2015 Porn Report: Who is Watching What Where

Every year the website Pornhub puts out a report about pornography use in the previous year. If you are not familiar with Pornhub, as you might infer, it is a very popular pornography site on the internet. One of the advantages of being one of the most popularly viewed pornography sites is that they can gather a lot of data from their site about pornography use patterns from around the world. Though some of my colleagues find it odd, I get really excited when reports like this come out. When academics research these topics, they are usually studying college age young people. Other surveys take a random sample of people who choose to respond. Reports like Pornhub’s 2015 Year in Review, can give us an accurate picture of what is going on because the data is coming from the actual use of the pornography site.

How much pornography are people watching? When we talk about this data, please remember that this is from Pornhub ALONE. There are many, many other pornography sites out there that people are using, so this is not a total number, simply the time spent on this site. In 2015, viewers watched 4,392,486,580 hours of pornography. That’s right, nearly 4.4 billion hours of pornography was viewed on this site alone. These viewers watched 87,849,731,608 pornography videos. Basically, that is 12 videos viewed per person on earth. Pornhub had 21.2 billion visits to it’s site, or 6.7 thousand people per second. That is a lot of pornography watching.

So who watches the most porn? Well, we Americans do. 41% of the traffic to Pornhub comes from the United States. Rounding out the top ten, in descending order are: #2 United Kingdom, India , Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, Brazil, and Mexico.

How much time are people spending watching pornography? The average amount of time spent on the site, viewing pornography was 9 minutes and 20 seconds. The psychologist the site used to interpret this data suggested that it is not being used, on average, in an addictive manner. The psychologist suggests that people are on the site long enough to find out what they are aroused by and then to masturbate to these images. Remember that this is the average time spent so there are going to be people who spend much more time on the site and those who will spend less time on the site.

When we look at the United States specifically (where I write from), the states that spent the most time per visit on the site were Hawaii, Mississippi and South Carolina. The average time spent for these states was just over 10 minutes. The states that spent the least amount of time looking at pornography on Pornhub were Rhode Island, Utah, Louisiana and Massachusetts.

As a clinician whose practice solely focuses on sex addiction and cybersex offenders, I am always very interested in what search terms pornography users are favoring. Frequently, what tops the list is the search word, “teen.” You can see why this is potentially bothersome. When you look at Pornhub’s worldwide use, the most popular search term is “lesbian” with “teen” coming in at second. This is actually good news as “teen” was last year’s most popular search term. In the United States specifically, the top searchers were #1 step mom, #2 cartoon, #3 lesbian and #4 teen. Again, the search word “teen” is down one spot in the ranking. The report also notes that search terms for “step mom” and “step sister” are more prominent in English speaking countries.

A moment of acknowledgment, for the following countries, the search word “teen” does not even make the top 10 list: France, Australia, and Sweden.

The Pornhub review shows us that more woman are watching pornography than last year. Twenty four percent of visitors to the site are women. The countries with the highest proportion of women users are: Jamaica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Ecuador, Bahamas, Panama, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, New Zealand and South Africa.

Most people who are looking at pornography are doing so on their phone, with over half using their phone to access Pornhub. Tablets are used the least. People are also using their game consoles to gain access to the site. Pornhub was accessed by Xbox, Playstation, PS Vita, Nintendo Wii and Nintendo 3DS in 2105.

The report also looks at how holidays and sporting events affect Pornhub traffic. I think this is a fun way to round out our summary of how the world was using pornography last year. When the Superbowl is on, American pornography use drops by 25%. During the NBA and NHL finals, only score single digit drops in pornography use. In traditionally soccer loving countries, a good game, like the COPA American final last year, can drop pornography use by about 50%.

The world is looking at a lot of pornography. Happily, the numbers suggest that the majority of the world is not looking at pornography addictively. I also see a tiny victory in the fact that, in some countries, the search for teen pornography has lost a little bit of ground.

If you think you may have a problem with pornography, please go to our site, Sexual Addiction Treatment Services, for resources for help.