Porn data: visualising fetish space

Fetish space

What are the most expensive kinks? Is porn keeping track with inflation, and is it possible to map ‘fetish-space’? Porn metadata could help find the answers to these and many other questions about human sexuality.

 An attempt to visualise ‘fetish-space’. Categories are linked by the number of times they appear together in Clips4Sale studios, and larger circles represent categories with more clips. Photograph: Martin Robbins 

Porn is one of the biggest yet worst-covered topics in popular discourse. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that sits at the heart of human sexuality in the 21^stcentury. Many people watch it, though few talk about it, and for better or worse it exerts a major influence over our culture; but we know relatively little about it. 

What if we could find some big source of data? The website Clips4Sale.com is one of the leading commercial porn sites on the web. It’s home to thousands of studio selling millions of clips. All the clips are indexed with metadata about their price, file size, fetish category, length, title, description and so on, and the site’s permissive robots policy allows web crawlers to trawl the content. How much useful information could you dig out from it? What interesting things could you find?/.../