What Keeps Us Online Late at Night: Porn, Games, and Chat

study of online behavior conducted by security firm Arbor Networks reveals that the prime time on the Internet may be later than you’d think. It also reveals the habits of late-night surfers, which boils down to surfing the web and watching videos (a large amount of which are adult content), chatting and gaming.

In what is perhaps the largest study of Internet traffic’s temporal characteristics, the folks at Arbor have used data from the Internet Observatory and analyzed weekday application traffic flowing through 110 geographically diverse Internet service providers. What they’ve found is somewhat surprising: US Internet traffic is at its peak at 11pm EDT, and it stays relatively high until 3am in the morning.

Once upon a time, Internet traffic peaked somewhere around 8 AM, when most people come to work. But people are obviously surfing just as much, or even more, from their homes.

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