Thanks to Pornhub, we know way too much about how people watch porn

August 2024 · 2 minute read

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The planet’s most popular porn site, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, has an astounding 75 million visitors from around the world every day.

But while we’ve been watching Pornhub, the sex-streaming behemoth has been watching us back — amassing so much data on its users’ ever-expanding sexual fantasies that it is now what New York magazine calls in its latest issue “the Kinsey Report of our time.

Thanks to Pornhub’s careful accounting of its whopping 10 million-video catalog, we now know, for example, that millennials are very into “cosplay” smut — or canoodling in costume.

We also know that women in Brazil and the Philippines are big fans of the site. And that the average time users spend browsing the site’s “Redheads” category is 6 minutes and 37 seconds. (As opposed to the average 11 minutes and 13 seconds users spend browsing “Old/Young.”)

Often, our interests in porn align with current events. Last year, for example, after Kim Kardashian was robbed, “burglar” became the second-fastest-growing search category. Searches for “Cuban maid” spiked last November after Fidel Castro died.

And on Election Night last year, Pornhub’s overall traffic grew 10 percent immediately after Donald Trump officially won.

More presidential porn trivia: In early January, when unconfirmed rumors of a “pee tape” involving the president first surfaced, searches for “golden showers” spiked by 289 percent.

But more often, porn trends seem to rise and fall independent of current events.

How else to explain the sudden 2012 spike in demand among Pornhub users for yoga porn?

“Taken as a whole,” New York’s Maureen O’Connor writes in the June 12-25 issue, Pornhub’s “vast trove of smut is the Kinsey Report of our time, shedding light on the multiplicity of erotic desires and sexual behaviors in our midst.”

So happy silver anniversary, Pornhub — and hearty thanks not only for all the smut, but for all the stats, as well:

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