BURBANK, Calif. — PornHub today released its annual “Year in Review,” which offers insights on the habits of millions of viewers who search out porn on the 10-year-old portal.
The report, about 8,300 words long and complete with scores of infographics, offers glimpses of new trends found in 2017 — some that may be obvious and others head scratching.
PornHub’s audience is a vast one — the web portal averaged an eye-popping 81 million visitors per day in 2017, or 28.5 billion visitors for the year, with 24.7 billion searches performed.
It streamed 3,732 petabytes of data, or 118 gigabytes per second, in 2017.
“Our users and content partners uploaded over 4 million videos in 2017, including 810,000 amateur videos,” PornHub wrote. “In total, 595,482 hours of video were uploaded, which is 68 years of porn if watched continuously.
So what were PornHub users searching for in 2017? According to the tube site, the top three trending searches were for “Porn for Women,” “Rick and Morty” and “Fidget Spinners.”
"2017 seems to have been the year where women have come forward to express their desires more openly," says Dr. Laurie Betito, sex therapist and director of the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center. "From the 'Me too' movement to prominent females the likes of Hillary Clinton and Nikki Haley on the world stage, women are feeling more empowered and they have found their voice. This is a sign of things to come."
For third year in a row, “lesbian” was the No. 1-searched term worldwide.
“That’s not much of a surprise,” Betito said. “Lesbians have been the No. 1 fantasy of men since the beginning of time. For the men that aren’t likely to ever have a threesome with lesbians, this is an ideal way for them to live out their fantasy.
“We can’t ignore women viewers though; for women that have a soft fantasy or curiosity, lesbian porn allows them to explore that part of their sexuality without risk. Of course, for bi or lesbian women, this category is an obvious choice.”
“Hentai” was the second most searched term for 2017.
“Hentai is a way for people to disconnect from reality and delve into the world of total fantasy, forgetting about all the stresses that real life brings,” Betito said. “Good, bad or indifferent, Hentai is an escape, not much different than seeing a sci-fi movie at a local theater for a couple of hours of mindless distraction.”
“Virtual reality porn” continued to gain in popularity, moving up 14 spots on the list from 2016, PornHub said. Cheerleaders came back in numbers in 2017, moving up 366 slots and into its top 20 searches of the year. The popularity of “MILF” grew by two positions
There were also dips compared to last year, including “anal,” which dropped three spots over the course of 2017, compared to the year prior where it gained four.
“Threesome” also lost one spot as opposed to last year where it gained two.
“There were significant increases come via two different ethnicities; ‘Indian’ and ‘Japanese’ jumped a respective 13 and seven positions this year landing them at 19th and 6th place on the list. The increased popularity of those two categories was helped by the traffic growth we saw from both Japan and India in 2017,” PornHub said.
Riley Reid and Jordi El Nino Polla were the top searched for female and male porn stars, respectively. Reid was followed by Mia Khalifa and Lisa Ann. Sunny Leone still held a strong spot at No. 5 on the list, while No. 7 went to the deceased August Ames.
For men, second place went to Mandingo, followed by Johnny Sins, Rocco Siffredi and James Deen.
PornHub also compiled separate statistics for numerous countries, including the U.S., which led all countries in traffic; the U.K.; India, which moved into third place in traffic; Japan; Canada; France; Germany; Australia; Italy; Brazil; Mexico; Spain; Philippines; The Netherlands; Poland; Sweden; Argentina; Russia; South Africa; and Belgium.
PornHub also examined how various holidays, sporting events and entertainment events have affected traffic to the site worldwide.
“Some things never change, and that includes the fact that traffic to the site always slows down on Dec. 31,” PornHub said. “In 2017, between 6 p.m. and midnight (to be exact) people were watching way less porn than they regularly do. As is tradition, the traffic dropped lower than any other day of the year (by 37 percent) which was actually seven percent less than on Dec. 31, 2016.”
Specifically for the U.S., PornHub spelled out what goes on with its viewers during holidays.
“The U.S. holiday traffic chart below shows that when there’s no work, there is a little bit more time for play. Labor Day increases site traffic by two percent, but the U.S. seems to be more into loving themselves, on Valentine’s Day at least, with a four percent increase of traffic on the site. While costume-related searches go up, traffic drops by three percent on Halloween.”
To view the entire report, click here.
