Into Temptation

Posted By jss on March 9, 2009

By Jeff Schult

Alaskans may vote conservatively but the state that brought us Gov. Sarah Palin leads the nation in memberships per capita to the world’s largest site for swingers, adult chat and adult personal ads. The nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., ranks third.

The statistics gnomes at intotemptation.net, meaning me, spent a day and change crunching and analyzing the publicly available records at AdultFriendfinder.com, which claims more than 16 million members in the United States, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. In Alaska, there are 123 members of Adult Friendfinder, or AFF as it is commonly known, for every 1,000 adults in the state — 60,797 memberships out of an adult population of 493,869.

Wyoming is No. 2, according to the study, at 92.83 members per 1,000 adults. Washington, D.C., home to the nation’s most scintillating sex scandals, has 92.07 AFF members per 1,000 adults.

Rounding out the Top 10:

• Nevada (91.67);
• Hawaii (85.97);
• Maine (81.81);
• North Dakota (81.33);
• New Hampshire (80.29);
• Georgia, (79.14);
• Virginia (78.85)

The average for all states is 70.45 AFF members per 1,000 adults. The full list is at the end of this post.

The data is especially interesting when compared and contrasted with that in a recent study by Prof. Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University, which named Utah the No. 1 state for subscribing to pornographic web sites. AFF.com is considered by many people to be a porn site despite its pre-eminence in adult social-sexual networking.Utah is ranked No. 21 for memberships, per capita, in AFF. Alaska, tops in AFF memberships, is 3rd on Edelman’s list. Hawaii is also high up. Overall, however, there are significant discrepancies in the two lists — as one would expect. They aren’t measuring the same things, after all, or using the same data. But they are both measuring different kinds of virtual sexual behavior. I’ve talked with Prof. Edelman a bit about methodology and will be following up, as time permits and when I can collate and process more data.That Utah ranked No. 1 in subscribing to pornographic web sites has perhaps been overemphasized and taken out of context by the media, but, well, it did rank first; and it doesn’t take a genius to predict that the fact that Washington, D.C. is near the top, per capita, in memberships to the world’s largest swinger and adult personals community is something that will spur discussion, controversy and the throwing about of names such as Elliot Spitzer, David Vitter and William Jefferson Clinton.

However, there really isn’t enough data yet to warrant sweeping conclusions about either porn viewing habits or sexual proclivities.
I used membership numbers by state available AFF.com (as of Friday, March 6) and recent census data on numbers of residents over the age of 18 by state to compute figures and rankings.

I would expect there to be questions about the AFF data. Certainly some people might suggest the numbers are exaggerated for marketing purposes; some people will say there are many fake profiles. But AFF has been around for more than a decade and has a strong interest in keeping the database as clean as they can; fakes annoy the paying customers. AFF continuously prunes the database of fakes, spammers and spammers.  It is not at all unreasonable to think that they have 16 million members, as they define them, in the United States. The vast majority of those are free memberships, of course; and that someone has a membership means they were at least curious enough about the site’s content and raison d’être to set up a profile and log on.

AFF is the largest adult personals site  and it is reasonable to assume that their high-level membership figures are relatively representative. Breaking down the publicly available numbers by sexual proclivity – men seeking women, couples seeking men, and so on – is possible. But it’s a lot of work and the results would probably raise far more questions than they would answer. There is no easy way, from the outside, to generate raw numbers by zip code or age, short of hand-counting results available via the AFF member search.

The male to female ratio of men to women who are AFF members is 10 to 1 or more in many areas, which is typical of adult personal web sites. Single heterosexual males are generally more than half the membership in any given geographic area. The site has sizeable memberships of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, couples and groups. Roughly one million of AFF’s total of 30 million members worldwide pay an average of about $19 per month for full access to the site. Free members have limited access in viewing and in initiating contact with others. Non-members are probably more familiar with the company from having seen its alluring online ads, which feature models and emphatically do not mention the male to female ratio.

AFF characterizes its membership figures this way:

The calculation of the number of accounts, members, listings, logins, and any other similar information appearing on this website is updated approximately every 24 hours. A “member” is a user account which has been logged in within approximately 2 years, has an available profile, and has an active email account. A member is considered “online” if they have logged in within approximately the last hour. The calculations made are approximations and should not be relied upon in making membership or payment decisions.

The company was started by entrepreneur Andrew Conru in Palo Alto, Calif. in 1997 and grew rapidly from the start. It and Conru’s other social networking and dating sites, all under the company name Various, Inc., were sold in 2007 to Penthouse Media Group (PMGI) for $500M. PMGI has since announced plans for a $460M initial public offering of the company under the name FriendFinder Networks (FFN.)

Puerto Rico has the lowest per capita memberships in AFF at 31.06 per thousand adults. The states at the bottom in AFF memberships per thousand adults were: Mississippi (58.57); Wisconsin (61.73); New Jersey (64.72); Massachusetts (65.20); and Pennsylvania (65.41).

Categories: Essays, News
Tags: adult friendfinder, aff.com, Alaska, Andrew Conru, District of Columbia, into temptation, swinger statistics, swingers, swinging states, Washington