As a young adult living on the internet, many of us have viewed some pornographic websites admit it or not. However, it is very hard to analyze the development of the pornography website industry due to the data availability problem. It is fair to assume that the visiting volume is very large and the assumption is confirmed by the Alexa, an advertising company under Google brand, that reported the list of top 500 highest visiting volume websites and 10 of them are pornographic websites. (Alexa, 2017)
The biggest pornography website Xvideos.com has monthly 342 million (Alexa, xvideos.com Traffic Statistics, 2017) pageviews in the US which is almost two times the pageviews of CNN.com (189 million). (Alexa, cnn.com Traffic Statistics, 2017) The pageviews of the large pornography websites such as YouPorn, Tube8 and Pornhub are also enormous compared to other websites except for the major searching engines (Google) and social networks (Facebook).
Considering the pageviews, it is concluded that the pornography websites are more popular than the same size non-pornography websites. Also, 342 million pageviews per month sound like an astronomical figure. If you take into consideration of the service provided by these pornography websites, the scale and size of these pornography websites should not be overlooked.
The scale of the website
The major difference between the pornography websites and non-pornography websites is the daily time on site. For example, the technological or scientific websites, the average daily time on site is roughly 2.35 minutes – 2.47 minutes such as Engadget and ExtremeTech. But the viewer of pornography websites has a roughly 15 minutes daily time on site. The reason is simply because that the pornography websites provide video to its customers while other websites mainly provide text and pictures.
The size of the main page of Extreme Tech is roughly several million bytes but even a low-quality video (480 x 200) has 0.1 million bytes per second which lead to 90 million bytes per 15 minutes. If we time this number with 342 million pageviews per month, we will lead to a conclusion that Xvideo are required to process 29 PB per month (1PB = 1024TB, 1TB = 1024 GB) which is 50 GB per second information transaction.
In short, the pornography websites are required to process a huge amount of data. Only YouTube and Hulu may compete with the absolute bandwidth of these pornography websites.
The infrastructure of the website
The storage of video requires more resources than simply store text and pictures. It requires massive data storage, short CPU cycle, internal I/O and high bandwidth.
The pornography websites need to provide thousands of dynamic, searchable video databases if someone clicked a video. This process is a complicated and the CPU cycle and internal I/O may influence the upload and download speed which ultimately influence the customer satisfaction. In addition to this, the hardware and software requirement is also higher than another type of websites.
References
Alexa. (2017, 10 13). Alexa Top 500 Global Sites. Retrieved from Alexa: https://www.alexa.com/topsites
Alexa. (2017, 10 13). cnn.com Traffic Statistics. Retrieved from Alexa: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cnn.com#?sites=cnn.com&sites=xvideos.com
Alexa. (2017, 10 13). xvideos.com Traffic Statistics. Retrieved from Alexa: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/xvideos.com#?sites=xvideos.com
Agreed with your opinion. If Pornhub is going to process such high volume data, upgrading its IT infrastructure would be a significant step to go. Basic data storage includes traditional data warehouse, data lake, cloud-based storage system, and hard disk/server (Marr, 2016). For big giants like Pornhub, regarding their demands and high volume users, new evolution of data storage could be expected.
Source:
Marr, B. (2016). Building Your Big Data Infrastructure: 4 Key Components Every Business Needs To Consider. Forbes.com.