Gilbert Wondracek, who (with coauthors) has investigated the economics of online porn, talks about his research in a podcast for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Wondracek’s research team went so far as to actually become adult website operators themselves. This perspective allowed them to offer the following insight: “We conclude that many participants of this industry have business models that are based on very questionable practices that could very well be abused for malicious activities and conducting cyber-crime. In fact, we found evidence that this kind of abuse is already happening in the wild.”[%comments]
Online Porn and Cyber Crime
TAGS: Economics, pornography
and 
. You can also watch it on 
“I swear honey, I’m only looking at porn websites to research for a paper I’m writing!”
So they started their own porn site for “research”. Yeah.
Shame to see Freakonomics giving voice to the sham artist that is Wondracek. The correct parts of his ‘results’ could have been gleaned from a 5 minute conversation with any one of the highly professional participants in the Adult Industry. The rest of it is a confused mangling of concepts, and dabbling in a tangential scavenger ‘industry’ only vaguely associated with the billion dollar industry he’s supposed to be examining.
$160 for junk traffic from a broker tells you nothing. Google don’t exclude Adult websites. I personally oversee a $20k+ a month account buying adult traffic. (Google for porn – the Sponsored Links are ads). They don’t allow it on the bottom-feeder sites, as they’re all scam artists.
The only reason there’s so much malware on the free sites is that porn is the most obvious draw. It is totally unconnected to the actual content itself. It’s like equating soccer hooliganism to soccer – it’s a parasitic community with very little shared ideals.
Where’s the control by the way? Compare this to health, fitness, and any other mainstream industry – the same tricks are used.
The real story in online porn is how piracy has killed it, but that’s for another day!
the paper is interesting but it looks old already. websites such as PornHub and YouPorn offer a huge quantity of good quality contents and cannot simply be labeled as “marketing sites” for other “core” adult websites. I guess that’s what Rabbit17 it’s referring to when it talks of “piracy” killing online porn…
What’s online porn?
According to a recent UN report “public and legal locations such as massage parlours, spas and strip clubs [in the Netherlands] act as fronts for illegal prostitution and trafficking.” That online porn is a nexus of criminality surprises me not at all. Such is the industry.
http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/tocta/2.Trafficking_in_persons.pdf
I like Betty Page.
Cocaine paid for Miami’s infrastructure.
Gambling paid for Las Vegas
In a properly set-up system of capitalism, vices (and actually, any form of greed or selfishness) will have a side-effect of enhancing the public good. I have no doubt that some guy who was frustrated downloading bitmaps of naked women contributed to the the development of lossy compression for images… “What if we throw away everything except the skin tones that we want to see. oh.. let’s only keep the interesting bits and toss out the boring bits and I don’t care if it is a bit fuzzy”. And then he got frustrated and said.. “it’d be so much better if the images could move” and then he came up with mpegs.
Porn and other vices have built much of the real world, and have played a significant role in technology of the Internet. To me, as long as the subjects are consenting adults, it is merely another industry that needs websites. If, as a society, we didn’t force porn to the gray market and allowed it to be more mainstream (oooh for shame, for shame!) then the other negatives around it would be minimal.