July 24, 2005

Porn & Productivity

Are we just talking a good game?

New research on workplace behaviors and online porn suggest that things aren’t what they seem to be. Americans’ highly touted productivity might just be a chimera if you believe the stats developed by AOL and Salary.com. After surveying 10,000 American workers, they concluded that American business pay $759 billion for work that doesn’t get done because employees are surfing the Web and kibitzing with co-workers.

Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows instinctively the truth of this data. What’s funny is that HR people and managers actually budget for workers to blow an hour a day on random acts of personal interest. But employees admit to wasting double the amount of time, on average 2.09 hours per day. Using average wage figures, that’s an additional $5720 per year/per worker that bosses didn’t count on wasting.

And not surprising, some of that personal Web surfing, accept where large firms have blocked XXX URLs, is to porn sites, which now account for 18 percent of all web usage, with an average time spent per adult site of 5 minutes and 22 seconds per.

Whether we are at home or at home, Americans made 70 million unique visits to adult sites, spending on average 15 minutes per site visited during April 2005, according to Hitwise. That’s 42 percent of the total 164 million unique site visitors anywhere on the Internet in the same month.

So what does this mean?

The Europeans, who make fun of our maniacal fascination with work at the expense of personal time, might be as productive as we are but more honest about their attitudes than we thought.

Work is so dull for huge numbers of American workers that they check out even when present.
Do you suppose this underlies all those business magazine stories about the search for ideas, leadership and vision?

Time wasting is clearly part of our business culture, a pressure release valve that also enables informal communication, networking and conflict resolution.

Our Puritan conceit about repressing the influence of sex is a joke.

Pornmeisters continue to pioneer sales and customer relationship techniques on the Web that mainstream marketers only dream about.

Jul 24, 2005 11:02:00 PM | Media

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Danny Flamberg

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