Every year, the world’s most popular porn streaming site, Pornhub, releases analytics about the site’s user viewing habits and every year it reveals just a little more about the sexual appetites of the human race. In 2019 alone, 49 billion people around the world visited Pornhub, performing 39 billion searches and uploading 1.36 million hours of new content, which is equivalent to 169 years of content to watch. That’s a — and please, excuse my language here — f*ck ton of porn!
The porn viewing habits of the public offer a window into the intimate thoughts of countries, states, cities, and even whole generations. Interestingly, the way we watch porn changes with world events and runs parallel to pop culture in ways that can be surprising — depending on how capable you are of surprise in the insane times we live in.
How much is the data that Pornhub collects actually useful? Probably none. But all of it is fascinating and fun to examine.
We picked out all the most interesting data tables from Pornhub’s 2019 year in review — which is way longer than it deserves to be — to see what it can tell us about ourselves. If you’re really interested in porn, peep the full report here, unless, you know, you don’t feel like opening up an incognito window.
The Curious Case Of Alien Porn
The top search that defined 2019 on Pornhub was “Amateur,” which proves that even in our fantasies the porn-viewing public favors realism. I, for one, take that as a comforting fact. With pop culture dominated by big-budget superhero movies, you’d think we’d seek the same high production visuals in our porn, but turns out no — we want low resolution and realism. Scorcese would be proud. But then shit gets weird…
Now, when I say weird, I’m not at all trying to kink-shame anyone. Whatever you’re into is cool with me so long as no one is getting hurt or coerced, but you have to admit “Alien” just isn’t a term that anyone expected to see topping porn searches. We’ll come back to that, first let’s examine the rest.
Belle Delphine landed the number four spot, no doubt a result of the Instagram star’s prank on her fanbase earlier this year when she promised she’d open a Pornhub account. Belle did, in fact, end up opening a Pornhub account, but she trolled her fans hard by taking a literal approach to her videos, with titles like “Pewdiepie goes all the way inside Belle Delphine,” which showed the model eating a photo of the popular YouTuber. Belle hasn’t uploaded any actual porn, yet she remains a hot commodity on Pornhub — good for her!
At number five we have “Cosplay” which makes sense given the popularity of anime, video games, and superheroes. Sometimes you log on to Pornhub and you wonder what it’d be like if Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk f*cked. It’s just something we do, I guess.
Number eight is Apex Legends, a popular video game that released in February of this year, and ASMR claimed the number nine spot. 2019 was the year of ASMR, and if you’ve ever experienced the audio phenomenon and thought “this seems sexual” — turns out a lot of people shared that thought.
Video games, in general, remain a popular category for porn and the inclusion of Overwatch and Fortnite shouldn’t surprise anyone. However, two things stick out to me: Pokemon and Minecraft. With Pokemon, you might be thinking to yourself “Well duh, Misty!” But here is the thing. Misty is the 13th most searched video game character on Pornhub, right under Pikachu.
Yes, Pikachu — more people are looking for porn of a pokemon than a human character from Pokemon. That. Is. Weird.
Topping the list is Zelda, followed by Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft, Overwatch’s D. Va, and coming in at fourth is “Super Mario,” which is probably just a general term for the series, but I like to believe people want to know what is under those form-fitting denim overalls?
Which brings us back around to “Alien.”
Obviously, this is a result of the “Storm Area 51” Facebook event from this summer, and further insights show that searches for the term “Area 51” greatly spiked in July when news of the event first broke.
“Area 51” went from zero searches per day to a combined 167,839 searches between July 12 and July 16th. But the love of Alien porn was not universal. Interestingly enough women were 33% more likely to view alien-related content compared to men.
Breaking it further down by generation, we see the preference for extraterrestrial porn sharply decline amongst Millenials, Gen X-ers, and Boomers — what gives Gen Z?
Examining the Porn Watching Habits of the World
Everyone watches porn, from the smallest town in the United States to the islands across the world, somebody somewhere is actively watching porn, and it turns out that on a worldwide scale we all have our preferences. The entire continent of North America, many parts of South America, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom all go hard on “Lesbian” porn, Spain keeps its “Mature,” and the whole of Asia gets hot for Japan.
Russia loved “Hentai” or anime porn for the uninitiated, which totally makes sense given every other Russian bot on Twitter has an anime avi.
People in the United States spent an average of 10 minutes and 36 seconds per visit to Pornhub, with women on average spending 23 seconds longer than men worldwide. While the majority of Pornhub users are from the United States, we don’t spend the most time watching porn.
Not sure what that says about us, but either way we are up there! Russia comes in at the bottom of the list, so we guess those cartoons get busy fast.
How We Watch Porn
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that porn is most often watched on our cellphones. Overwhelmingly! Between nudes, sexy Facetime, and platforms like Only Fans, our smartphones are pretty much porn devices. Tablets are used for porn viewing much less often, which makes us feel a whole lot better about touching other people’s tablets.
Smartphones though — between how often they’re in a bathroom and how often they’re used for porn (hopefully not at the same time) it’s best to just not touch anyone else’s personal device.
Here is where things get funny again. PlayStation 4 dominated the other gaming platforms in sales and porn watching in the year 2019, with the Xbox being the second favorite platform for phone viewing. Strangely enough, the PS Vita saw a traffic bump of 23% — why? The PS Vita was discontinued as a platform in 2019, look what happens when Sony cuts off support? People flock to porn.
Nintendo Switch would surely be on this list if the system had an internet browser, so if you’re patting yourself on the back as a Nintendo user because this makes it look like you watch porn less, you probably don’t. What is with that 0.4% watching on the 3DS though?
Sporting events cause a sharp decline in porn watching habits, even though the majority of porn is watched between the hours of 11 p.m. and Midnight. Winning team cities tend to watch less porn than the losing team’s city, which is just flat out funny. Next time you’re mocking a rival team, feel free to use these stats in your roasts.
Holidays also seem to have a large effect on our porn habits.
The winter holiday season sees the biggest decline in porn watching — probably because we’re with family — with the sharpest decline happening on New Year’s Eve and Christmas Eve. Traffic boosts up eight percent on Valentine’s day, which I choose to believe is sexy couples making things steamier, and not just lonely people without dates.
Porn Stats For The Porn Fan
Worldwide, there was a 32% increase in visitors who self-identified as female, with a 30-70 split between men and women watching porn in the United States. Across the board, numbers hover around similar figures, with users self-identifying as male watching the majority of porn.
Pornstar Lana Rhoades topped the list in both Most Searched porn star and the porn star most searched by users self-identifying as female. So Congrats to Lana for uniting porn watchers across all demographics!
The full report is packed with interesting insights like these, but these are likely the figures people will be talking about most. That and the sharp rise in Joker porn in October. For more stats, like who the most popular porn stars are, read the full report.
