It was quite a surprise to see the traffic to this blog suddenly jump from about 100 visits to more than 600 in one day after the post on discrimination in the toilets. Looking through the traffic statistics collected whilst people browse the web (thanks to the Big Brother widget embedded in WordPress), I could see that some people came to the previous post through fellow bloggers Matt and Elizabeth, but most of them came from Stumble Upon where I also bookmark each posting.

What could so suddenly drive people to come here? The answer is quite obvious: keywords, and not any kind of keywords, sex-related keywords. The previous post and its comments contain in less than 500 words the keywords Katoye, toilet, gay, sexual, transvestite, all the right buttons that make sex on the internet one, if not THE, major source of online revenues, with gaming and advertisement. Every second, 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography and 372 Internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines in 2006 (Source: www.Internet-filter.com).

XBIZ, the adult entertainment industry’s number one visited portal for business news and information quotes a 2006 Nielsen NetRatings study showing that “The fastest-growing market for online porn is Great Britain [where] 40 percent of British men had visited porn sites within the last year, with an equal number having downloaded adult content within the past month. From a larger perspective, the study found, users in the island nation have increased from 2 million 6-years ago to 9 million today.”

And this is not only men, but women! Let’s get ride of the cliché that only men watch pornography. The same study reports that women represent the fastest growing demographic group visiting porn sites.

Sexual imagery is often used in advertising to sale everything from chocolate to perfume. Back to HIV, Public Health and society, it is quite striking that we don’t mind having chocolate sold to us by a naked man, but would not accept the same approach for the promotion of condoms, unless it was shown after the watershed, when most of those who would benefit of watching these ads, won’t be able to.

I refrain to post yesterday and the traffic to this blog went down to 141 visits. It would be very interesting to see how this post fares considering it also contains the keywords I believe increased the traffic. For good measure, let’s add a few more taken from the Internet-filter website: toys, teen, free, group, XXX, cyber and nude. I’ll report tomorrow on the statistics!

Apologies to all those who came here by mistake, I can only a offer a sexy perfume advert for Girls who are boys Who like boys to be girls Who do boys like they’re girls Who do girls like they’re boys Always should be someone you really love (lots more keywords!).

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