One of the biggest tube owners, the owner of redtube in fact, if I remember correctly, is under multiple investigations for money laundering, as an example.

Thousands of mom-and-pop porn sites are being driven out of business by the tubes, because it’s too expensive to constantly chase the tubes with takedown requests, when tube employees with dummy “user” accounts immediately reupload the stolen content.

All of you hoighty toity netkultur types may believe that when a person gets naked and gets banged on camera to try to make a living you have a god-given right to steal that infinitely-reproducible piece of created work, but you are still stealing it.

I remember when I was in highschool in the early to mid nineties, the national guard laid cabling for all the high schools in the area to insure we had the highest speed of internet connection then available (and no, I was not in what one could call an even REMOTELY rich district).

I moved to tacoma in 2005 to teach high school and was quite shocked at how limited the online technology and availability was in schools here. We are just now, in 2010, getting to the point my poor Utah high school was at 15 years ago.

Broadband coverage by state: http://coronainsights.com/2008/09/who-uses-the-internet-part-1-state-by-state/

Note Utah falls into the top five in multiple categories.

So, I suspect it’s not that falks from Utah are a particularly horny lot, it’s that they have lower overall broadband coverage and that partakers of paid porn are disproportionately represented among the broadband users.

I’m sure it does, but a 60% majority is more than most stereotypes are based on. For example, less than 37 percent of voters in Massachusetts are registered Democrats and probably even a smaller percentage of Hawaiian people know how to surf.

You say that like its a bad thing.

Too many times people that use statistics jump to conclusions (many times convenient, or to prove whatever they want to prove) as to what the numbers actually mean in reality.

Freakanomics is a good book that shows this principle. Statistics is not simple, and usually cannot stand alone, and has to be taken in context of all reasonable factors.

Many medical “facts” scare me a bit as someone does some random study, and then based on that they make some grandiose determination. It might be reasonable, or even true, however there are proper ways to use statistics and eliminate possible error. In many instances I don’t think this is done, as it takes additional work, and doesn’t make the headline any better.

Usually it is a number of factors that determine anything, but it is way sexier to say that they found that People that do X have a 20% higher chance to get Y.

That doesn’t mean X causes Y, it is only an empirical observation, they then jump to the conclusion that it does. It could be that the People that do X have less money, and as a result, eat less healthy, or have more stressful jobs, etc…(any number of related factors) and thus are more susceptible to Y, but it certainly doesn’t mean in any science type way that X is at the cause of Y in any kind of definitive manner.

Trying to explain this to people over and over again can be frustrating.

In Provo, where BYU is, you can go into a chain restaurant (like PF Chang’s) and order a bottle of wine. Right there at your table. In front of everyone. Things be a changin’.

So maybe it’s all the non-Mormon’s who are whoopping up the internets with fleshy bits.

Or they could be so backwards they don’t realize that porn is available freely inasmuch as water is.

Really? I’ve never met anyone who thought that every single resident of Utah was Mormon.

Oh, and the other commentator is dead on with the fact that causality can not be proven by a relationship in the data. We all know that more babies in Britain are born in the spring and that storks migrate there in the spring, but this does not mean that storks are the cause of more babies. (They actually come from cabbage leaves…)

The next day they all come back and the king asks the Mathematician what his answer is and he says, “I worked out the problem in several different ways and I always got the same answer. Four. I’m absolutely certain of this.” The Statistician chimes in, “Your Majesty, I also got four, but I think I could get it down to three.” The King turns to the Statistician and says “Well? What is your answer?” The Statistician replies, “I dunno… What do you want to hear?”

Joke courtesy of my college Statistics teacher. The only math class I ever enjoyed.

If 28258 people view porn each second and there are 24644172 porn sites then on average each porn site gets 99 visits a day. Seems way too low to make any money. What % of those 99 porn viewers are paying each day?

If the global internet porn revenues are $4.9 billion (I’ve seen estimates much lower) and there are 24664172 sites that means on average a site makes about $198 per year. Again seems low.

I’m guessing the most out of whack stat is the number of porn sites. 24 million is way too high.

This does make me want to update our bland reports to look like this though.

I am pretty sure that 1 in 3 users on our sites are not women.

So 2 out of 3 users are women? That’s a lot of randy ladies!

Btw, it’s copyright infringement, not theft.