The Internet is for Porn: Measurement and Analysis of Online Adult Traffic

Adult (or pornographic) websites attract a large number of visitors and account for a substantial fraction of the global Internet traffic. However, little is known about the makeup and characteristics of online adult traffic. In this paper, we present the first large-scale measurement study of online adult traffic using HTTP logs collected from a major commercial content delivery network. Our data set contains approximately 323 terabytes worth of traffic from 80 million users, and includes traffic from several dozen major adult websites and their users in four different continents. We analyze several characteristics of online adult traffic including content and traffic composition, device type composition, temporal dynamics, content popularity, content injection, and user engagement. Our analysis reveals several unique characteristics of online adult traffic. We also analyze implications of our findings on adult content delivery. Our findings suggest several content delivery and cache performance optimizations for adult traffic, e.g., modifications to website design, content delivery, cache placement strategies, and cache storage configurations.