Arousal Quantified: 7 Trends Revealed via Pornhub's Data

What millions of searches and clicks say about sexual desire

Porn.

What are you feeling?

It’s strange that for a single word to embody so much, we have such a hard time publicly expressing those thoughts and feelings.

Arguably, what we’re most uncomfortable with is not porn itself, nor are we uncomfortable speaking out against porn, but rather what we’re uneasy with is navigating its complexity and nuance.

Perhaps this is because we don’t have a whole lot of data to base our opinions off of — just private, isolated thought amidst a backdrop of taboo.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, writes,

“People have no incentive to tell the truth on surveys. The more impersonal the conditions, the more honest people will be. An internet survey is better than a phone survey, which is better than an in-person survey.”

Stephens-Davidowitz goes on to propose that Google searches are “the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.”

I think we can take this idea one step farther.

The Pornhub search bar, the largest porn platform in the world, and the 7th most viewed website in the world — more frequented than Amazon.com — is an even more intimate alter of human truth.

ZINE received early access to Pornhub’s 2024 Year in Review Data Report — in addition to some exclusive, requested analyses — in order to better decode the state of eroticism, curiosity and our private desires online.