Free Porn

When i was a kid we had a cinema close to where we lived which would have 'special showings' which would see shifty looking men enter once a month to watch 'art films' which were about as much about art as Monty Python's Flying Circus was about trapeze artists and clowns, what they were showing were soft core porn films.
Where in bygone days the lovers of people watching other people have sex had to face the shop assistant to buy a top shelf magazine, now they have the internet and as much porn as their right arm can handle and one 1990s study of Usenet discussion groups suggested five in six images shared were pornographic.
Online pornography providers were pioneers in web technologies to compress video files to smaller, easier downloadable files but as the internet expanded, it gradually became less for pornography and more for all that other stuff and the problem porn studios have now is the same as faced by newspaper sites that when so much is available free online, it's hard to sell pornography when sites such as Pornhub are giving it away.
Whereas porn may have drove the early internet, today only 4% of the web is porn although 13% of all web searches are for 'erotic content' down from an estimated 40-50% ten years earlier and of the top one million websites, 42,337 are for sex-related content.
Although the porn industry may well have chocked it's own golden goose, there are still people who pay for access to pornographic websites presumably unaware that they can get it for free.
The moral panic may make it seem that you can hardly look at the web without seeing activities rated XXX but they are driven by companies that sell blocking software to 'make the Internet safe for children and families'.
Despite the availability of free pornography, an academic study by the General Social Survey (GSS) looking into pornographic viewing trends, found that when they asked 'Have you viewed pornography in the past year', during the decade before the Internet, (1987-1997), 32% of men answered yes while when asked the same question a dozen years after (1998-2010), the figure was 34%.
It may well feel that we have come a long way since the days of sex watching only being available in seedy theatres or on the top row of a newsagents and you had pay for either of those but with billions of porn pages now just a click away for free it seems that the scare stories may be not as scary as we thought.