{"id":338,"date":"2007-04-23T09:49:24","date_gmt":"2007-04-23T01:49:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whoisandrewwee.com\/social-traffic\/are-social-networking-sites-more-popular-than-porn-sites\/"},"modified":"2007-04-23T09:50:26","modified_gmt":"2007-04-23T01:50:26","slug":"are-social-networking-sites-more-popular-than-porn-sites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/whoisandrewwee.com\/social-traffic\/are-social-networking-sites-more-popular-than-porn-sites\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Social Networking Sites More Popular Than Porn Sites?"},"content":{"rendered":"
There’s an unholy trinity of money making niches that are said to be perpetually profitable.<\/p>\n
If you’re looking for a ‘permanent niche’, look no further than ‘Pills, Poker and Porn’.<\/p>\n
By some estimates, Porn (abbreviated from pornography, and sometimes going by it’s synonyms ‘adult sites’, pr0n, or pron) is the biggest segment of the three. [Though it’s difficult to get quantitative data on gaming\/gambling, pharmaceutical and adult sites]<\/p>\n
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So Laura Alter’s post “Social networking overtaking porn?<\/a>” got me thinking: Could Social Networking sites really be more popular<\/strong> than porn sites?<\/p>\n Reader Paul Johns<\/a> has suggested that social networking sites could be an avenue for people to meet up for sex or to exchange naked pictures.<\/p>\n Although this might be true for some sites like Facebook or MySpace, I doubt this ‘tactic’ would work as well on StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us or Digg, just because of the way it’s structured.<\/p>\n As for exchanging pictures, I think someone would better get their jollies, downloading full length movies from a P2P network instead. Pictures are so Web1.0…<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n Here’s what I think is happening.<\/p>\n Most Web 2.0\/social networking users have accounts at multiple service provider. For example, I have accounts at MyBlogLog<\/a>, BumpZee<\/a>, Affiliate Marketing Buzz<\/a>, MySpace<\/a> and a multitude of other services.<\/p>\n Does the fact that I have 15 Social Networking accounts, mean that I represent 15 unique visitors?<\/p>\n Just like a free webmail account, most social networking sites have free membership. It’s also an ‘incentive’ to create tons of accounts, and only use one or two services.<\/p>\n Does the report factor that some spam marketers are creating millions of MySpace and other accounts for spam purposes?<\/p>\n Well, if it does, I wouldn’t be surprised that social networking is ‘overtaking’ porn sites!<\/p>\n Here’s the bottomline, financial figures <\/strong>generally don’t lie.<\/p>\n If a niche is generating sufficient profit for people to make a full time living from it, then it’s worth pursuing.<\/p>\n