Philippines ranked #8 on Worldwide Porn Revenues

With about $1 billion in annual revenues, the Philippines is tied at No. 8 with Canada and Taiwan for the largest revenues from pornography in 2006. This is according to the Internet Pornography Statistics report by Jerry Ropelato of Top Ten Reviews. For a poor 3rd 2nd world country, that’s something, huh?

The top 3 on the list is headed by Asia with China, South Korea and Japan bringing in a combined $73 Billion in annual sales for 2006. This is followed by the US, Australia, UK and Italy.

The Philippines, tanked over Php50 Billion (exchange rate at that time hovered between Php49 to Php53) despite the fact that per capita income was only $11.18, the lowest of the top 10. It’s not indicated how these numbers are split up between online and offline sales — magazines, video sales and rentals, internet or cable.

With PlayBoy Philippines coming into the magazine market, the numbers could only go up.

Here are some additional figures revealed from that research:

Every second – $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography
Every second – 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography
Every second – 372 Internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines
4.2 million porn websites (12% of total websites)
68 million porn-related search requests daily (25% of total search engine requests)
1.5 billion porn-related downloads a month from P2P networks (35% of all downloads)
42.7% of internet users have viewed porn online (that’s like almost all of the male population!)

There are exceptions of course since some countries are actively banning porn related materials (offline and online): Saudia Arabia, Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Egypt, UAE, Kuwait, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Kenya, India, Cuba, China.

Here are some inside info shared to me by people I met who used to work for that industry in the Philippines:

• The top 2 largest web hosting companies operating in the Philippines are servicing the “adult” industry.
• The largest adult video and internet content outsourcing company is located in Makati owned by an Indian and American nationals. Stacks of DVD shipped to Manila for raw videos to be edited and websites developed 24/7.
• Some content are actually created locally here in Metro Manila. They’ve been raided several times but some say they’ve struck a deal with someone in the upper levels.
• Cookie-cutter porn websites are outsourced to freelance web designers that starts at $1,000 a pop. This figure has declined over the years due to market competition.

Through the years, I’ve been getting tons of opportunities to provide web hosting services to the adult and the online gambling (read: poker) industry but declined despite the seemingly very lucrative market.

But then again, is this even a new story? I think everybody already knows about this industry already.