Some of you might be old enough to remember the days when pornography was scarce, at least
in relation to now.
Kids in the 80s might only see porn when discovering their father’s hidden adult magazines methodically
placed somewhere between his collection of National Geographic’s and Gardener’s Weekly,
out of sight at the back of the closet.
Back then they had VHS tapes, Debbie does Dallas and titillating tales of British Window
Cleaners.
But now porn is pervasive, there at the push of a button; your own private library of lascivious
entertainment, an endless cornucopia of copulation, fetishes for all tastes; Japanese screamers,
Russian teens, MILFs, massive mammary glands, inconceivable animated sexual acts and anything
that goes really, if it’s legal of course.
Today we will look at many people’s worst kept secret, in this episode of the Infographics
Show, How Successful Is Pornhub?
According to French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille, we humans love to get lost
in the erotic act.
He said that in his hard-to-understand book, “Eroticism”, that it’s the taboo of
such acts that allows us to overcome isolation, boredom, even the fear of death.
You might say pornography gives us something similar, although Bataille could have had
no idea about what was to come in the 21st century.
Let’s just give you a quick run-down of porn through the ages before we get into one
of the biggest porn distributors now or ever.
You can go back to pre-history and find instances of porn, or at least erotic drawings on cave
walls.
The Romans loved to see painted acts of people getting it on, and there are plenty of artifacts
that show things such as people having oral sex.
In 1857, the Victorians outlawed pornography under the ‘Obscene Publications Act’ and
then we saw the word pornography in the English dictionary.
While the Romans thought pictures of such acts were beautiful, the Victorians warned
that porn would “corrupt and deprave the minds of the uneducated public.”
Over in France not long before this, the Marquis de Sade (where we get the word Sadism) had
been writing political pornography, often disturbing to say the least.
Nonetheless, Sadomasochism is a genre in the porn-world right now.
The first porn movie, at least some sources tell us, was made by someone who worked for
Thomas Edison.
His name was William Kennedy Dickson, and he made “What the Butler Saw” on mutoscope;
flickering images of women underdressing, what we might call softcore.
In the 70s people might go to special blue theaters to watch their porn, a far cry from
the private shows we get in front of our computers today.
If you’ve seen the recent show, “The Deuce” by David Simon, you’ll know how this developed
into porn on video in the 80s.
This was the start of a huge industry, replete with low-grade geezers in LA taking copious
amounts of drugs and hanging out with girls and guys whose bodies defied biology.
But that is still a long way from Millennials thinking watching porn is as natural as taking
a bath.
When porn really broke, is when the Internet arrived, or at least when the Internet could
accommodate videos in the 90s.
Porn broke the Internet like nothing else, and the statistics are astounding.
You know Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter are popular.
Well, porn sites in total get way more hits.
In fact, it’s around a $100 billion industry.
We all download things right, well, it’s said that 35% of all internet downloads are
related to pornography.
U.S. health research tells us that 64 percent of the population searched for porn at least
once a week in 2016.
As for young men, adolescents, 93 percent of them were actively looking for porn that
year.
With girls it was only 63 percent, according to that survey.
Ok, we don’t need to get stat-heavy here because you know yourself how much porn is
being watched because you are very, very likely part of the statistics.
So, where do we go to see porn?
This is actually quite hard to find an answer to, because every time this writer searches
for something porn-related all he gets is more porn, not research!
We went to Alexa, which tells you the most hit sites on the web.
Right now Pornhub is indeed the most popular adult website, in fact, it’s the 20th most
hit site in the world.
Following Pornhub came Livejasmin.com in 40th place and Xvideos in 41st place.
Pornhub is without doubt the biggest porn site out there.
The Canadian site was launched in 2007 and has gone from strength to strength.
You might hear the word Pornhub in Hollywood movies, as it’s become a byword for online
adult video, although you’ll find some countries have a zero tolerance stance against such
assumed filth, such as China and Thailand, countries that might ban porn but have a very
vibrant scene of prostitution and other sex entertainment.
Go figure.
Anyway, let’s look at some of the things Pornhub has to say about itself.
It’s so big it releases its own statistics.
In 2017 the site had a total of 28.5 billion visitors, which averaged at 81 million visitors
every day.
In a post, Pornhub wrote, “With 24.7 billion searches performed on the site this year,
there was clearly a lot to find, as this translates to about 50,000 searches per minute and 800
searches per second.”
The site said this is quite funny as it’s about the same number of hamburgers that McDonalds
sells.
Perhaps fast food and masturbation go hand in hand, but of course not at the same time.
You eat first of course, we are not animals.
If you look at videos uploaded that year, if you watched every single video it would
take you 68 years to get through them.
In terms of size, uploaded videos equaled 118 GBs per second or 10,225,205 GBs per day.
Now that’s hard to get into your head.
It meant that 595,482 hours of video was uploaded in total.
This was more than 4 million videos, 810,000 of them coming from you amateur enthusiasts.
Did people like them?
Most probably some folks would not tell, but Pornhub said that 120 million videos were
voted for and 80 percent of the reviews were positive.
Porn for women, which Pornhub said isn’t easy to explain, was up 1400%.
In terms of video views.
It seems more women are getting down with porn.
Guess what the number one searched term was?
No, it wasn’t about voluptuous women or men with oversized appendages, or Eastern
European beauties or adorable Asians in uniforms; it was “lesbians.”
Pornhub wrote, “Lesbians have been the #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.”
Women, too, it seemed were into woman on woman porn.
The next most searched for terms were as follows: Hentai, MILF, Step mom, Step sister, mom,
teen, Japanese, massage, anal, ebony, cartoon, overwatch, Asian.
Does that surprise you?
It’s surprised us a little, but then we are too innocent to be experts on this matter.
Everything changes per country though, with the Brits even eagerly searching for “British
Chav” a lot, hmm, really…Indians liked wives, teachers and aunties; the Japanese
liked school girls and teens; the French wanted French porn; Germans liked a bit of dirty
talk, and the Italians search for Italians.
We guess these are insular countries in terms of sex.
But in many countries the top search term was the nationality of that country.
The terms with the biggest rise were cuckold, Japanese and Indian.
As for our gay friends, their top searches were Japanese, Korean, straight first time
and straight friend.
Women’s faves were lesbian, lesbian scissoring and threesome.
We had to look up “scissoring”.
Told you we were innocent.
Virtual Reality Porn became more popular and the most searched for porn star was someone
called Riley Reid.
Hmm, we’ve never heard of her, but we bet some of you have.
The next most searched for porn stars or just hot women were Mia Khalifa, Lisa Ann, Kim
Kardashian, Sunny Leone and Brandi Love.
The most popular male stars were Jordi El Nino Polla, Mandingo, and Rocco Siffredi.
Lastly Pornhub writes, “25 to 34 year olds make up 32% of Pornhub’s visitors.
Viewers between the ages of 18 and 24 made up 29% of our entire viewership in 2017.”
35 to 44 was 17 percent and 55 plus just 11 percent.
We are told that if you wanted to watch every video, it would take the average American
two average lifetimes to see them, so don’t even try.
As for countries where the most people are watching Pornhub, the top was of course the
USA, followed by the UK, then India, then Japan, then Canada, France, Germany, Australia,
Italy and Brazil.
In all, the average time spent on the site was 9 minutes and 59 seconds on every visit.
The countries that spent most time per visit were The Philippines (average 13 mins 28 seconds),
South Africa (11 mins 02 seconds, USA (10 mins 33 seconds) and Canada (10 mins 10 seconds).
Even in banned countries, users found a way to get around the block.
As for when people like to be alone with their videos, it might not be surprising to some
of you that 10 pm until 1 am was the most popular time-slot for sexual entertainment.
Most people did this, by far, on their phones, with desktop next and then tablet.
Chrome was the go-to browser for half of the users, followed by Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Ok, enough stats.
What is all this worth?
Oh gosh, we just searched for that and accidentally opened a page of porn animation called Fair
Market Value.
Some say Pornhub is worth around four billion dollars.
The company doesn’t post its annual profits, but people guess.
One such person said the company pulls in 1.3 billion dollars a month, which is just
silly talk.
It’s a private company, so it’s hard to know.
Another said the company was worth about one billion and in 2015 was earning about $629,668,000.
We are told by the mainstream media that Mind Geek, that owns Pornhub as well as You Porn,
RedTube, Tube8, Reality Kings and other big sites, has revenues of about 500 million a
year.
We certainly have come a long way from watching flickering women inside a mutoscope or painting
depictions of fellatio on Roman vases.
The trick was bringing porn home; no more hidden magazines or taking care of biological
needs in a public cinema.
And Pornhub is king of the online sexual jungle, in part because it’s made itself open to
the public and is not ashamed of what it does.
Maybe Pornhub is trying to undo a taboo, or perhaps there is still a long way to go.
It seems porn is here to stay, although it will always be somewhat controversial.
Do you think it benefits society, or do you think we should turn our backs on porn, or
at least watch it less?
Will we become more immersed in porn as technology develops?
Is that a problem?
Tell us what you think about this subject in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video What Happens to Your Body While You Are Having
Sex?.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.