5 Trends Exposed via Pornhub Data
What millions of searches and clicks say
“A moral point of view is a poor substitute for understanding in technological matters.”
— Marshall McLuhan
Porn remains our least understood expression. We still refuse to look at it in the eyes and make peace with its history, its current role in culture, and its future. Instead, we view it with shame, as a pathology all its own.
It’s easy to say we’re in the midst of a multi-century war with pornography, but it’s with our own humanity.
In Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, social critic Laura Kipnis wrote,
“For all of these reasons, instead of seeking to suppress the pornographic, we might instead regard it as performing a social service: one of revealing these cultural sore spots, of elucidating not only the connection between sex and the social, but between our desires, our ‘selves,’ and the casual everyday brutality of cultural conformity.”
ZINE received access to Pornhub’s Year in Review Data Report, as well as some exclusive data, to better decode our state of eroticism, curiosity and private desire online. I’ve identified the five biggest shifts and what they reveal.
Before diving in, some ground rules:
This analysis solely focuses on statistics revealed around consumption, rather than what drives consumption, porn’s effects or sex work itself.
Like all entertainment, porn is not one medium. This data only speaks to one site. It does not reveal trends across OnlyFans, cam/streamer platforms, audio or literary erotica.
When reviewing the data — as always, we should ask, “What are its biases?” This raises questions: Does a platform and algorithm drive preference, or does preference drive the algorithm? And, are creators making what they want, or what the platform rewards?
Whether you watch, enjoy and approve of porn or not, remaining curious about what the world consumes here is critical to deepening our understanding of ourselves (fellow humans). If you’re uncomfortable even reading about porn, that’s a worthy inquiry. We don’t have to like or celebrate everything to respect it.
With that... what does the data expose?
01. The Coldplay-to-Cuckold Pipeline
On July 16, at a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts, a stadium kiss cam spotlit Kristin wrapped in Andy’s arms. Their affair was exposed... and later, so was the detail that they were coworkers.
The internet freaked out. But the commentary and memes weren’t just surface level. A cultural obsession with office affairs was seared into the collective psyche.
Since the event, searches for “cheating” and “sneaky cheating” grew +2X YoY (year-over-year), while “caught cheating” spiked +53% and “cuckold” +73%.
This might read as coincidence — until we learn that searches for “CEO” spiked +4.8X across Pornhub globally. “Boss” spiked +2.7X, “employee” +2.8X, “office affair” +3X, and “office sex” +62%.
Cultural events reliably inform our sexual fantasies. Look no further than spikes in searches for Fantastic 4, Superman and Jurassic World on Pornhub, which all also had theatrical releases this past year. Sexy Stegosaurus.
For Martin Scorsese,
“Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as ‘fantasy’ and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life — it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.”
Current events consistently find themselves typed into Pornhub search bars. The non-erotic and erotic are interconnected, and as Scorsese puts it, always in dialogue. Porn metabolizes.
Pop culture shapes what we search for, what we search for shapes what gets produced, what gets produced shapes what we imagine, and what we imagine informs how we show up in the world. The ouroboros pleasures itself.