Cellular Phone Porn

Ars Technica reports that cell phone users are more than twice as likely to search for pornography than PC users:

Less than 10 percent of all searches done on PCs these days are porn scavenger hunts, a number that is down 50 percent from 1997. As the Web has matured and more consumers have come online, porn's percentage of searches has consistently dropped. On mobile phones, though, users are still partying like it's 1997 — more than 20 percent of all mobile queries looked at in the study were for "adult" content.

This is counterintuitive in several ways. First, browsing for content on mobile phones can be expensive, especially when compared to PCs, which most cell phone users own anyway. Second, there's the screen issue. Who wants to watch video clips on a mobile phone when they could just step over to the computer and have a 21 inch monitor? Apparently, though, cost and quality are beaten handily (no pun intended) by the one great advantage of mobile phones — privacy.

I had wondered who was paying for video service to their handheld devices (phones, PDAs, hybrids), given the high cost and low image resolution, not to mention the much more limited choice of programming available to mobile users. This study — at least to some degree — answers that question.