The UK’s Internet Watch Foundation conducted research to identify how many sites trade such images and concluded there are 2,755 such sites worldwide.
Of these, 80% are judged to be fully commercial operations.
The IWF said this “manageable” number could be eliminated if net firms, governments and police worked together.
Closing sites
The IWF, which identifies and shuts down UK hosts of child abuse images, said it carried out the research to quantify the scale of the problem.
Before now, said a spokeswoman for the IWF, uninformed speculation about sites that trade and traffic in images of child sexual abuse caused many to think the problem was impossible to tackle.
“We think 2,755 is a manageable number,” said the spokeswoman. “We are now asking for a worldwide effort to go in and really combat this issue.”
