As an avid collector and connoisseur of zombie statistics, I was amused to discover that a statistic I investigated over a decade ago has not only made its way into Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel’s book ‘Pornocracy’, but appears right in the third paragraph of the book’s introduction.
“Porn is a colossal industry, yet it manages the rare trick of being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Take its financial scale; a figure from over a decade ago, still parroted by major media outlets, put global revenues at $97 billion – more than the GDP of most nations on Earth. But the truth is, no one really knows how much pornographers make. What we do know is that the influence of the industry can’t be measured by cash alone.”
The paragraph ends on a justified note of scepticism but in the last decade or so the financial landscape of the porn industry has altered sufficiently to suggest that the received wisdom that its true financial is unknowable is becoming increasingly outdated.
Over the past 20 years, the distribution landscape has shifted dramatically, with a handful of dominant “porntube” sites and their networks now controlling the vast bulk of the advertising supported market and a sizeable portion of the sales and subscription side of the sector. These are owned by just three companies: Aylo (formerly MindGeek), which owns the Pornhub network as well as major studios and subscription platforms such as Brazzers and Reality Kings; WGCZ Holdings, owner of XVideos, XNXX, and established brands including Penthouse magazine and Private Media Group; and Cyprus-based Hammy Media Ltd, owner of XHamster.
Although clear financial information may still be difficult to obtain without paying for it, the consolidation of much of the distribution side of the industry around a handful of companies has made it easier for some of the more reputable business intelligence services to arrive at credible estimates for the size of the online porn industry, with a straw poll of several such sources giving an average figure in the £65-70 billion ballpark from a range of estimates spanning $49-$82 billion for current revenues.
Around half of that is accounted for by the streaming of pre-recorded videos via tube sites, PPV and subscription sites with the rest spilt between live/interactive cam sites, the burgeoning ‘creator economy’, e.g. OnlyFans, which recorded gross revenues of $7.2 billion in fan payments for 2024, and a rapidly developing adult gaming and adult virtual/augmented reality services market.
So, porn is big business, but how big in the context of other commercial activities?
In terms of the broader legal adult entertainment market, it’s around 60% of the sector as a whole with the sex toys and novelties market accounting for most of the rest and a rapidly shrinking legacy market for traditional/physical media, i.e. magazines, books, DVDs, etc. accounting for well under 5% of current revenues.
In relation to mainstream entertainment, porn comfortably exceeds several major segments. Digital pornography revenues are roughly twice the size of the global theatrical box office ($33–34 billion in 2025) and the entire recorded music industry ($29.6 billion in 2024). It also comfortably exceeds Netflix’s standalone revenue of about $45 billion (2025).
However, it represents only about one-third of the global video-games market ($188–197 billion in 2025), roughly 40 percent of non-adult OTT/streaming video revenues ($169 billion in 2024), and approximately 45 percent of global book publishing ($138–152 billion).
Overall, digital porn accounts for under 2.5% of the global entertainment and media sector which, according to Price Waterhouse Coopers, generated $2.9 trillion in global revenues in 2024.
In financial terms, porn is a mid-tier niche part of the entertainment industry, lucrative but still very much a niche activity.
In the broader context of the $2.9 trillion global entertainment and media industry (PwC 2024), digital adult content accounts for less than 2.5 percent of total revenues.
So, in terms of getting to grips with the financial scale of the porn industry, things have changed considerably over the last decade and while precise figures may still remain elusive, the business intelligence sector’s ability to generate revenue estimates for the sector that are at least in the right ballpark has improved considerable as the distribution side of the sector has consolidated around a handful of key players.
So how is that a wildly exaggerated near 20-year-old zombie statistic is still making the rounds and still turning up in news media reports, academic papers, etc. and where did it come from?
This is a question that I originally investigated over a decade ago and it’s also the story of one of the internet’s most successful statistics launderers, a Utah-based tech entrepreneur named Jerry Ropelato.
Ropelato began his business career in 1993 by founding a small IT services and consultancy firm in Utah and Nevada, which folded around 1999–2000. He then moved on to ContentWatch Inc., a developer/supplier of internet content filtering software, where we spent two years as it COO/CTO before branching out on his own in 2003 by launching his own a product review website – TopTenReviews – which was modelled on consumer testing publications, featuring comparative tests, ratings, reviews, and affiliate links. Over the next 15 years, the business expanded through acquisitions (including Tom’s Hardware Guide and AnandTech) and rebrandings, becoming a major digital publisher. In 2018, the company was sold to Future plc’s US division. Following the sale, Ropelato entered the 3D printing sector but has since returned to digital publishing in 2025 with a new venture that appears to largely AI-based.
Winding things back to 2003/4, Ropelato launched TopTenReviews with a small but disparate set of group test content spanning everything anti-virus and privacy software to credit card payment processing services and – unsurprisingly – internet content filtering software. Less surprisingly still, the top rated product in at that time was called ContentProtect and was developed and sold by Ropelato’s former employer, ContentWatch Inc. and it remained the site’s number one recommendation until ContentWatch’s purchase of the Net Nanny brand in 2007, at which Net Nanny became top dog.
Towards the end of 2004, Ropelato hit on the idea of augmented his online marketing of content filtering software with a compendium of scary looking ‘Internet Pornography Statistics’ all of which were presented without linking to or identifying any original sources.
The headline claim on this first compendium put the size of the global porn market at $57 billion, $12 billion of which attributable to the US, and appears to resembles a throwaway line in a 1999 article in Forbes magazine.
“Welcome to the modern peep show. Today’s legal porn business is a $56 billion global industry (see table, p. 218) and very different from when FORBES published its groundbreaking coverage in the 1970s about mob enforcers and under-the-table cash payments.” [i] [ii]
A source for the $12 billion figure given for US remains similarly elusive but may have come from a article published by the New Times Magazine in May 2001 that was also which by Forbes Magazine later that same month.
“Take for instance the New York Times Magazine: It ran a cover story on May 18 called “Naked Capitalists: There’s No Business Like Porn Business.” Its thesis: Pornography is big business–with $10 billion to $14 billion in annual sales.
The idea that pornography is a $10 billion business is often credited to a study by Forrester Research. This figure gets repeated over and over. The only problem is that there is no such study. In 1998, Forrester did publish a report on the online “adult content” industry, which it pegged at $750 million to $1 billion in annual revenue. The $10 billion aggregate figure was unsourced and mentioned in passing.” [iii]
This article does a pretty good job of pouring cold water on the idea that porn was $10 billion plus industry in the US in 2001, arriving at a much more realistic estimate of $2.6-$3.9 billion, not that this was reflected in the information that Ropelato included on his site.
The lack of sources in Ropelato’s original compendium should have been seen at the time as a major red flag but did little to inhibit his laundered statistics escaping into the wild.
As recently as 2016, a claim in the 2004 compendium that escort services generate $11 billion in global annual revenues resurfaced on India’s Business Standard news website where it was attributed to ‘studies done by several international government and non-government agencies’ [iv]
Elsewhere, the claim that 12-17 year olds are the largest consumers of internet pornography, which featured in Ropelato’s compendium from 2004 until 2007, turned up in 2018 in a paper on porn consumption and psychosomatic and depressive symptoms in Swedish adolescents published in the Uppsala Journal of Medical Sciences[v], having found. its way there via a 2008 paper on pornography and public health in Global Health Promotion[vi] which cites Ropelato’s compendium as a source.
This a particularly fascinating zombie statistic because of its original source.
The earliest version that’s available online begins with:
“The most frequent exposure to pornography is reported by adolescents between twelve to seventeen,”
– before continuing with:
“a finding reported by the Canadian as well as the 1970 Commission survey.”
The quote is from Chapter 3 of Part 4 of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography: Final Report—commonly known as the “Meese Report” after President Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese and was originally published in July 1986.
The reference to a “1970 Commission” relates to the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, established by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 and Its final report was published in 1970 during the Nixon administration, so what we have is a questionable statistic from a survey in the late 1960s being presented as one relating to the online consumption of porn in the early 21st century.
Despite their highly questionable origins, these and other ‘statistics’ from Ropelato’s compendium found their way over time into the pages of major newspapers, into parliamentary and government reports, such as Claire Perry’s ostensibly independent review of online safety, the Home Office commissioned Papadopoulos review of the Sexualisation of Young People and Gail Dines’ 2010 book ‘Pornland’’ and was then her ‘Stop Porn Culture’ website.
“The size of the porn industry today is staggering. Though reliable numbers are hard to find, the global industry has been estimated to be worth around $96 billion in 2006, with the U.S. market worth approximately $13 billion. Each year, over 13,000 films are released, and despite their modest budgets, pornography revenues rival those of all the major Hollywood studios combined. There are 420 million Internet porn pages, 4.2 million porn Web sites, and 68 million search engine requests for porn daily” [vii]
Every statistic in that paragraph, which from a chapter in Pornland entitled ‘From the Backstreet to Wall Street, is sourced from Ropelato’s compendium, albeit from an updated version published in 2007.
And it’s to 2007 that we much look for the origins of the $97 billion figure for global porn revenues and to a press release issued by Ropelato/TopTenReviews through BusinessWire in March of that year:
“TopTenREVIEWS Reports Worldwide Pornography Market at Least $97 Billion;
Every Second 28,258 Internet Users View Pornography
Worldwide revenues for the pornography industry in 2006 were at least $97 billion, with revenues in the United States fourth highest among all countries at $13.3 billion, according to a TopTenReviews’ report.
Pornography revenues in China were the highest for 2006 at $27.4 billion with South Korea at $25.7 billion and Japan at $20 billion.”
The release asserted that this was “the most accurate and complete report of the worldwide pornography industry to date,” and was quickly picked up by a number of tech and news sites.
Ropelato updated his Internet Filter Review statistics page around the same time, adding a list of purported sources (e.g., Associated Press, BBC, New York Times, Miami Herald) at the end to suggest credibility. However, he provided no specific attributions linking individual figures to those sources, nor direct links or citations—leaving the origins opaque and open to question, had anyone care to delve any further.
There is nothing predating this 2007 press release that would support the $97 billion total or the specific country-level claims, other than the US figure which, as previous noted, may derive from the $10-$14 billion figure in the 2001 New York Times Magazine article referred to earlier, but extrapolating from that to $53+ billion combined for China and South Korea in porn revenues strains credibility to breaking point.
China is, admittedly, the major player in global sex toy production accounting for 70%+ of global output, most of which is for export, but pornography production, distribution, sale, and public dissemination remain broadly illegal under mainland law, covering printed works, videos, livestreams, online content, and performances. Private viewing often goes unprosecuted, but sharing or distributing triggers criminal liability amid heavy censorship, mandatory platform monitoring, and frequent crackdowns. No formal industry exists beyond an underground shadow ecosystem of offshore websites, file-sharing, peer-to-peer networks offering access amateur content, pirated foreign material (US, European, Japanese), and overseas productions (frequently using Taiwanese performers) serving Chinese-language audiences.
South Korea’s regime is similar, though marginally less severe: production and distribution of pornography are illegal with criminal penalties; the Korea Communications Standards Commission enforces domestic censorship by collaborating with platforms and ISPs to block or remove explicit content, while police target organised distributors. A shadow market in Korean-language content does exist but access relies on VPNs, proxies and mirror site. This offers content largely produced/hosted overseas, although there is some locally produced amateur content, with revenues generated via subscriptions, tips, and advertising, all processed outside Korea’s jurisdiction.
Nothing in either China or Korea, even remotely approaches the legal, highly developed porn industries of the US or Japan, leading to the obvious conclusion that origins of the $97 billion headline claim and its country-level breakdown lie in pure fabrication.
Nevertheless, the $97 billion headline persists and still circulates, often repeated second-hand without reference to its original source.
Recent examples include an April 2025 CESifo Working Paper (No. 11842) from Germany’s IFO Institute, “Asymmetric Content Moderation in Search Markets: The Case of Adult Websites”, which states: “The global pornography industry generates significant revenue, currently estimated at $97 billion,” citing the data aggregation site Worldmetrics.
The figure also features in Wikipedia’s main Pornography article as a 2015 estimate attributed to sociologist Kassia Wosick (New Mexico State University), referencing David Rosen’s 2023 paper “Pornography and the Erotic Phantasmagoria” in the journal ‘Sexuality and Culture’. Wosick’s name first appeared in conjunction with this estimate in on the CNBC website in 2013, calling global porn a $97 billion industry. Wosick’s remarks, if not herself, moved on to NBC News in January 2014, and again in January 2015 before resurfacing twice at Fortune Magazine, in January 2017 and March 2018, where she also put in a copypasta appearance for and Yahoo Finance (March 2018).
The claim endures across business intelligence platforms, academic papers, politicians, advocacy groups, and NGOs—rarely subjected to scrutiny of its provenance or basic plausibility, even as contemporary estimates for the core industry (excluding broader adult entertainment) are significantly lower and offer greater accuracy due to the consolidation of the industry around a handful of major porntube, live cam and subscription services provider.
[i] ‘Porn Goes Public’ – https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0614/6312214a.html
[ii] Table captioned ‘Forbes Magazine, 6.14.99 – from Porn Goes Public’ – https://archive.is/lBrq0
[iii] ‘How Big is Porn’ – https://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html
[iv] ‘Escort service trade on the rise, despite govt measures’ – https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/escort-service-trade-on-the-rise-despite-govt-measures-116062000015_1.html
[v] ‘Pornography consumption and psychosomatic and depressive symptoms among Swedish adolescents: a longitudinal study’ – https://ujms.net/index.php/ujms/article/view/5787
[vi] ‘Health education’s role in framing pornography as a public health issue: local and national strategies with international implications’ – https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1025382307088093
[vii] “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality”, Gail Dines, 2010.