |
| Netflix’s share of global downstream traffic | 14.97% | 2018 | Sandvine |
| Pornhub data vs forecast global IP traffic | 0.33% | 2019 | Our calculation |
| Adult share of kiosk traffic in 2 developing countries | Under 1% | Before 2016 | Du et al., as cited by Ahmed, Shafiq & Liu |
Both network figures are second-hand, as cited by Ahmed, Shafiq and Liu: Erman et al. found adult content was about 15% of mobile video traffic on one US 3G network, and Du et al. found it under 1% of traffic at internet kiosks in 2 developing countries.
Source: Canaltech, TweakTown, Genbeta, El Español, Cisco, Ahmed, Shafiq and Liu
How Many People Visit Porn Sites?
About 3 in 10 adults online, in a given month. 29% of UK online adults, or 13.8 million people, visited a porn service in May 2024, according to Ofcom.
Pornhub alone reached 18% of UK online adults in May 2024, falling to 15% in August 2025 after age checks began (Ofcom).
Reach is high, but time spent is low. UK porn visitors spent an average of 93 minutes a month on porn services in the first half of 2024, while the average UK adult spent 4 hours 20 minutes online every day in May 2024 (Ofcom). That’s about 1.2% of monthly time online (our rough calculation, comparing visitors with all adults).
Here’s a breakdown of how many people visit porn sites:
| Measure | Share | Population | Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visited porn sites within a month | 38% | About 15,000 European broadband households | 2014–2017 |
| Visit adult sites monthly | 36% | French internet users | 2022 |
| Visited a porn service | 29% | UK online adults | May 2024 |
| Watched porn in the past month (any source) | 27% | US adults | 2022 |
| Visited Pornhub | 15% | UK online adults | Aug 2025 |
| Visited porn sites daily | 12% | About 15,000 European broadband households | 2014–2017 |
In the household study, 12% of homes visited porn sites daily, compared with 45% for YouTube, 60% for Facebook and 3% for Netflix, according to Morichetta et al. Survey splits by gender and age, from the US to Sweden, appear in our roundup of porn statistics.
Source: Ofcom, Arcom, AEI, Morichetta et al.
How Many Porn Videos Are There?
Millions on a single site. Pornhub users uploaded a record 6.83 million videos in 2019, according to Canaltech, adding up to 1.36 million hours of content (Il Post).
That’s still small next to mainstream video. YouTube was getting more than 500 hours of uploads every minute in 2019 (Tubefilter), about 262.8 million hours a year, so Pornhub’s uploads equalled at most about 0.52% of YouTube’s (our calculation).
Here’s a breakdown of how much content one of the biggest porn platforms holds:
| Measure | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pornhub library before December 2020 purge | 13.5 million videos | 2020 | Tubefilter |
| Videos uploaded to Pornhub | 6.83 million | 2019 | Canaltech |
| Pornhub library after purge | 2.9 million videos | 2020 | Tubefilter |
| Videos uploaded to Pornhub | 854,980 | First half of 2025 | Statista |
| New videos added across Aylo’s platforms | 8,000 a day | 2026 | Aylo |
| Media stored by Aylo | 65+ petabytes | 2026 | Aylo |
Pornhub’s library shrank from 13.5 million videos to 2.9 million in December 2020, when it removed unverified uploads, according to Tubefilter. Its owner, Aylo, says about 8,000 new videos now reach its platforms every day.
Pornhub’s last published annual total was 42 billion visits in 2019, and its year-by-year Pornhub statistics show how searches and uploads grew alongside.
Source: Canaltech, Il Post, TweakTown, Campaign, Statista, Tubefilter, Aylo
Why Do Estimates of Porn on the Internet Conflict?
Because each one counts something different. Sites give about 4%, pages 1.1%, visits to top sites 3.1%, searches 13% and monthly reach 29% of UK online adults.
A site count treats a tiny blog the same as Pornhub. A page count rewards sites that generate endless pages, which may help explain why Optenet’s URL-based 37% sits so far above Stark’s random sample.
Visits and bytes favour a few giant video sites, so porn’s share of data is likely higher than its share of sites. Searches can run high because people often search for porn instead of typing in a site they already know, though that’s a likely explanation rather than a measured one.
Methodology
We reviewed 140 data points from 38 sources. Site and page shares come from Ogas and Gaddam’s analysis of the top million websites (c. 2010, reported by Psychology Today and Gizmodo), the 2019 studies by Maris et al. and Vallina et al. (2018 data), and Philip Stark’s random samples of the Google and MSN indexes, prepared for the US Justice Department in a court case.
Search shares come from query-log studies by Spink, Jansen and colleagues (Excite, AltaVista and AlltheWeb, 1997–2001), Ogas and Gaddam (including Dogpile, 2009–2010) and Stark (AOL, MSN and Yahoo, 2005). Traffic figures are third-party estimates by Semrush and Similarweb for September 2026, modelled from panel and clickstream data; Similarweb’s free pages show visits under a “last 3 months” heading, which we treat as monthly.
UK reach and time figures come from Ofcom’s Online Nation reports, French reach from the regulator Arcom, and US reach from an AEI survey. Pornhub upload and data figures are company-reported via press coverage of its Year in Review, and Aylo figures are company claims. Optenet is a filtering-software vendor. The 30% figures are estimates without a published method.
Shares of top-20 visits, multiples, Pornhub’s share of Cisco’s 2019 forecast, the UK time share and the Maris share of the top million are our own calculations.
Key Takeaways
Porn is a single-digit share of the internet by most measures: about 4% of top websites around 2010, 1.1% of indexed pages in 2005–2006 and 3.1% of visits to the 20 most-visited sites in September 2026. Searches run higher, at about 13% in 2009–2010.
The 30% and 37% figures trace to a back-of-the-envelope estimate and a filtering-software vendor, not to measurements. Reach is real, though: 29% of UK online adults visited a porn service in May 2024.
FAQ
How much of the internet is porn?
About 4% of the world’s top million websites were porn in c. 2010 data, and only 1.1% of indexed web pages were sexually explicit in 2005–2006. In September 2026, Pornhub, XVideos and xHamster took 3.1% of visits to the 20 most-visited websites, based on Semrush estimates.
What percentage of internet traffic is porn?
No current study measures it. The often-quoted 30% was a 2012 ExtremeTech estimate. Pornhub’s 6,597 petabytes in 2019 equalled about 0.33% of Cisco’s forecast global IP traffic for that year (our rough calculation), and video overall made up 65% of internet traffic in 2022.
Is 30% of the internet porn?
No. The 30% figure comes from a 2012 ExtremeTech calculation and a 2013 infographic by a porn website, neither with a published method. Measured shares are 1.1% of pages, about 4% of top sites and 13% of searches.
How many porn sites are there?
Ogas and Gaddam counted 42,337 sex-related sites in the top million around 2010. A 2019 study (crawled in 2018) found 22,484 porn sites in the Alexa top 1 million, and about 15,000 European households visited 59,989 adult domains between 2014 and 2017.
How many porn videos are there?
No total count exists. Pornhub users uploaded 6.83 million videos in 2019, and its library held 13.5 million videos before a December 2020 purge cut it to 2.9 million. In the first half of 2025, 854,980 new videos were uploaded.
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