http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/19/ispa_criticises_smut_blocking_plan/
Pornography is regarded by some as one of the driving forces behind the expansion of the World Wide Web, like the camcorder VCR and cable television before it.[1] Pornographic images had been transmitted over the Internet as ASCII porn but to send images over network needed computers with graphics capability and also higher network bandwidth. This was possible in the late ’80s and early ’90s through the use of anonymous FTP servers and through Gopher. At this time the internet was mainly an academic and military network and there was not widespread use of the internet. One of the early Gopher/FTP sites was at tudelft and was called the Digital Archive on the 17th Floor (List of websites founded before 1995). This small image archive contained some low quality scanned pornographic images that were initially available to anyone anonymously, but the site soon became restricted to Netherlands only access.
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_pornography#Internet_pornography_formats
See also:
The statistics are truly staggering. According to compiled numbers from respected news and research organizations, every second $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography. Every second 28,258 internet users are viewing pornography. In that same second 372 internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines. Every 39 minutes a new pornographic video is being created in the U.S.
It’s big business. The pornography industry has larger revenues than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined. 2006 Worldwide Pornography Revenues ballooned to $97.06 billion. 2006 & 2005 U.S. Pornography Industry Revenue Statistics, 2006 Top Adult Search Requests, 2006 Search Engine Request Trends are some of the other statistics revealed here.
http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html
And:
http://www.mykidsbrowser.com/internet-pornography-statistics.php
