Originally Posted by wasteland

With regards to how this is possibly effecting surfer behavior this week during the mainstream media blitz....

We run sites and services in a lot of different adult sectors, so did a little math this morning and came up with the following:

1) Dating: We have run a "kinky dating" free site (kinkculture.com) for many years and the number of new signups per day is traditionally consistent. But, this week, new signups in the US are down by 30%, Canada dropped like a lead baloon, and a pretty steady flow of people deleting their accounts. Will be interested to see if things go back to normal after the media frenzy has died down. It's a totally free site (ad supported) that collects very little data beyond creating a nickname, adding their email address for match alerts, and then a lot of "what's your kink" info, so I'm guessing that a lot of folks are being gun shy at the moment.

2) Search: We also run a privacy-oriented adult search engine - boodigo.com - that does not mine or store any user data and provides users with an anonymous and encrypted search experience (and is heavily promoted this way in mainstream marketing). Boodigo also has very steady as a rock traffic, but within the first day of the AM data release news, traffic in the US and Canada went up by over 20%. I'm not sure if this is just some fluke, but suspect the AM news has some people now being more mindful in revealing that they are searching for "hardcore midget fartporn" lol

3) Paysites: No significant variation in traffic or conversions, although I a seeing a marked increase in privacy and TOS page views across the board for all of our paysites.

Time will of course tell what effects, big or small, this has on the overall adult industry, but I suspect the sector that is going to need some vigorous tap dancing will be dating.