NPR breaking news: Internet Sex is popular!! We had no idea!

 Breaking news: Sex is popular online."Sex had played a major role in driving many technologies," says Jonathan Coopersmith, a technology historian at Texas A&M.The example most people are familiar with, he says, is the VCR. Many early video cassettes were pornographic, and consumers' desire to view the material in their own homes fueled the early dissemination of the technology.Think back to the early days of the Internet, Coopersmith says. "You had to have the hookup, you had to have the computer, you had to have the willingness to experiment a fair amount. And the people who do this tend to be young men, especially in their 20s and 30s, and this also happens to be a prime audience for pornography."According to Nielsen net ratings, more than a quarter of Internet users accessed an adult Web site in January 2010. The Web research company Hitwise says adult sites accounted for about 6 percent of all U.S. Internet hits that month — putting the adult category in eighth place, with social networking sites in first.But Hitwise general manager Bill Tancer says that in the not-too-distant past, adult sites used to get the most hits of anything on the Internet. "If I go back to when I started tracking this data in 2004, that was the highest of any category," he says. Head over to npr.org for the entire story.