LOS ANGELES — A new joint report on global porn consumption has been released by TheNextWeb and market research company SimilarWeb.
Key findings revealed that the majority of adult sites originate in Europe, while most of the traffic flow is coming from the U.S.
The report also said adult websites are responsible for 4.41 percent of all Internet desktop visits and porn ranks seventh on the list of leading categories, beating games and sports but trailing slightly behind computers and electronics.
It was also found that the social media channel driving the most traffic to adult websites is not Facebook as some would suspect, but rather reddit.com with 57.21 percent.
The study also found that porn drives more traffic than the online finance industry. Adult sites are also the fourth largest category in terms of traffic from display ads, coming in right after shopping with slightly more than 3 percent of the market share.
Somewhat surprising according to SimilarWeb’s analysis, was that the top two countries with the highest share of adult website use are Iraq and Egypt, followed by Europe and Japan, with Peru making up the Asian and South American contingent.
Middle-Eastern countries also ranked highest in average session times, topped by Asian countries. Interestingly, neither the U.S, U.K. nor Canada were significantly ranked.
Hong Kong dominated in terms of highest pages viewed per visit, followed by Northern Europe.
As far as search engines used to find porn are concerned, Google is by far the leader with 83.48 percent.
Countries with the smallest share of adult website use are the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Australia, New Zealand and Thailand also have a significantly small share.
Muslim countries had the highest bounce rate, and Russia topped shortest session time.