Billions of visits to Pornhub this year. Was one of them you?
It's been a busy year for Pornhub. Aside from delivering billions of porn videos to the world, it attempted to save the bees, dig into the history of erotic movies, donated a car and tried to clean up the world's beaches before ending the year with a Black Friday sale on its premium memberships. Now it's time to dig into the surface level stats a tad with Pornhub's 2019 Year In Review.
As we saw in previous years (2018/2017) 2019 saw additional year over year growth in several categories. With page stat numbers in the billions, it's hard to imagine that there are people on this planet somehow not viewing or uploading content to Pornhub.
This is Pornhub's 7th annual report, every year it keeps getting longer and longer. Since I'm not writing a dissertation on it, I'm going to focus on the overall numbers and the tech-focused stats like operating systems, time on site and mobile use. There are a ton of categories on the report, and as a data analyst by trade it's tough to not touch on every single one of them, but just like that split second after a strong porn viewing session, I have the overwhelming feeling that I have something else to do.
There were 42 billion visits to Pornhub this year. That's the answer. It breaks down to 115 million per day. 39 billion searches were entered, often bringing up one of the 6.83 million new video uploads in 2019. In data storage terms, that's 723,041 GB transferred per hour. Every minute on Pornhub saw 80,032 visits, 77,861 searches (2,171 have their favorites bookmarked I'm sure) and 219,985 video views.
Every nine minutes an entire days' worth of content was uploaded to Pornhub. We're viewing it, we're making it. Porn is not going anywhere.
The average time spent on site worldwide was up 15 seconds over 2018, coming in at 10 minutes and 28 seconds. That's a long time on a porn site, but viewers weren't just watching porn. They treat Pornhub's comment section like a social network, with over 70 million messages sent between users and over 11.5 million comments left on videos. Additionally, 98,000 new models were verified, bringing the verified model total to 130,000.
As you would imagine, the most popular times to visit the site were 11pm to 1am, well after the sun has set and still floating on that Call of Duty high. Oddly enough, the least popular day of the week was Friday, while the most popular day was Sunday. So, imagine what a good portion of the world is doing every Sunday night at around 11:30pm.
And they were likely doing it on their phones. Mobile devices accounted for 83.7% (up 7% YOY) of all of Pornhub's traffic in 2019 worldwide. 76.6% of that was from a smartphone, taking another chunk of traffic from tablets (down 17% YOY). Desktop and laptop computers only made up 16.3% (down 18% YOY) of worldwide traffic, so my gaming PC feels special. Most desktop viewers were using Windows (75.5%), with only 16.7% using Mac OS. Pornhub’s sidekick, YouPorn, also saw great gains in mobile as reflected on its Year In Review report.
Mobile users were almost split between Apple iOS (52.8%) and Android (46.6%). The notable stat here is that Apple iOS use is up 19% YOY, while Android use is down 14% YOY. This speaks to Apple's choke-hold on the mobile phone marketplace at least in the United States. Most of this change is due to porn restrictions in India, a primarily Android country, as its overall traffic drop caused the mobile OS demographic to shift.
Google Chrome dominated both desktop (56.2%) and mobile (44.3%). And someone actually used Opera Mini (0.6%) to watch porn. Adorable.
Finally, it should be noted that users were accessing Pornhub and watching porn on their game consoles as well. Sony Playstation led the pack with 51.5% of game console traffic. PS Vita, still being used for porn at least, saw a 23% YOY rise in traffic, bringing its total contribution to 9.1%. Microsoft Xbox traffic accounted for 34.7%, up 5.3% YOY.
If you want to check out the entire Pornhub 2019 Year In Review report at its Insights blog, you can find it here (SFW). There are much more porn-focused statistics there, like most searched for Pornstars, most viewed categories, age and gender breakdowns, LGBTQ statistics, most searched for celebrities and video game characters (Zelda, Lara Croft and D. Va lead the list here) as well as traffic changes during world events.
If you like data as much as you like porn, or just really love data, then there is something for everyone. Just like porn itself.
