Re:Just how big are porn sites?
by stickfigure on Wednesday April 04, 2012 @03:45PM
(#3799465)
This comment needs a huge +1.
It's really quite easy to serve large volumes of porn. The dataset doesn't change often and 90% of your working set is the first couple pages of content. Back in 2007 when I was in the business, there was only one CDN that would touch porn (LimeLight) and they were absurdly expensive. Today there are hundreds of porn-friendly CDNs and they charge 1/10th the price (no exaggeration).
Storing a couple hundred terabytes of porn is not expensive or complicated.
Sites like YouPorn don't authenticate their content. Most of the high-volume web page content is static. Even then, you're looking at just a few page views before the user spends 5 minutes watching a video that streams from the CDN.
Payment transactions are handled by third parties, and usually abstracted through third-party affiliate software like NATS. Which, BTW, is a piece of junk and the one part of our system which we had trouble scaling.
Big bandwidth numbers sound impressive but the truth is running even a mildly successful social network with heavily personalized pages is ten times harder than running even the largest porn sites.
It's really quite easy to serve large volumes of porn. The dataset doesn't change often and 90% of your working set is the first couple pages of content. Back in 2007 when I was in the business, there was only one CDN that would touch porn (LimeLight) and they were absurdly expensive. Today there are hundreds of porn-friendly CDNs and they charge 1/10th the price (no exaggeration).
Storing a couple hundred terabytes of porn is not expensive or complicated.
Sites like YouPorn don't authenticate their content. Most of the high-volume web page content is static. Even then, you're looking at just a few page views before the user spends 5 minutes watching a video that streams from the CDN.
Payment transactions are handled by third parties, and usually abstracted through third-party affiliate software like NATS. Which, BTW, is a piece of junk and the one part of our system which we had trouble scaling.
Big bandwidth numbers sound impressive but the truth is running even a mildly successful social network with heavily personalized pages is ten times harder than running even the largest porn sites.