Online porn: massive consumption, risk for young people and an emergency to regulate

Le phénomène est massif, la consommation de la pornographie en ligne de plus en plus répandue, tandis qu'un Gafa du porno domine l'offre mondiale. Faut-il en parler ? Faut-il s'en émouvoir ? En parler, sans doute, même si les effets sont très mal établis, faute d'études scientifiques suffisantes. S'en émouvoir sûrement si on est parent d'adolescents ou féministe, notamment. J'ai longtemps hésité avant de traiter ce sujet. Il ne fait pas sérieux pour un économiste, sans être amusant pour autant. Mais pour la société il est important car Internet a changé l'échelle du marché de la pornographie : elle relève désormais de la consommation de masse.

A recent publication of the British communications regulator convinced me that it was time to throw myself into the water.In its annual survey on online consumption, OFCOM estimated that 49 % of the adult population of the United Kingdom had visited a pornographic site in September 2020, or 26 million unique visitors, or even less than InstagramBut a little more than Twitter.

You probably did not expect so high figures.Me niether !But it is the credit that we can grant them that especially decided me.The British regulator is known to publish reliable data based on rigorous methods.Which is not the case for most of the figures circulating on the porn industry.

Quirks in the counts

The hundred billion dollars for its global turnover, often advanced in recent years, offer a good example.Resumed everywhere, both in the press and in academic journals, this amount is in no way trustworthy.It is the rounding which results from the sum of data by country picked up here and there there is already more than 15 years by a site for the consumer consumption information aggregation.

This counting contains lots of quirks: the turnover made in the United States comes after that of Korea and Japan;The French market occupies the 17th position, far behind the Philippines where pornography was at the time prohibited and severely repressed.For this country, the figure used is actually the estimated amount of the black market, all products and services combined!Better to admit that we do not know the turnover of online pornography.

Attendance of the pornhub site in the United Kingdom, by age group.Ofcom (September 2020).

The study of Ofcom also teaches us, this time without surprise, that men are archi-major (4/5 of consumers in number of unique visitors) on Pornhub, the leader site of the sector, and that the proportion of consumersBy age classes reaches its highest for young adults, 55 % for 18-24 year olds, then gradually decreases up to 23 % for 55 and + +.

It also offers an almost reassuring point of comparison: the figure of one minute of porn consumption per day on average per adult on September 2020 for 3 hours and a daily age spent online this same month.Our British friends for whom we were starting to seriously worry us first pay their attention to Facebook and YouTube or even Netflix.The same as Europeans and Americans.

We will not insult them to think that they differ fundamentally from other Westerners in terms of pornographic consumption.In this area, there is no reason for them to be - and feel - superior to the non -British.

But to have a quantified idea of global consumption, the regulatory authority for communications of the United Kingdom is not helping us.We must then credit the most popular planetary site, pornhub.Its 2020 annual review reports a global attendance of 130 million visits per day.

Facebook is known to overestimate its audiences in order to collect more advertising revenues.Pornhub, less monitored and less transparent, is similarly encouraged to inflate his attendance.We can however remember an order of magnitude of a few tens of billions of visits per year.

For the audience for all sites combined, it is not known but should be more than a hundred billion.Indeed, Pornhub is, to my knowledge, the only site which communicates public audience data.However, according to the OFCOM study, Pornhub's market share in number of visits is 22 %.If we consider that the global audience of this site is 30 billion visits and if it is applied to it a share of 20 %, we therefore obtain an audience of 150 billion.

We can also undoubtedly trust the evolution over time of pornhub attendance - a tripling of the audience since 2013, the first year of publication of your data - to affirm that global consumption of pornography is experiencing a stronggrowth.

The Sars-Cov-2 pandemic, and its procession of confinements, has accelerated it again."Pornography is Booming During Lockdowns" (pornography is booming during confinements), as a short investigation by The Economist says.No need for an explanation to understand it.

An unprofitable industry

To do in short, pornography consumption is now a mass phenomenon.How did we get there?A short explanation is enough: Porn access is incredibly free, massively free and tremendously discreet.No need to register, give an email address, nor spend the slightest penny to access millions of videos.

Nor not the obligation to hide his obscene review between newspapers and ordinary magazines nor to wear dark glasses and a hat as leaving an X cinema or a peep-show: porn sites are mainly consultedFrom the mobile phone, the most personal object that is today.

In reality, it is not Pornhub who is less transparent than Facebook but Mindgeek, the company who owns it.A real porn gafa - although installing in Quebec and recorded in Luxembourg -, Mindgeek also has other most popular sites in the world, free or paid, production studios, an electronic advertising management, programsData collection and processing, and adult games.

Like its sisters of the American Far West, it is therefore both integrated horizontally (several activities in the same sector) and vertically (several activities from upstream to downstream), which gives it unequaled power in the industry ofporn.

But is it so profitable?No, far from it.The porn industry is not an Eldorado.This is due to very constrained sources of recipes and expensive money.Access to the advertising market is restricted.Advertisers do not rush for their marks to appear on pornhub or elsewhere.Unilever there is a time praised her men's toiletries before making a machine.

Pornography retains too bad image in opinion to associate its name and anti-Porno militant associations are quick to denounce the brands.The business model based on generalist advertising, that of Facebook or Google for example, is barred for pornography.She is sentenced to endogamy: X advertisers for X broadcasters.

Pornhub and the other large platforms are there because they are above all intermediaries.They relate, on the one hand, studios and sites looking for paid customers and, on the other hand, pornography consumers.The first provide free access videos and seconds, sometimes subscribe or pay sessions and videos on demand.By the way, the platform is mainly remunerated by being paid for the broadcast of the free on their site or by receiving a commission on the subscription or the paid service online.

As for the sale of data outside, you should not count there to provide additional revenue.It would be to facilitate and be an accomplice of large -scale blackmail practices.Too risky.On the balance sheet, the Recipes of X platforms remain very modest.Ditto for Mindgeek: according to the Financial Times, its turnover reached less than half a billion dollars in 2018.

The money is expensive for two reasons.First, payments are very expensive.Visa and other Mastercard take the online porn merchants of the commissions three to ten times higher than usual.They reflect a risk linked to fraud, blocked payments and cancellations that experience record rates.Many payment operators, such as American Express or Paypal, refuse their payment solutions to pornographic platforms by invoking these risks.

Then, raising money is not easy and the interest rates requested by investors who agree to finance this sulphurous industry are high.Mindgeek has nothing to do with Tesla or Amazon who were able to achieve their rapid growth by burning cash brought by venture capital and shareholders who are too happy to be.According to the Financial Times again, Mindgeek, very indebted, pays for its creditors of interest rates of 20 % and its profit represents less than 10 % of its turnover.

Online porn entrepreneurs can however become rich, like György Gattyán, founder of a webcam site for adults on the banks of the Danube, but then become the most wealthy man in Hungary, notUnited States.

Headed addiction

Easy and free access to a few global platforms which concentrate millions of videos and the massive consumption that allows a whole series of problems which seem obvious, but of which it is difficult to appreciate the extent and D'objectively assess the consequences.

The record of the year 2019 of the Pornhub site.Annual report (2019).

It is of course addiction.The bottom of the alcohol bottle or the last packet cigarette establish a limit that viewing on pornography sites does not know.There is always a new free video within click and paid sites offer unlimited access to subscribers to their catalog of old and new products, like the platforms for the diffusion of music or films and series.

In 2019, the only Pornhub site offered more than a million hours of new content.Its annual report displays with pride that a person would take 169 years to view them non-stop.Live scenes through webcams are the unique services that oblige money to continue to satisfy its consumption.

Addiction remains of course also maintained by a collection and data processing which makes it possible to identify the preferences and the particular tastes of consumers and, from there, better manufacture content which continues to capture their attention.Mindgeek's know-how is sometimes compared to that of the largest like Netflix and Hulu.

The magnitude of the phenomenon of addiction to online pornography and its degree of severity, however, remain difficult to assess.In the absence of statistics, let us simply observe that addiction treatment centers have now opened specialized consultations for porn addicts.

Viewing of online pornographic content by adolescents.Ifop (2017).

Another more worrying phenomenon, because there is no doubt that it is more massive, relates to the consumption of adolescents (10-18 years according to the World Health Organization).According to an IFOP survey conducted in 2017 with a representative sample of a thousand of them, more than half has already surfed on a pornographic site, 7 % of which declare to connect "often" and 25% " sometimes ".More specifically, about a third of boys at least once a month, including 1 in 10 every day or almost.

The first time is on average at 14 years.Pornography consumption is therefore also massive in adolescents.I knocked you down with figures because, if you are a teenager, there is a good chance that you underestimate the phenomenon: parents are three times fewer to think that their offspring consume porn that it does notThere are children who declare that surveyers consume porn.

There is no doubt that this now trivial consumption exerts an influence on the sexuality of adolescents.According to the Ifop still, almost half of the boys and girls who have already had sex have tried to reproduce scenes or practices that they have seen or that they have seen.

There is little votes to award an educational value to the pornographic sites and defend the idea that their influence can then be positive among adolescents.It is indeed abstraction of the truncated and distorted image conveyed by pornographic videos: no place to romanticism and love, absence of preliminaries and signs of affection, hyperpower men, women brought back to the rank of object, always consenting therefore without needing to ask them, brutality and violence very often the rule, etc..

Economic science has highlighted and even theorized the importance of mimicry in the financial markets, but it did not venture to study the phenomenon in the case that interests us here.It is therefore difficult for me to decide on the magnitude of the negative effects of the consumption of adolescents.To my knowledge, but she remains summary, my colleagues in human sciences do not seem to be much more advanced on the question.So she seems to me to stay today without a solid response.

However, there is no debate on the ravages for children and filmed adolescents.Although child pornography is almost universally condemned and prosecuted, it is not confined to the underground internet.An investigation by the New York Times showed in 2020 that it was perfectly possible to search and find on pornhub videos involving under 18s and that the site hosted, among other atrocities, filmed sequences of rape and strike D'children.

The porn gafa reacted quickly by deleting several million videos from its catalog, the videos that had been downloaded by private people or professionals on its servers without any control and filtering has never been exercised.

However, it remains difficult to know what verification measures have been taken since, as well as their effectiveness.The New York Times article advanced the figure of 80 content moderators worldwide for all Mindgeek sites.They are 15,000 at Facebook.Facebook who had been criticized by a school teacher for having closed his account after there was a reproduction of the origin of the world of Gustave Courbet.The Paris tribunal de grande instance seized by the case has proven the Californian company wrong.Wouldn't there be more urgent fights and priorities?

How to regulate?

Let us stop the depressing list of the negative effects of online pornography (without claiming, alas, having them all mentioned) to question the measures of public policy to be taken, in other words about the regulation to be implemented.

However, this part will not be very long.Before knowing if it is advisable to regulate this or that problem, it is indeed necessary to know the scale.Regulations which can be expensive to implement and enforce is justified only before the extent and severity of the effects to be corrected and eliminated.

However, as we have seen, they are very little known and measured.There is an overabundance of beliefs and little proven knowledge.For some, like an American journalist who boasts of writing on sexuality for 36 years, pornography does not cause any social damage, which would then settle the question.

Come in support of his thesis of pseudo-Travals who would show, unlike the clichés, a lesser consumption of pornography among the rapists or the husbands who divorce.For others, pornography is to be banned because it creates almost irreversible physical disorders and is one of the main causes of violence against women.Again, the arguments are based on beliefs rather than well -conducted study results and established causal links.

But how could it be otherwise when they lack in number but also and above all in quality?We don't know much.

While waiting to have sufficient knowledge, the precautionary principle could justify public intervention.But to avoid doing too badly, it would be necessary to study, compare and assess the regulations that already exist.But again, the work is missing.

Take measures to limit access to teenagers' pornographic platforms.There are all kinds of them, the obligation to declare to be over eighteen, blocking sites, parental control, awareness of parents, etc..But we do not know what works, and when it does not work, like the initiative of the United Kingdom abandoned after several years of an age verification system, we do not know why...

There are many studies of synthesis and research on the best ways to regulate electrical and telecommunications networks, I did not find anything on the regulation of online pornography.But maybe have I looked insufficiently?

Here, I started and I hope it was not useless to bring this information.I could logically conclude by calling my colleagues economists and human sciences more interested in this subject, in particular those who already work on drugs, prostitution or gaming and therefore connoisseurs of similar phenomena and regulations forlimit them.But I will not do it because I myself am determined not to devote more time to him.Too depressing, not very rewarding and not at all funny.

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(*) By François Lévêque, professor of economics, Mines ParisTech

François Lévêque has just published with Odile Jacob “Hyperpowering companies - giants and titans, the end of the global model?»»