Pornhub top 2018 trends include Fortnite, Spider-Man, Stormy Daniels
If it exists, there's a porn version of it -- and chances are you'll find it on Pornhub, whose year-in-review proves Rule 34 is alive and well.
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Hot for Harley Quinn ? Fancy some Fortnite porn, perhaps? Turns out you're not alone, according to an in-depth report from Pornhub that sheds an awful lot of light on a topic few are willing to speak publicly or honestly about.
For millions, Pornhub is the de facto front page of porn on the internet, and every year the site amasses a mountain of data on the kinds of porn people are searching for.
The 2018 report, released Tuesday and coming in at about 8,000 words, offers a comprehensive peek at our collective proclivities. There are too many intriguing tidbits to stuff into this summary, so check out the full report for a fun, illuminating and surprisingly SFW-ish read (no pornographic images, just charts and figures). In the meantime, here are the top takeaways that raised my eyebrows.
The internet is for... well, you know
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It's no surprise online porn is big business, but you still might be shocked to hear just how much traffic flows through Pornhub every day. The platform racked up 33.5 billion visits in 2018, 5 billion more than in 2017. That averages 92 million visitors per day, and the number is still trending upward -- Pornhub says its current daily average is now more than 100 million visitors.
The sheer quantity of HD video streaming from Pornhub's servers at any given moment equates to a heck of a lot of data. In 2018, the site streamed a total of 4,403 petabytes, which, as Pornhub brags, is more than the entire internet consumed in 2002.
So, yeah. People watch a lot of porn.
The day iOS users paused the porn
Still, some of the more interesting data in Pornhub's report concerns cases where people weren't watching as much porn as usual. For instance, Pornhub's iOS traffic dipped by as much as 11 percent during Apple's fall event when the iPhone XR, XS and XS Max made their debuts.
The blue lines on the left represent iOS traffic dips on Pornhub during Apple's fall 2018 keynote. Android users (the green lines) were presumably less inclined to turn off the porn to check in on Cupertino, but some topics seemed to catch their interest. Click for more.
CNET actually helped Pornhub track these dips by providing a timeline of the event. When matched with Pornhub's traffic data, you get a surprisingly good sense of the devices and announcements that best seemed to capture the public's attention (new iPhones yes, new Apple Watch not so much -- at least per Pornhub).
What up, Windows?
Mobile browsing was the method of choice for Pornhub users in 2018 -- all told, mobile traffic accounted for 80 percent of Pornhub's visitors, a 7 percent increase over 2017.
As for desktop browsing, Pornhub saw it drop 18 percent this year. Pornhub did see a bump in the percentage of desktop visitors running Google's Chrome OS , though the overwhelming majority of those, 77.1 percent, were running Windows. That's about 7 points higher than Windows' overall desktop OS market share as of November 2018.
Chrome is tops when it comes to browsers, though. Its 57.3 percent share of Pornhub's desktop traffic represented an 8 percent jump from 2017 numbers. The largest jump went to Microsoft Edge , though, which climbed 18 percent over its 2017 numbers to capture the runner-up spot.
Your trending topics may vary
Pornhub's search data also tells a lot about what people are searching for. For instance, "lesbian" was the No 1 search term among female Pornhub visitors, with "Japanese" the top term among men.
Millennials between 18 and 34 made up 61 percent of Pornhub's traffic in 2018. Pornhub makes some interesting distinctions within this group, pointing out, for instance, that younger millennials aged 18 - 24 saw a 143 percent increase in searches with the tag ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response). Among older millennials aged 25 to 34, searches for "Korean" content saw an even greater spike, jumping 233 percent in 2018.
Pornhub also found older users more likely to search for porn tagged "trans," with a 124 percent increase in interest among users aged 35 and 44, a 214 percent increase among users aged 45 and 54, and a 290 percent increase among users aged 55 and 64.
Stormy Daniels surge
2018's most-searched celebrity? That'd be adult performer Stormy Daniels, who generated headlines throughout the year after an alleged affair with President Trump and subsequent efforts to keep it quiet became cable news catnip. Searches for Stormy exceeded 30 million on Pornhub, a meteoric rise from her 671st-place finish in 2017.
Among leading men, the top-searched celebrity was Noah Centineo, best known for the Netflix film To All the Boys I've Loved Before. Centineo searches shot up 874 percent after the film's release in August, and totaled 7.6 million by year's end.
Rule 34 reigns supreme
It's not just celebrities -- fictional characters get lots of attention on Pornhub, too. The DC Universe's Harley Quinn has been a hot draw since the 2016 release of Suicide Squad, and she topped the charts again in 2018 with more than 10 million searches. In second place: Elastigirl from The Incredibles, with 7.6 million searches.
Porn parodies for cartoon comedies including Rick and Morty, Family Guy and Big Mouth all saw millions of searches in 2018. As for Star Wars, searches for adult content from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away shot up 633 percent on May 4 -- or "May the Fourth" to fans who treat the day as an unofficial Star Wars holiday.
"Searches like these serve as an indication that people use this site to not only satisfy sexual urges, but also to get a different angle on something they are already interested in," said Laurie Betito, director of the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center.
No endgame in sight for Avengers porn
Harley Quinn might have kept DC on top in 2018 as far as porn is concerned (Wonder Woman and Batman ranked high on the search charts, as well), but Pornhub reports tons of traffic for the Marvel Universe, too -- particularly the Avengers, who enjoyed a springtime blockbuster release with Avengers: Infinity War.
Searches for the superhero team surged 356 percent on April 27, the day of the film's release. By the end of the year, those searches topped out at 6.7 million, up from 2.5 million the year before.
Black Widow was the Avenger Pornhub users searched for the most in 2018, with Spider-Man in second place. I always suspected that a fight between Captain America and the Hulk would be a close one, and that was the case on Pornhub this year -- Cap just barely bested the green giant to take third place.
Along with Black Widow, men were particularly drawn to Scarlet Witch and Gamora from Guardians of the Galaxy. Ladies, meanwhile, seem to like Loki, Captain America, Black Panther and Thor, as each of those four characters saw significantly more search traffic from women than from men.
Overall, Pornhub says women are 28 percent more likely than men to seek out Avengers-themed porn.
We get it -- you really, really like Fortnite
Video games are a common trending topic on Pornhub, too. Last year, the top-searched game was the online multiplayer shooter Overwatch, and that game's characters -- namely Brigette -- still ranks near the top of Pornhub's video game character search rankings.
The only character to beat her? Bowsette, a fan-created hybrid of Bowser and Princess Peach who hasn't actually appeared in any Nintendo games. Nevertheless, she saw a whopping 34.6 million searches in 2018 -- enough to rank as one of the top 10 search terms of the year.
More recently, Pornhub attributes a 745 percent increase in Wild West-related searches to the October arrival of Rockstar's highly anticipated Western epic Red Dead Redemption 2.
Still, no game drew more Pornhub interest this year than Fortnite. A battle royale breakout hit across popular gaming platforms like PC, PlayStation, Xbox and the Nintendo Switch , Fortnite saw regular spikes in Pornhub search traffic with each major update -- and specifically, with each new set of character skins.
For instance, the September release of Fortnite season 6 introduced gamers to Calamity. Now, three months and 2.5 million Pornhub searches later, she's the site's most-searched Fortnite character of the year, beating out Sun Strider and Zoey for the top spot.
One other point of note: Pornhub saw searches for Fortnite-related adult content shoot up 60 percent during a server outage on April 11 that temporarily rendered the multiplayer shooter unplayable. You guys really can't get enough of this game, can you?
All of that was enough for Pornhub to call Fortnite one of the defining terms of 2018. The game even managed to crack Pornhub's top 20 overall search terms of the year, which seems insane to me given the competition from more traditional X-rated search terms.
And yes, Pornhub's report has plenty of data on terms like those, too. Click here to read it for yourself. Again, it's SFW as far as images are concerned.
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