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Xvideos: The world's biggest porn site receives billions of hits a month
30% of all web traffic is porn, according to a report

'The internet is for porn,' is the title of a song on hit musical Avenue Q.

And it turns out the lyricists had touched on a home truth, because researchers have discovered that a staggering 30 per cent of all internet traffic is pornography.

The biggest porn site on the web - Xvideos - receives 4.4billion page views and 350million unique visits per month, according to a report on the ExtremeTech website.

The only sites that surpass this in size are the likes of Google and Facebook.

The report uncovered the viewing figures for Xvideos from Google's DoubleClick Ad Planner, which uses cookies to gather information about users.

It then used these figures - and actual data from the third biggest porn site, YouPorn - to extrapolate how much data is being transferred out of the site's servers.

And it's a huge amount.

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© Daily Mail, UK
It based the first calculation on the average length of time spent on Xvideos, which is 15minutes, and assumed a low resolution video was being streamed.

From this it estimated that around 29 petabytes of pornography is being transferred a month, or 50 gigabytes per second.

However, it upped this estimate to 35 to 40PB per month after learning that YouPorn hosts over 100TB of porn, gets 100million page views and transfers 950 terabytes per day.

That's the equivalent of 10 dual-layer DVDs per second.

At peak times, it speculates that Xvideos is streaming 1,000 gigabytes per second (or one terabyte), which, the report points out, is one fifteenth of the total amount of connectivity between London and New York.

The ExtremeTech investigation surmised that YouPorn accounts for two per cent of internet traffic, with 30 per cent of all web traffic being pornography related.

Earlier this year thousands of YouPorn users had their personal passwords and emails leaked online by hackers.

In total, 6433 users of the YouPorn chat site were exposed after a third-party service provider failed to secure data, its owner claimed.

Email address and password combinations were put on the website Pastebin, although some appeared to be bogus or inactive.

A spokesman said at the time that the site was run by an outside company on separate servers and that there was no breach at YouPorn itself.