twopointouch

The Sydney Morning Herald reports the sad news that the internet has grown up:

Sex and pornography have been trounced by business and e-commerce as the most popular internet search topics, new research shows.

In their mid-90s heyday, sex-related topics accounted for 17 per cent of web searches, but that figure has shrunk to an unsexy 3.8 per cent, Queensland University of Technology’s Professor Amanda Spinks said today.

But Prof Spinks said business and commerce-related topics, including buying and selling on the net, had outstripped sex to make 30 per cent of web searches.

I can confirm that in my mid-90s heyday, sex-related topics accounted for 17% of my thoughts.

It’s taken me six weeks, shamefully enough, but I have finally read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. Here’s a very quick precis of the main idea for anyone just released from a Chinese prison:

The internet makes it possible for retailers to increase their available stock almost indefinitely. For example, Amazon stocks 3.7mn titles whereas the largest traditional book stores keep 100,000. The same proportions are true for iTunes, netflix, Rhapsody, cafe press and other online retailers.

This increased variety has an interesting effect. The products that aren’t big hits still sell. Amazon is believed to sell 98% of the books it stocks over any quarter. 98% of Rhapsody’s tunes are sold over the same period. When people have access to more variety, they develop a taste for it. And the accumulated value of all those little sales can add up. 25% of Amazon’s sales are books not available in any book shop. 40% of tracks played through Rhapsody are not available in offline record stores.

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