By Andrea Orr

PALO ALTO (Reuters) - How much do you think your employer would pay to make sure that you did not spend half your day browsing an online book store, watching sports, or downloading music files -- and that you never spent your working hours at a porn site?

Thousands of companies have invested in "employee Internet management" software that lets them control how their workers are using the Web.

Since the software sells for as little as $15 per employee per year, it is an expense they find easy to justify even in a sluggish economy: a way to see if workers are wasting time, hogging limited bandwidth or breaking company policies.

"There are more and more distractions on the Internet," explains John Carrington, Chief Executive of Websense Inc WBSN.O , a small but rapidly growing San Diego company that provides such employee management software to some 17,000 companies, including many Fortune 500 companies, around the world.

"You basically have a home entertainment center on every desktop," Carrington said. "We help manage that distraction."

Websense, which estimates that the majority of all companies that use employee Internet management software use its product, recently reported a small quarterly profit as its revenues surged 90 percent.

Analysts who follow the company are projecting its revenues this year will grow to $61.7 million, from $35.9 million last year, according to Thomson First Call.

Other companies selling similar products include SurfControl and Secure Computing Corp SCUR.O .

If most workers equate this kind of monitoring with spying, and keeping detailed records of every Web site ever visited by all employees, Websense says the reality is not nearly so big brotherish.

Rather, Carrington says, the company's software is more preventative in nature, blocking access to the objectionable sites in the first place, so a company can prevent workers from going places that might be grounds for dismissal -- a kindler gentler big brother, perhaps.

A BLACK HOLE OF PRODUCTIVITY

Websense provides software that lets companies decide how restrictive they want their work place to be. It is the customers themselves that determine which areas of the Web are off limits. Websense, which maintains an ever-changing database of 3.5 million Web sites organized into 75 different categories, says corporate policies vary significantly.

Some block nothing but "the sinful six" (a category covering, pornography, militancy and extremism, hate sites, as well as illegal, tasteless and violent topics), while others restrict employees from shopping, watching sporting events, or viewing even short movie trailers.

Most fall somewhere in the middle. Websense says companies typically tolerate limited amounts of online shopping, objecting only when reports come back showing excessive amounts of time spent on such sites. Others have no problem at all with employees watching sporting events, provided they do so after hours, when there is more bandwidth available.

Of course, when companies purchase this kind of employee management software, they do get back logs of all the different Web sites visited, so individual employee moves may be closely watched.

Websense, which tries to present its product as a non-intrusive way to police the workplace, however, maintains that most employers are interested in the aggregate results from the whole office rather than individual workers.

"There is not much reason to look at reports on individual employees," argues Carrington. "It takes a phenomenal amount of time to look at all that information."

Currently, Carrington says, companies seem more concerned with blocking access to World Cup matches than to porn or gambling sites. A year ago a Victoria's Secret fashion show that was Webcast was a major point of concern.

Ironically, Carrington said, it is the slow adoption of broadband Internet access by consumers, that keeps his business thriving.

"One problem for companies is that the majority of homes that have Internet access still have dial-up connections," he says. "When you have broadband at work, there are a lot of distractions. There is sort of like this black hole, that people get sucked into."