If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t get offended by the notion of porn, then you’ll likely be as intrigued as I am by PornHub’s annual statistical review, which gives in-depth analysis to the trends of their viewership. The report is here, and is, at least visually, safe for work. The previous year is here. I realize that some may find the topic distasteful but, truth be told, large data analysis like this really IS what gets me all excited. (Seriously, I’d equally love to see this kind of statistical infographic breakdown of the board game database I discussed yesterday. Because I’m a massive data nerd)
It’s also somewhat interesting to see parallels between that entertainment industry, and the gaming industry – which makes sense, to some extent. If you think about it, we’re all competing for the scarce spare time of the public. One clear parallel is that, much like gaming services, PornHub also sees serious declines during major sporting events. Among other interesting tidbits.
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- Much like gaming, it’s a highly seasonable business, with most viewing happening in the bitter cold and loneliness of winter.
- Care about stamina? Different countries vary wildly in terms of session duration, with sessions in the Phillipines lasting almost twice as long as those in Eastern Europe.
- 23% of users worldwide are women. Oddly, even though the US is easily the top customer of the site, their female viewership is way lower (15%) than that average.
- Much like gaming, porn audiences are gravitating away from desktops (-13% form the previous year) to phones (+12%) and tablets (+20%). However, these numbers vary WILDLY from country to country. Russia and Poland, for example, are still firmly PC first countries.
- Playstation may be winning this generation’s console wars out of the gate, but one place that XBox has them beat is PornHub viewership (45.7% to 40%).
The last interesting takeaway is that the biggest way for new talent to break through is to get in the mainstream news somehow. The new number one actress nowadays is Mia Khalifa, who was recently on CNN for being condemned in her home country of Lebanon for her nefarious career. Earlier in the year it was Belle Knox, who was notoriously outed by her classmates at Duke. If more adult actresses recognize this as a growing trend to claiming fame, we could be in for a truly nutty year of news.
It’s interesting to see Porn suppliers follow the free-to-play model. Most if not all of the content on Pornhub is of inferior quality to the material found on subscription sites and yet it is obviously fit for purpose (even if the average purpose is less than 10 mins). I can only imagine they make a good return on advertising revenue.
There’s a Louis Theroux documentary out there ‘Twilight of the Porn Stars’ where many porn celebrities lament the effect the internet and ease of access to free porn is having on the industry. It revisits one of his earlier 1998 docs ‘Loius Theroux’s Weird Weekends: Porn’.
Metrics is an area I’ve always been interested in but as a mere player rarely if ever get access to the privileged information. Seen as a good indication of how well a game is performing, or the direction it is likely to take, companies are obviously keen to hold this information very close restricting the sort of information they do release to fairly bland and meaningless statistics.
Games that are doing very well are sometimes proud to release interesting statistics. Of particular note, both League of Legends and World of Tanks have released interesting infographics.
http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=2669363
http://worldoftanks.com/en/media/8/2013-wot-infographic/
If you’re really a datanerd, look into the data released by SOE about EQ2 a few years ago.
The interesting thing about PornHub, is its not so much the F2P market but the long tail market. It is important to know that the pornhub empire as encompassed by their parent company, MindGeek, is actually one of, if not the largest force in porn from a creation, talent, and distribution standpoint. They own something like 14 distinct studios (each of which has numerous sub brands) that create porn along with being one of the major players in for profit camming. Their main studio’s include Twisty’s, Brazzer, Digital Playground, Mofo, etc along with numerous boutique and special interest (aka any kink you can imagine) studios. They also obviously own a great many of the subscription sites out there as well. In addition, they manage a quite large number of sites for other companies (ex Playboy).
So it probably best not to think of their properties like PornHub so much as a F2P analog but as a combination advertising and long tail play. They can put up short clips from their various Studios that are either part of the older catalog or feature new talent as both promotional material and as a way to monetize content that ordinarily wouldn’t have much value. In addition, with the camming side and the uploaded amatuer content, they can scout for new talent that they want to sign (and they have signed talent that way).
PornHub itself is basically just a technology subsidiary though that has no interaction directly with the content side as strange as that may seem. They are literally in a different country than any of the studios. There was actually a pretty decent reddit AMA that they did.
I drew the analogy between Pornhub and the F-2-P MMO market as there is content made available for free that is fit for purpose, and a pay wall to those that want more convenient features.
Even then many MMOs fit a certain amount of ‘Long Tail’ development into their structure. They try to cater to as many playstyles as they possibly can to open up the player base. If anything it could be argued it is their greatest weakness as they are seldom able to get the balance right between the various groups and the difference in mechanics required.
I’ll see if I can track down the EQ2 data 🙂
I did like the SWTOR informatics that was released, again a little light on the sort of information I’d really like to see but I understand why that is.
http://www.swtor.com/info/news/news-article/20141126
It does hint at one of my other misgivings about metrics and that is accepting them at face value.
The Yellow-Black light sabre crystal is given as the most popular, and yet in game I rarely see it used. It was a gift for early release players, so was there for the peak player base, and one was given free to every character generated. This gives it a huge advantage over other colours at the low levels. Higher level crystals are available from a vendor but come in at a high cost (usually far cheaper to buy the latest Cartel Market crystal if there’s a glut driving prices down).
There is also the inference that can be made from 57 million characters created and a fleet of 6,824,056 ships, only ~12% of the characters created made it past the end of the home world where the character is given a ship. Alongside the 635 million hours invested (an average of ~11 hours per character created) and the time it took the first player to reach 50 (59.47 hours) it can be assumed that a very small percentage of the player-base make it to end game.
Although I was surprised more was not made of the PvP kills (in my maths class 1,790,161,866 would round to 1.8 billion not 1.7) after 3 years of play (It’s a 3rd year anniversary celebration so I just rounded to an exact 3 year point of 26,280 hours) there were 68,119 kills per hour or 1,135 kills per minute or 18.9 kills per second. That sounds like a very healthy PvP value 🙂
Of course once you start putting figures up it gives the competition something to rival, and followers of other games (although I still feel gamers are letting themselves down by being so tribal) to brag about on the forums – or troll with :/
Although, not sure why I’m using that as an example as I’m sure you were privileged to the source material and the full wealth of SWTOR metrics 🙂
Ah, pornhub, my fav site for nude girls together with perfectgirls and http://theporndude.com/. Personally, I rarely watch any adult stuff on my gameconsole 😉
A console ain’t really ‘comfortable’ for it. If I want to see some 18+ stuff, I rather use my computer/iPhone5. Don’t really feel like getting infected with a virus on my PS4.
I wasn’t even aware that you could stream porn on a 3DS. Does the porn get displayed in 3D too or not? 😀
Anyways, I hope pornhub does something about their vid database. Almost nothing can be seen in HD yet and it’s 2015.
Apparently most Americans are using their phone for porn now. Is it just that they have more control over that device? Or that it is…ahem, already designed for use with only one hand?
–Dave
I have two hypotheses to explain this migration, in addition of the increasing market share of phones.
1)Desktops and, to a lesser extend, laptops are shared within a household; mobile phone aren’t. Is it far easier to hide your habits on a device you don’t share.
2)It allows to access porn at work without being caught by the administrator. I read, a few years ago, that some companies find porn on nearly on half of the male employees and a little less than a third or a quarter of the female employees ( sorry, my memory is hazy) . Mobile phones allow serving a market of people that don’t want to be caught doing something they aren’t supposed to do, boss and admins doesn’t have access to personals mobile phones.
As far as network admins are concerned, watching porn on personal phone doesn’t create a security risk for the workplace.
OK, so porn and games worst enemy is sport, or watching sport to be exact. I m always anxious about the pornhub’s infographics, they put a lot of effort into it. https://www.fapshows.com(NSFW) is another adult cam site that started doing infographics, they also have a few interesting ones.
I remember reading about the massive drops in traffic on porn sites during the superbowl. If you think about it, the drop in traffic is perfectly normal, I doubt men will prefer watching adult videos or playing games to watching the superbowl or any other sports event they only get to see once a year.