How big is BDSM in this country?

Posted by Tanos on Wed 28 May 03, 8:51 AM

Yesterday lili and I were talking about the number of people now involved in the public BDSM and Fetish Scenes in the UK, participating in websites like IC or just getting on with it with their partner in private. However you look at it, the figures are rather large ...

The thing that started the discussion was looking at the stats for Informed Consent. I noticed that on Bank Holiday Monday we had 88 new members, which is the highest I've ever noticed for a single day. The membership total had also rolled over the 33,000 mark last week (although that does include some multiple sign-ups.)

This prompted me to look through the logs to check the current traffic rate: based on April and May, the main page, personal listings and weblogs listings (ie excluding the individual ads and weblog posts) get a total of 750,000 page views per month!

This really puts us as one of the more popular sites on the web, and one way of estimating this is with independent site ranking services like www.alexa.com. Alexa bases its rankings on fraction of people viewing the site who also use Alexa's toolbar add-on for Internet Explorer (it's a bit like the Google Toolbar, if you're familiar with that.)

According to Alexa's 3 month average, IC is the 38,283th most visited website in the whole web (out of 150 million that they're aware of.) That's across all subjects and countries. I think that itself says a lot about the level of interest in BDSM in the world, that a regional site like IC can be so highly ranked.

In some ways, the potential for all this isn't so suprising, since the Kinsey percentages for BDSM are something like 5% of the general population practicing BDSM at least occasionally. (See http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/resources/FAQ.htm... for some more recent figures.) The means in the UK alone, the numbers with a passing interest should be into the millions.

But isn't it good the net is giving people a gateway into it all?

Edited Sat 10 Jan 09, 12:09 AM by Tanos