Big duh

According to a survey, American executives like financial, shopping and sex Web sites best.

By Jack Boulware

Mar 6, 2001 | We've seen the lists compiled by Internet research companies detailing the world's most visited Web sites, like Yahoo, AOL and MSN. But nowhere in these official tabulations does one ever see a glimpse of the billion-dollar Internet porn industry. Somebody is clicking on an awful lot of porn, but who?

According to a recent news report from Australia, it's business executives from the United States. The Sydney Morning Herald helpfully ran portions of an unexpurgated list of 2,000 sites most visited by American chief executives in January. The list, assembled by the Nielsen/NetRatings research firm, opens a seamy window into the surfing habits of the moguls who pull the nation's financial levers.

Sandwiched among the usual portal, news and shopping sites is wildteenvirgins.com, ranking No. 29 on the list, with 65,000 unique viewers. The teen sex site handily outpaces its competition, including sites from Bloomingdale's, Harvard University, Bloomberg News, Christianbook.com and, yes, even Salon.com. Other porn sites also ranked highly, most of them with teenage themes. But why wildteenvirgins.com? What about this site is so popular with America's cubicle-bound titans of industry?

A quick inspection of the site reveals it to be nothing new in the way of original adult content. The majority of the display is composed of buttons with enticing sobriquets like "Hot Babe," "Teens With Toys," "Peeing Girls" and "Russian Teens," all of which link to an individual photo. The appeal most likely is that all of the images are updated daily, which means that each day, when an executive comes to work and surreptitiously types in the URL, he or she is treated to a brand-new, full-color treat in the fetish of choice.

For executives with perennial erections, the site links to another teen site with the rallying cry: "Tired of having a monster woody and finding the video store closed?"

Corporate porn dogs from the U.S. may supplement their workload with fleshy distractions, but the true world leaders in X-rated Web-site surfing actually appear to be the Australians. The article quotes Media Metrix as having determined that a full one-third of the country's 6.8 million Internet users visited a porn site in December 2000.

(In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that the author of the news report, Paul Ham, is both Australian and a corporate executive.)

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