[shadowgovt]

You know, the organizations most likely to have that information are the ones with the big data on access and source IP address, who could make an educated guess on the scale and variety of consumers of pornography.

... In other words, PornHub.

[maxbond]

Do you think anonymous surveys wouldn't work here? (Genuinely asking and not being snarky, I expected to find lots of people doing surveys in this area but didn't readily find it, so I'm open to there being something I'm not understanding.)

[shadowgovt]

I have no idea. Broadly speaking, I don't trust self-reporting on anything taboo even when it's anonymous; people both lie to themselves and have justified paranoia about precisely how anonymous any collected data is.

... But it's real hard to fake the actual server requests and human sourced usage patterns to the service provider at scale.

[maxbond]

Yeah, ideally I suppose we'd have both and perhaps other sorts of measurements, the server logs can still have error because of eg bots scraping porn sites, the uncertainty of attribution, and people who consume porn offline (by downloading it, by ordering DVDs or magazines, etc).

There's also the matter that, from what I've observed, women often prefer erotic literature. That seems very difficult to parse out from traffic.

For what it's worth, I did come across one article where researchers were using data from an analytics company to probe porn use[1], but it wasn't measuring what I was looking for, so I didn't look too closely.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2...