If you have a pension scheme or if you own shares then the likelihood is that you are making money from the porn industry!

I have just watched a program on BBC 2 about the porn industry and who makes money from it…it was interesting to note that this was not just the porn film makers. In addition to the makers of porn you have the hotel chains that sell porn in their bedrooms; the phone companies like Vodafone that make money from porn on mobiles; companies like Virgin and B Sky B make money from showing adult films on their channels; there are the credit card companies that take their cut from the sales or porn, which are owned by the banks…and so on.

It depends on your view of porn and whether this bothers you or not, but I would bet that most people do not realise this and there are many that would probably try to change this if they did know!

There was a financial expert on the show who was asked what percentage of the UK stock market would be involved in porn to some extent or not and this was just 5%, so therefore not a huge issue for those that want to avoid this type of investment.

At the end of the day no matter whether we like it or not sex sells and porn is going to be with us forever and makes billions of dollars every year!

Business on the internet exploded in the early days with porn and porn sites and the “sale of sex” in all forms and this continues to do so – Sex sells, as they say!

To just show how important the word “SEX” is on the Internet and that “Sex Sells” is that if you “Google” the word sex you get 743,000,000 results, however, I did some playing around with some other Google searches and was surprised to find the results shown in the table below.

I will admit that I expected the search term “Sex” to be top of this list – so I have learnt something new today – it is said that you learn something new each day!

So I then decided to do some more research and typed in the search term “internet revenue statistics” to find the highest revenue earner on the Internet and was surprised to see a website with a title “Internet Pornography Statistics – TopTenREVIEWS” of the 330,000 results was No. 1 on Google!

This was not quite what I was looking for or even expected, but might in itself be revealing about could still be the main business revenue generator on the World-Wide-Web!

As I had found this site, it was worth a look and it gave some statistics for 2006 Worldwide Pornography Revenues, where China was top of the list spending $27.4 Billion per annum on porn (representing $27.41 per capita).

However, the highest, per capita spend was in South Korea where on average each person spends $526.76 on porn making a total of $25.73 billion annual spend in total for the country! To see the full details of this report go to Internet Pornography Statistics.

Highest Internet Revenue Earner

However, this is not what I was looking for – I would like to find what is the Highest Internet Revenue Earner and whether there are other businesses on the Internet that have overtaken the “Porn Boom” from the early days of the Internet.

I think the billions of revenue earned from porn on the Internet is going to take some beating – what I also found interesting was the number of search results for “Poker” sites or online gambling – the revenue generated from online gambling is expected to be around $18 billion by 2010, which is no where near the adult industry revenues!

So if you are going to set up an online business then should you set up an adult one?

Well I say why not – Sex is one of the most natural things in life and one of the key reasons for life, i.e. pro-recreation. However, sex has and probably will always be a taboo!

So how can you earn money in the adult or porn industry?

There are many alternatives from phone sex sites to pornographic content sites that you could set up yourself – however, there are so many affiliate programs these days that all you need do is to set up an adult website or blog and form links with adult affiliate programs and link your site off to these.

What is interesting about the top porn website listed above, pornhub.com, is that you can view porn for free! So how do they make their money you might ask? One method is that on their site there is a link to a premium service, which includes HD quality and a lot more scenes that people are prepared to pay for.

As pornhub.com is the top site listed for the two main adult searches of “Sex” (215,293 per month) and “Porn” (278,910 per month), which is a total of nearly 500,000 monthly searches on those two search terms alone. To be No.1 on Google for this many searches is like winning the lottery every day!

So to conclude with this article “Sex Sells” for sure, but I am still not sure whether this is the top revenue earner for the Internet.