ATLANTA — The 53rd Super Bowl took place Sunday, capturing the nation’s attention. But the game was slow-moving and low-scoring, with the New England Patriots besting the Los Angeles Rams, 13-3.
Without the excitement of some games, football fans might have moved on to porn during the final game of the NFL season. But in the opening moments of the game, all eyes were on the field in Atlanta, where the championship game was played.
Pornhub, as it has in previous years, took a look at traffic on its site after the game, attempting to see how this year stacked up compared to previous years.
Researchers at Pornhub said that U.S. traffic began to drop around 5 p.m. (EST), reaching -20 percent from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. when it dropped as low as -23 percent.
But “immediately after the game ended, football fans making up for lost time headed to Pornhub where traffic surged +9 percent above average at 11 p.m. That’s a massive increase in traffic when you consider that 11 p.m. is Pornhub’s peak traffic time in the U.S.,” researchers said.
“If we look at the average statewide traffic changes, Massachusetts and New Hampshire had the biggest game-time drops of -42 percent during, followed by -37 percent in Maine and -37 percent in North Dakota,” Pornhub researchers said. “The smallest changes happened in Mississippi and Louisiana with only -2 percent and -3 percent drops respectively.
“Traffic drops in Los Angeles ranged from -21 percent to -22 percent during the game, while Boston traffic reached -52 percent below average at 9 p.m.,” Pornhub researchers said. “After the game ended, traffic returned to normal in L.A., while fans from Boston caused a +13 percent surge in Pornhub traffic from 11 p.m. to Midnight, when compared to traffic on a normal Sunday.
Pornhub researchers broke down U.S. traffic by gender to see if women were as likely as men to take an interest in watching the game (as opposed to visiting Pornhub). Which the timeline changes were quite similar, the peak drop for female traffic reached -17 percent below Sunday’s average, compared to a -24 percent drop for men.
Pornhub researchers also looked at the search terms that increased on game day.
“As you might imagine, ‘Super Bowl’ and ‘Superbowl’ were on many people’s minds so their search popularity increased by 3341 percent compared to an average day,” Pornhub researchers said. “Searches for “patriots” increased by 3115 percent, and “touchdown” by 1880 percent.
“Cheerleaders were on a lot of people’s minds, so the already popular term ‘cheerleader’ increased by 179 percent, with more specific searches up like ‘football cheerleader,’ ‘cheerleader orgy’ and ‘naked cheerleaders.’”
