A Peep at Pornography Web in China

This paper seeks to gain improved insight into the pornography web in China when the authorities step up the anti-pornography campaigns as part of China‟s Internet regulation. Based on our collected snapshots of 92950 pornographic web pages from 1826 pornographic sites over a span of 10 months, we measured the users‟ visiting behavior in different time scale, and the distribution of porn web sites in quantity and geography. Our findings indicate the clampdown on pornography web made a difference but never eradication to online porn and the pornography web sites‟ geographic distribution is positively correlated with regional economic level. We also find that there exists “Pareto principle” in both online porn visiting number of a user and the number of visits to a porn site. Both visiting number per user and number of users under a certain quantity of online porn visits obey the power law. Similarly, number of visits per porn site and number of porn sites under a certain number of visits follow the power law. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first quantitative study on the Chinese online porn. We hope our work could shed some light on the present and future of pornography web in China.