As this marathon of a year comes to its blessed close, brands everywhere are releasing their oh-so-precious insights on the ways we consumed, well, just about everything. The porn industry, in particular, delivers some exciting data about our porn viewing, searching and climaxing habits in 2019. With studies affirming the obvious: that women are just as likely to enjoy pornography as anyone else, our views on porn have steadily evolved. Online porn is complicated and there will forever be parts of the industry that will never be palatable to everyone (and it wouldn’t be a fair reflection of human sexuality if it somehow was!) — but if you pair attitudes (and tech) that’s ever-evolving with the big porn trends of the moment (moms! lesbians! amateurs!), it’s been a big year for considering the porn we like to view and the ways we like to view it.
Diving right in to all that super sexy data (we don’t kinkshame here, folks) from Pornhub, xHamster and YouPorn‘s year in review round-ups (all SFW, as long as your workplace is cool with porn data perusing), here are the major takeaways about the last year in porn:
First of all, we’re watching a lot of it and mostly from our phones.
According to YouPorn, they received more than five Billion visits to their site (one billion more than last year) and they viewed four billion more videos in 2019 than 2018. XHamster clocked more than 100K video views each minute and 13.5 Billion total visits. Pornhub reported seeing 42 Billion visits (which they average at 115 million visits per day).
Both Pornhub and YouPorn reported a decrease in desktop traffic and an increase in phone traffic — which, given the way we tend to consume most media in 2019, definitely makes some sense. But, uh, maybe think twice about casually grabbing someone’s phone for a Google search if you don’t want to stumble on their NSFW search history. Also, remember that our phones are already really gross.
Women had staying power on both sides of the screen.
All three sites noted that 2019 was a big year for women viewing porn.
“Because we use Google Analytics to compile and present our anonymized user data, we are limited to only being able to show gender binarist type data, which identifies users as either male or female only. That said, female viewership increased by two whole percent points in 2019!” YouPorn wrote in their year in retrospect blog post. “Meaning that now 31 percent of YouPorn’s visitors to the site are female, with the remaining 69 percent (yes, we said sixty-nine) of traffic coming from male users.” Nice.
Pornhub also noted that their viewership had women sticking around just a bit longer than male users (and that the length of time hanging out with a video only got better with age): “Female visitors typically stay 23 seconds longer than their male counterparts, and visitors between the ages of 18 to 24 tend to get the job done 64 seconds faster,” Pornhub’s insights blog writes. “Visitors over the age of 55 take their time and spend about two minutes longer each time they visit Pornhub.” They add that the ‘Popular With Women’ category’s views increased by 65 percent in 2019.
And xHamster adds that their women viewership has also continued to grow — and their diverse tastes have also led to some additional growth: “In all seriousness, 2019 — like the past several years — has been the year of the woman. Not only did women continue to grow as part of the audience (28.56 percent), and cross the 50 percent threshold in at least one country (the Dominican Republic), but they lead the demand for an ever more varied and interesting porn world.”
The Big Femme Energy™ could also be found in the search terms that defined the year across all three of the sites: Femdom, Lesbians and, yes, Mom (!) each stood out in search terms for 2019.
“To be honest, it’s not the first time she’s been our #1 girl,” xHamster says about the maternal influence on their search terms. “She’s beloved both in the US and worldwide, and by men and women. (Although for the latter, “Daddy” is a strong #2).”
Pornhub also notes that women are significantly more likely to view videos with vulva-owning people receiving oral pleasure (260 percent more likely), videos featuring fingering (183 percent more likely) and more “Romantic” porn (130 percent more likely).
In completely unsurprising news: women love lesbians.
For Pornhub, “lesbian” remains the top most popular category for women. It saw a decrease in ranking at YouPorn (dropping to number three most-searched from its original perch as number one) — but still going strong. And xHamster saw a noted 63 percent increase in search for lesbian content in the United States.
So, TL;DR:
Porn can be fake, but people want to get real.
The rise in people searching for “amateur” porn (their top year defining search — above alien and POV searches) was particularly interesting to Pornhub’s Insights blog — so much so that they asked Dr. Laurie Betito of their Sexual Wellness Center to weigh in about the phenomenon.
“It seems that people are looking for more realistic depictions of sex,” Dr. Betito told Pornhub. “Real” people vs. actors seems to be the draw. It’s interesting that more and more people are putting themselves out there as amateurs. Sex has become so much less taboo that those who get a kick out of exhibitionism can do so with very little experience or equipment. The message is: anyone can be a porn star!”
Betito adds that the rise in verified couples in the amateur porn space can be attributed to people who dig exhibitionism finding a playground to share their interests: “Couples are finding a space in the porn world where they can “expose” their sexuality to the world. These are likely people who get a thrill from this type of exhibitionism and who are proud to show off their intimate coupling.” (Do you, bbs!)
Astrology-minded viewers really felt Virgo vibes.
YouPorn launched their Search by Zodiac capability in 2019 and let them take a look at what zodiac signs were the most popular on their site for the year. Since 2019 was a big year for astrology, it’s a cool feature that lets you dive a bit into some sexy synastry and sign up for sex horoscopes from their in-house astrologer. They found that Virgo was the top searched and Cancer was the least — which for all sorts of cosmic reasons seem legit to me. (But I am deeply upset, as a Libra Sun/Taurus Moon, to see Libras at 11 out of 12 on that list and Taurus at 10 out of 12. Just absolutely gutted.)
Ultimately, whatever your thoughts are on porn, the industry offers plenty of interesting insights that say a lot more about who we are (at least sexually) in 2019. Can’t wait to see what’s ~sexually trending~ in 2020.
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