6 Ways That Porn Runs The World

This world is rife with moral decay. Doubters need only look to the vacant church pews and surging Cracked readership for confirmation. That, and the fact that the porn industry utterly dominates all others.

Think we're exaggerating? We've got the numbers to back it up. As big as you think porn is, it's bigger, and its influence on modern society is deeper. As Jules Verne once said, "Some day, this whole thing is gonna be titties."

The Long, Hard Facts

Hollywood cranks out around 500 movies a year to an international audience of 2.8 billion. Its closest competitor, India's Bollywood, makes about 1,000 movies a year, but 50 percent aren't released and 95 percent of those released are financial flops. This is unfortunate considering every Bollywood clip we've ever seen has been absolutely amazing.

In 2008, The Dark Knight alone grossed $533 million domestically and over $1 billion internationally, certifying it in the top five highest grossing films of all time and a crown jewel in the Hollywood empire. It's just further evidence that the institution of Hollywood cannot possibly be bested in any way, and certainly not by the data in the following paragraph.

The Moneyshot

As early as 2002, about 11,000 adult movies were released per year--more than 20 times the mainstream movie production. Of course, it's not really fair to compare them in that regard since Hollywood has to worry about dialogue, special effects and plot, while porn only requires a handcam, titties, and maybe a pizza delivery guy costume. To meet current demand, a new pornographic video is being created every 39 minutes in the U.S. We don't know if that includes filming Giada De Laurentiis handling zucchini, eggplants or eclairs for various shows, but it damn well should.

I'm not sure that eggplant is clean yet, Giada. Give it another quick rubdown, wouldya?

When it comes to cinematic preferences, people let their money do the talking. Since mainstream theater chains won't show The Crotchmen in wide release, we're forced to use other means of comparison. And every time, porn wins.

For example, in hotel chains that offer in-room X-rated content alongside major Hollywood releases, porn movie rentals represent 55 percent of the overall pay-per-view usage. Porn consistently generates more revenue than the hotels' mini-bars, though that probably wouldn't be the case if the hand-lotion was locked up in there too.

In 2005, there were approximately 425 films released in Hollywood, including a Star Wars prequel and a Harry Potter movie, with domestic grosses of $8.597 billion. That's very impressive. In 2006, the cumulative grosses for porn videos in the U.S., leveraging video sales, rentals, mobile phone content and Internet revenues--came out to....

Are you ready?

$8.65 billion.

About the same, and that's minus the billions Hollywood spends on promotion. Oh, and we're going to take a wild guess and say that the combined budgets of every porno shot that year wouldn't even pay for the CGI in the opening credits of a Harry Potter movie. So, yeah, we're thinking that $8.65 billion is pretty much all profit.

The Long, Hard Facts

In the digital age, there is no better snapshot of the zeitgeist than Web search trends. They allow you to view the ebb and flow of fads and news stories, as well as identify moments of hysteria:

If you examine top search trends in the U.S. over the last year an unsurprising amount of traffic was dedicated to coverage of the presidential election. We could have probably saved the electorate a lot of time by declaring Obama the winner when the search term "McCain" was trailing in popularity behind "American Idol," but apparently the constitution doesn't have those kinds of provisions.

The Moneyshot

Barack Obama was not only the front-runner for much of the presidential race, he garnered some attention as a "celebrity" along the way, particularly among the young people and internet users.

But it wasn't enough to make him number one. Most people just didn't feel they could fully absorb the nuances of presidential politics without rubbing one out first.

To illustrate this, we compared the volume of searches over the last year for "Sex" to those for "Obama" and "Iraq." We also added "Color Me Badd" because we thought it'd make them feel good just to be included, despite effectively serving as a statistical baseline:

Source.

Look a the poor red Obama line, looking like the ocean floor under blue sea of sex. It's no surprise, considering that in any given second, approximately 372 Internet users are typing "adult" search terms into search engines. Note the brief spike for Obama at point E up there. That's election day. It took a black man becoming leader of the free world to wrangle the collective consciousness away from sex for roughly 23 minutes.

The Long, Hard Facts

To further illustrate how utterly porn dominates the internet, let's give you one more.

Domain names are to Internet commerce what location is to real estate. That's why corporate giants like Toys 'R' Us shelled out $5.1 million for Toys.com. The difference between toys.com and toysrus.com is the difference between a house in Hawaii and a house in Dipshit, Michigan.

We do apologize to the good people of Dipshit.

The Moneyshot

So toys.com, that's got to be the most expensive domain name ever, right?

Not even close. Not even the 1999 sale of business.com at $7.5 million (a record at the time) makes the top. No, topping them all is, you guessed it, Sex.com, at a jaw-dropping $14 million.

Courtesy of sex.com and porn.com, smut sits pretty in the top five most expensive domains, trumping the keyword-monsters diamonds.com and creditcards.com. One could even argue that diamonds.com likewise qualifies as porn, if the sensation of being vigorously boned in the wallet while browsing there counts.