I wish I could say that I'm surprised that one of the most popular articles I've written was about Pornhub ... Every month I get hundreds of views on that post without having linked to it, promoted it, or put ads behind it.
The reality is that Pornhub does a lot right as a company. I'm going to clarify now, before we get into the real article, that I'm not advocating for Pornhub, or porn, or anything of that nature. I am advocating for good business practices and for good case studies.
Cool tech often gets adopted by porn and gambling before more mainstream uses. Porn was the launchpad for video streaming, mobile-enabled sites, VR, and (unfortunately) pop-up ad technologies. It is really popular. Check out these statistics.
I'm a vocal proponent of tracking, analytics, and data being the new precious commodity.
Pornhub tracks data like its business depends on it, which it likely does. A staggering 90% of all the world’s data (2.5 quintillion bytes per day) has been created in the past two years, last year, Porrnhub represented over 6597 petabytes of data of that (about 18,000 terabytes a day).
In 2019, over 5,824,699,200 hours of porn was watched on their site. That's over 6300 centuries of video.
via Pornhub Insights
Moreover, last year, it received 42 Billion views.... 10 billion more than last year. That’s 1,332 people a second, or 115 million a day. To put that in perspective, only 11 countries have populations greater than that.
Here are some additional facts about its use.
- Women typically spend 23 seconds longer on the site than men (and represent a third of users)
- The average time spent on the site is 10 minutes and 28 seconds (older demographics spend more time on the site than younger demographics)
- Sunday is their most popular day
While I would not suggest going through the full report (there's a lot of information on different pornstars) if you're interested in what platforms people use, what search engines, time of stay based on region, the effect of "events" on viewership, and more, Pornhub's insights are ... robust. Here's a link to the full report.