According to a new analysis by MetaCert, a San Fransisco web-blocking firm, Porn is still largely found on .com domain names with .xxx domains ranking only 6th in terms of TLD’s containing the most porn, even behind .org and .info.
In the story carried in the guardian.co.uk, MetaCert found that the .XXX extension accounted for just 0.56% of porn sites.
.Com, .net, and .org domains contain 83.32%, 8.13% and 0.9% of the relevant domains respectively, adding up to 92.35% of the total that it blocks.
MetaCert which is based on San Fransisco as been researching and developing its crawling and classification platform for the past six years, and has just spent 12 months tweaking the crawler-based algorithms to construct the world’s largest database of pornography web sites.
Paul Walsh, chief executive of MetaCert is quoted in the article as saying:
Every day we are given a list of .xxx domains that are registered”
“Given that the number of .xxx domains represents 0.56% of our data set and they have been on sale for a year – it’s coming up to the anniversary this week – I would say that new TLDs will not pose any issues.”
MetaCert, found that there are approximately 5,000 URLs per pornography website, and that on average each site links to another 10 sites.
According to MetaCert, which has developed a web-filtering technology, a scan of 645 million web pages – out of 3 billion or so online – contains more than 31 billion links to porn.
Here is where the porn is according to to Meta Cert by TLD:
The location of porn sites is also heavily focused in the US, with 58.9% located in there. The Netherlands is the next largest, with 27%, followed by the UK (7.4%) and Germany (1.5%)
Acro says
Okay… and in pure numbers, there are 105 million .com domains, and 250k (?) .xxx domains. Not to mention, 25 years of .com vs. 1 year for .xxx. But nice, promotional article that one.
Michael Berkens says
There are 105 million .com domains but that extension was not set up only for porn as .XXX was
Of course there is also the little point that there are more porn sites on .info and .org and .nl non of which was set up solely for porn either.
Beyond that there is the $7.85 cost of a .com which retail for $9 or so Vs. the $60 wholesale of .XXX which retails for $80 or more
Acro says
Dot info had huge promotions on $0.99 domains. It’s a known spam magnet. The key factor is time; all those TLDs/ccTLDs have existed for years.
Knowing how MetaCert/MetaSurf aims for the adult filter market, I don’t see anything remarkable about that story, TBH. Just a PR masked as an interview.
Paul__Walsh says
@Acro “Knowing how MetaCert/MetaSurf aims for the adult filter market, I don’t see anything remarkable about that story, TBH. Just a PR masked as an interview.”
You don’t actually know much about our technology, apart from what you will find on http://metacert.com and http://ollybrowser.com
I agree that the article is great PR for the company – just like any report provided by any company.
Perhaps you are passing negative commentary because I refused to buy the domain metasurf.com from you for thousands of dollars – because that’s the name given to our FREE family safe browser extensions. In your emails you were very polite, as was I when explaining why we weren’t going to buy the domain from you. Yet, here you are writing negatively about our technology. Some people would think you were unprofessional as a result of being upset with us not buying the domain.
I would be delighted if you’d like to properly evaluate our technology and hear an informed opinion.
Paul says
How is this report surprising?
.Com has been around for decades. Porn has been around just as long. No one should be debating that there is more porn in the .Com space. With respect, duh. The same could be said for other domains like .Org. They have simply had longer to accumulate more porn content. Even if not specifically intended for porn, people have pushed porn on every domain and will continue to do so.
It’s a matter of quality vs. quantity. Sure, there’s more porn on .Com sites. There probably always will be. But there’s also more spam, pop-ups, bad links, virsus, etc.. After all these years, it’s still the wild, wild west. It got to the point where visiting a porn site wasn’t worth the risk. In contrast, all .XXX sites are checked for viruses. They’re clean… no pun intended. They’re also more exclusive, as many .XXX domains are blocked/restricted. Finally, for adult content developers, you can get a much sexier domain name vs. thisistheonlypornameicouldfind.com
It’s a new portal, it’s a safe portal and it’s growing. I don’t know what people were expecting. Did they think all porn content would shift to .XXX overnight? For an upstart, they’ve done pretty well. Sex sells and it’s just a matter of time before they become increasingly viable. ASSUMING they continue to promote the brand, offer free services like virus protection and a good search portal and get companies like Manwin to stop bullying them. Dropping the registration price would also be nice. I don’t think .XXX should cost more than .Co, for example.
Is there more porn on .Com vs. any other domain? Of course. But quantity does not equal quality.
Michael Berkens says
Paul
So your company opinion is that .XXX is having an extremely small effect on the adult market overall, correct.
Paul says
@ M. Berkens
Again, I don’t know what people expected a year out, when .Com was established in 1985. Long before most of us even knew what the internet was. A new domain comes out in Dec 2011 and it’s supposed to immediately compete in terms of quantity? A tad unrealistic.
I expect .XXX to become a more exclusive location for porn. More of a premium channel, if you will. Towards that end, I expect better service/branding, which perhaps justifies the registration price. However, I would still like it lowered.
My opinion isn’t a company opinion. It’s just my opinion. I don’t work for .XXX. I just own a few domains. But I don’t see how anyone can debate the quantity of porn. That’s academic. Personally, I’m not interesting in quantity. I’m interested in quality. Especially in an industry with such a dubious reputation.
Paul__Walsh says
For the record, the title of the article was not chosen by me. Nor did I assert that .xxx had little effect. I never commented on it. We provided information to the Guardian and they decided to run a story that highlighted one specific point.
MetaCert and ICM has a partnership that sees MetaCert label every .xxx domain registered every day, in return for $ for every domain. So, it would be really silly for MetaCert at the very least, to make any negative assertions about .xxx for any reason.
.COM has been around a lot longer. And .XXX has much more strict criteria which sites owners might not feel comfortable with. There are lots of reasons why .COM has more pornography, just like there are much more businesses that use .COM over .biz.
confer says
I would bet that for ALL ‘topics’, .com has a far greater number of ‘topic’-related sites than any other tld.
Even when compared to other topic-purposed tld’s (such as .pro, .aero, .museum, .co, .mobi, .tv) I would bet .com has more sites related to professionals, aerospace/airplanes, museums, companies, mobile devices/sites & television/broadcasts respectively. It’s also likely other extensions (.net, .org, .info) edge out these longer-established purposed-tld’s in terms of the number of respective ‘topic’-related sites.
_________
As written, the title seems to imply .xxx is faring poorly. However, what would be the % for the following examples:
– the % of ‘museum’ sites found on .museum versus all other tld’s;
– the % of ‘aerospace/airplane’ sites found on .aero versus all other tld’s;
– the % of ‘company’ sites found on .co versus all other tld’s;
– the % of ‘TV-related’ or ‘broadcast’ sites found on .tv versus all other tld’s
This type of comparison, while not perfect, would at least put the .xxx results (0.56%) into proper context.
Steve
BrianWick says
“the article is great PR for the company” –
Does not seem like any of this is good PR for anybody ???
jose says
imho, the question is: what is all the hype around any eventual success of .XXX? all extensions exhibit the same pattern: a flood of registrations at the lunch and on the first year, a bunch of big sales during the first year, an then it goes to the oblivion.
SIC
Paul says
@ Jose
Good point. The difference here is it’s not some generic TLD. It’s specific to porn. So, unlike .biz for example, it has a very specific target audience. If ICM Reg can provide enough value to that target audience, in terms of quality content (not just quantity), a good search engine (search.xxx) and a safe viewing experience (all content scanned for malware, etc.) they “should” succeed over time. But I don’t think their goal should be to compete with .Com in terms of quantity. How can they possibly compete on that level with a TLD that’s been around for over 25 years? Instead, they should seek to better .Com in terms of quality content, search and safety. Just my two cents. Moving on.
Eze says
Looking forward in seeing how .xxx works out…
Seeing that manwin and most of the big porn companies do not support the ICM registry and the .xxx Even as an affiliate they want let you use there content on the .xxx
But i currently have some good .xxx and google seems to like theme!
Acro says
@Paul Walsh – I own the generic domain MetaSurf.com registered in 2003, long before your company was conceived. Then I realized that perhaps, you could be interested in it, judging by the increased inbound traffic after you registered the lesser TLDs .net and .org
In fact, since you decided to unveil private communications in a public forum, I will add that my asking price was hardly in the “thousands of dollars”. Mike Berkens and other domainers would have asked for 10x that much.
The truth is that while I support your cause, I don’t believe that your business decisions hold much rationale. Correct, not only I was polite in my communications with you, but also advised you to register MetaCertDNS.com – the name of your product – before someone grabs it. I am not surprised it’s still available.
Therefore, I would advise you to understand how to the domain market works, before embarking on a tirade of invalid impression-seeking.
Eze says
WOW….very interesting!
@Acro Props to some nice domaining!
Acro says
@Eze – Paul appears to have misunderstood my intentions; he’s Irish, I’m Greek – we share opposing mindsets, both very stubborn. But I won’t state anything else, just wanted to clarify things.
@Paul – Good luck, register that domain, it’s $9 – the max you’ve ever paid on a domain, as you stated in your response to my opening email.