...porno-nation,
evaluation,
what's this? "time for segregation"
libido, libido fascination,
too much oral defication
white trash get down on your knees,
time for cake and sodomy
-Cake and Sodomy by Marilyn Manson (1993)
Back in 1993, Manson was just being shocking. I mean, that's his schtick, right? But today, I think Manson may have been prophetic....
Earlier this morning, I was scrolling through the Drudge Report and came across the blurb: PORN SITES DOMINATE. I was a sucker and clicked on the link and Holy Cow-
The Website is called SimilarWeb and it ranks all the websites in the world. I was not familiar with the site, so I looked up it's mission statement: SimilarWeb gives you global multi-device market intelligence to understand, track and grow your digital market share. Sounds legit. So looking at their rankings, they have Porn Sites ranked #6, #7, and #8 in the United States in internet traffic. The only sites bigger than porn are Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Yahoo! To me, that is stunning.
Now you have to pay for most sections of analysis on SimilarWeb, I believe the website makes money by moving companies toward increasing their website presence, so I don't have the complete data set. I'm not spending any money to get serious analytical insights, but just the general gist of the rankings paint a bleak future for American Society.
First of all, SimilarWeb gives you the Top 50 Website Rankings for free. 3 of the top 10 and 5 of the top 50 websites in America are Porn. We at Beacon of Speech are not a religious website, we just quoted Marilyn Manson lyrics for goodness sake, but there is something morally reprehensible about the Top 50 Websites in America. Nowhere on the Top 50 were there any religious websites. The Catholic Church, for example, has 1 BILLION followers across the world, and between 70-80 million followers in the United States. They should have some sort of online presence? Right, right?
So I went on over to SimilarWeb's competitor Alexa and found out that the Vatican Website is ranked 9,165th in the United States. Maybe Catholics just aren't Tech Savvy. Let's see, how about Joel Osteen, he seems like a popular guy. Joelosteen.com is ranked 36,718th in the United States. Okay, just going to look up the most popular religious website in America.... jw.org.
What's jw.org? It's the Jehovah's Winesses! Ranked 1,951st in America.
If Google is the most popular site in America and it gets over 3.5 billion searches a day, and number #10 is Wikipedia, which gets over 600 million page views a day, it's safe to estimate that each one of the top 3 Porn sites in America are pulling in a BILLION page views a day. And that doesn't include ancillary Porn sites.
Editor's Note: Again, we are not paying for insights, we have to use estimates from free data. Even if it's not 100% representative, you understand the point.
What are the 7 Deadly Sins?
Pride
Greed
Lust
Envy
Gluttony
Wrath
Sloth
You could legitimately argue, with the exception of popular sites like Accuweather and Indeed (jobs), that 48 out of 50 of America's Top Websites could be used to facilitate at least one your vices. If you use Amazon, you could probably use that site to buy items to indulge in ALL of your bad habits.
If Beacon of Speech was trying to gauge as many hits as possible, instead of bitching about massive liberal corporations like ESPN or CNN masquerading as centrists, (ranked #25 and #28 respectively,) maybe we should be critiquing the quality of the performances by Miss Cinnamon or Lavender Girl instead. I'm happy with my current content (wish I had more time and got paid) but if I was driven by clicks, I would have to make a decision whether I wanted to re-focus BOS' energies to where the action is.
Heck, not just us, look for cash-strapped ESPN to research the viability of a Sports Science segment dedicated to porn performance. They're not above exploiting vices, they have betting lines on practically every pro game in existence. Look for CNN to expand their porn coverage to outside of the Stormy Daniels case. I'm not trying to be flippant, if the bottom line is traffic, when does the internet devolve into its own digital version of Idiocracy?
I'm not naive, I know people like porn. What I learned today is that Americans are super-obsessed with porn.
More than 125 million people have viewed Manson's (arguably) most popular song, The Beautiful People on YouTube. Countless millions more have heard the song on their favorite Rock Station or downloaded the single. Still, it is statistically feasible that there were more porn pages viewed, just today, than have listened to Manson's signature song in the past 20 years combined.
In a nation of compulsions, there is no internet vice bigger than pornography. As a free speech site, all I'm asking for, is for you, the reader, to dial it back a bit.
Everyone has internal numbers for their website and, as of today, Beacon of Speech's most popular article is one we didn't promote at all: Thank You, Jeff Anderson. Inexplicably, people just found it. Pornographic websites, once you get to the search engine level, kind of promote themselves. You don't see their adds on mainstream websites. You don't click on the Porn Link while shopping at WalMart.com. Which begets the question, when do mainstream websites start advertising on Porn sites to drive their traffic?
Catholic media must not fall behind in digital age, Pope says - CatholicSun.org, May 6, 2018.
Catholic Sun's Alexa ranking? 620,585th in the United States
I think God may be pissed....