Pornhub is the world’s largest hard-core adult pornography site. Access to it is free and unrestricted. They recently published a blog describing how their site fared in 2013. They are very pleased with themselves.
First they want us to know they have now configured Pornhub to be accessible from
every possible device known to man
Games consoles
They then do a special feature on visits to their site made by people using games consoles. They don’t tell us what proportion of total traffic comes via consoles but they do let us in on a lot of other stuff.
I know games consoles are owned by people of different ages. The average age of a gamer seemingly is 35 although we should not forget that, in 2010 at any rate, 25% of gamers were under the age of 18.
Pornhub details the principal consoles being used. They distinguish between the Sony PS3 and PS4, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Wii. Apparently console users as a whole stay longer on Pornhub than the typical visitor. We also learn that, per visit, Wii users went to the largest number of pages while Xbox users stayed the longest. Moreover Xbox users were least likely to land on Pornhub by mistake – measured by something called the bounce rate.
Who knows what to make of data like these? Is there something in the demographics of games console ownership which might explain what could otherwise potentially be random and therefore meaningless differences? Answers on a postcard please to the usual address but parents take note. Games consoles have many uses.
Desktops, mobiles and tablets
Pornhub discloses the proportion of their visitors arriving on their site using either a mobile phone, a tablet or a desktop machine. By a margin of 51%:40% globally Pornhub is still accessed mainly from desktops but mobiles are moving into the ascendancy. In the USA last year 53% of access to Pornhub was from a mobile, the highest proportion in the world, up from 47% the previous year. The UK was not that far behind at 43%, up from 39% in 2012.
9% of all visitors to Pornhub came via a tablet. At 15% the UK had the highest proportion in the world of tablet users. Our nearest rival was Italy at 10%. I would be interested to track visits from different types of tablets and for that to be correlated with the price at which they were sold. My hunch would be the higher the representation of some of the less expensive tablets the greater is the likelihood the users will be kids.
If you add mobiles and tablets together the proportion comes out at 49%, yet more evidence the desktop is on its way out.
Gigantic numbers
In 2013 Pornhub had a total of 14.7 billion visitors, averaging at 1.68 million per hour. Between them the visitors viewed 63.2 billion videos. Unsurprisingly the USA generated the largest number altogether but the UK was second even though we rank only 9th in the global table of the number of internet users per country. The Guardian’s Mona Chalabi tells us UK residents visited Pornhub over 110 million times.
Maybe there’s an English language bias which draws more UK residents to Pornhub but whatever the explanation we are sufficiently important for the company to produce a special statistical analysis of UK Pornhub users. I’m not sure it is interesting enough to write much more about it. Suffice to say that in almost every category we are No. 2 to Uncle Sam.
Pornhub breaks the law every day
The really big thing to remember about Pornhub is this: our law is very clear and they are breaking it. This is from the Crown Prosecution web site
The principal factors influencing whether a prosecution…is required are…..
- the type and scale of any commercial venture…..;
- whether publication was made to a child or vulnerable adult, or the possibility that (it) would be likely to take place;
- where children are likely to access material of a degree of sexual explicitness equivalent to what is available to those aged 18 and above in a licensed sex shop…..This applies to material which is not behind a suitable payment barrier or other accepted means of age verification, for example, material on the front page of pornography websites and non-commercial, user-generated material which is likely to be accessed by children and meets the threshold. see R v Perrin, [2002] EWCA Crim 747
- where publication took place, especially if material can be readily seen by the general public, for example in a newsagents or market, or websites easily accessible to children;
The UK’s gambling web sites have managed to find a way to keep children off their sites. Pornhub could do the same. But they don’t. So why has no attempt ever been made to arrest the owners of this site and bring them to the UK to face trial?
Desiderata 