Over the past year, technology has played a more pronounced role in our daily lives, as both a source of entertainment, and how we communicate with friends, family and coworkers. Quite often it’s the same tech that we use to touch ourselves, that we use to keep in touch with others, so Forbes asked Pornhub’s statisticians to take a closer look at the tech we use to log on and get off.
130 million people visit Pornhub every day, from all parts of the world and representing a variety of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Analyzing these billions of visits and pageviews gives us a snapshot of not only what sort of porn the world was viewing, but what devices and technologies we were using to connect with the internet.
Welcome to the Pornhub Tech Review.
- Traffic by Device
- Web Browsers
- Operating Systems
- Android vs Apple: Searches
- Windows vs Mac: Searches
- Search Engine Traffic
Traffic by Device
In 2020, mobile devices made up 84% of all Pornhub’s traffic worldwide. 80% of that was from smartphones, which saw their share grow by +4.7%. Tablet traffic was reduced another –29% in 2020, while desktop and laptop traffic were reduced to just 15% of Pornhub’s global traffic.
Some countries have even larger shares of mobile traffic including the United States, where 87% of visits are from phones or tablets. 95% of traffic from the Philippines is from mobile, and 92% in Mexico. Russia saw smartphone usage increase +10 percentage points in 2020 and Ukraine increased its share by +11 points.
Desktop computer hold-outs include Germany and Russia, where more than a quarter of Pornhub content is still viewed with a mouse in one hand.
Android vs Apple
Apple’s iOS is more popular in the Western countries that most frequently visit Pornhub, while Android is used to visit Pornhub throughout much of Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.
Apple’s iOS is the top OS of choice for the majority of Americans, except for three states where Android represents more visits: Oregon, Ohio and Virginia.
Web Browsers
Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari web browsers made up nearly 88% of mobile browser traffic. Chrome’s share grew by +5.4% while Safari dropped by -1.1%. Opera Mini’s share grew by +30%, but still only made up a paltry 0.8% of mobile traffic.
On the desktop side, Safari’s share of traffic more than doubled, which was clearly related to the increase in Apple’s share of desktop OS traffic (seen below). Microsoft’s ancient Internet Explorer usage plummeted by –43% but users of the newer Microsoft Edge browser reduced slightly as well to about 10% of Pornhub’s traffic.
Operating Systems
Users of Android and Apple devices flip flopped again in 2020 making that the 3rd annual switcheroo! Apple’s iOS made up 46.8% of mobile visits in 2020, compared to 53% in 2019 and 44% in 2018. Android’s increase of +14% in 2020 mirrors it’s previous -14% share reduction in 2019.
While desktop operating systems make up only 15% of Pornhub’s traffic, it’s still an active tech group as the share of MacOS users grew by +57% in 2020. The extra Apple traffic came directly from a loss in systems running Microsoft Windows. In 2020 Windows made up 66% of desktops compared to 76% the previous year. Mac OS grew to 26% in 2020 compared to just 16% in 2019.
Mobile OS Versions
If we break the results down further to the mobile OS versions being used, we find that Apple users tend to be more up to date than their Android counterparts. 73% of Apple visitors have upgraded to iOS 14 which was released in September. A further 20% are using the year old iOS 13.
Compare that to Android devices, where only 1.3% are using the latest Android 11 which had also been released in September. 24% were still using “Pie” which was released in 2018, 14% on 2017’s “Oreo” and 6% on 2016’s “Nougat”. Nearly 5% of Android users still arrive at Pornhub using an Obama-era operating system.
Android vs Apple: Searches
Device usage varies by region and demographic, so different sorts of porn tend to be watched on either Android or Apple based devices.
For example, “car sex” is not the most popular search on Apple devices, but it’s +170% more likely to be searched on iOS than on Android. The following chart compares Pornhub’s top 500 searches to see which ones are consistently more popular on one OS when compared to the other.
Search terms can be influenced by regional languages, but Pornhub’s 100+ video categories are the same throughout the world, making it easier to compare the genres of porn being watched on different operating systems.
Android users are +95% more likely to watch “Vitual Reality” content, while Apple users are +59% more likely to watch “Ass” videos.
Windows vs Mac
Remember the ‘Mac guy vs PC guy’ commercials from the late 90s? Now we can settle once and for all what their real differences are.
Proportionately, visitors using Windows operating systems are +127% more likely to view “Cartoon” porn, while Apple users are +112% more often viewing videos in the “Popular with Women” category.
We hope you enjoyed this edition of Pornhub Insights. Please note that all traffic is anonymized and based on data pulled from Google Analytics.