Pornhub’s 2019 Year in Review: Amateurs, Japan, and Boy Toys

Pornhub is both a boon and a bane to the porn industry, as it continues to eat up traffic, spread the idea that porn is free…and provide a gigantic platform for models and producers. At the end of the decade, the adult entertainment behemoth has released its seventh annual “Pornhub Year in Review” data dump, and the results are just as fascinating and frustrating as you’d imagine, so I’ve rounded up some of the highlights below.

Pornhub has often called itself the biggest porn site in the world, and the title doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. In 2019, site booked 42 billion visits—an average of 115 million a day. As they phrased it, “That’s the equivalent of the populations of Canada, Australia, Poland and the Netherlands all visiting in one day!”

It’s a massive amount of traffic, but the nature of those visits shows—during those 42 billion visits, there were only 203 million video votes and a measly 11.5 million comments left on videos. Most people are still, it seems, going to Pornhub to fap and then disappear, not to interact with the content in a meaningful way. Still, with “80,032 visits, 77,861 searches, and 219,985 video views” every minute, nobody’s scoffing at Pornhub’s pull.

Data analysts went on to note that 2019 was the year of the amateur. Not only did 98,000 new models join the platform, but Pornhub declared, “‘Amateur’ was the top of the list for 2019’s searches that defined the year.” Interestingly, nowhere do the data analysts explain why they made this distinction, other than calling it a “trending” search. “Amateur” doesn’t appear on the lists of top search terms, nor does the “Year in Review” article describe the term’s growth clearly. (The category “Amateur,” however, moved up eight places to become the third-most-viewed category of 2019…But I digress.) The point is that, as viewing trends over the past few years have seemed to indicate, more consumers are looking for “real people” in their adult content than ever.

Then again, lots of people are looking for the opposite. Other trending search terms that made waves in 2019 included “Alien” and “Cosplay,” indicating that a healthy number of Pornhub visitors are looking for pure fantasy in their smut. 

The search terms “Japanese” and “Anime” rocketed to the top of 2019’s search terms, upending the longstanding champ, “Lesbian,” which fell to third place. Pornhub explained that “Much of [“Japanese’s”] growth in popularity was due to a big traffic increase from Japan,” which became the second-largest source of traffic to Pornhub in 2019, behind the US. 

“As Japan moved up,” elaborated the article, “the United Kingdom moved down to third, while India moved down 12 positions from it’s [sic] previous third place position in 2018 partly due to the Indian government blocking access to some porn sites.” As we noted in a recent article, folks in India are still watching quite a lot of porn; they’re just using VPN apps to do it, and thus masking their location. 

Meanwhile, Lana Rhoades wont he dubious honor of most-searched-for porn star in the world in 2019. Mia Khalifa, who’s been retired for years, held fast at her number two spot, largely due to her continued presence in the media—notably by bad-mouthing the adult industry that made her famous.

In an interesting turn of events, the only male porn star to make Pornhub’s coveted top-25 list of searched-for stars was Jordi El Nino Polla—a small, skinny guy who stars in a lot of stepson and MILF porn, where he plays the role of a teen being taken advantage of by older women. His popularity makes sense when put into the context of female interest in porn in 2019. 

Turns out, the “Popular with Women” category was the eleventh most viewed in 2019, growing by 65% this year, during which time the proportion of female Pornhub visitors grew to 32% of total viewership. Meanwhile, “Femdom” was named a “trending” search term. As Pornhub’s own Dr. Laurie Betito said, “Women-in-power has been trending for a while now.” Perhaps Jordi El Nino Polla is what  more women are looking for—a boy toy they can get their empowered, self-pleasuring rocks off to.

There’s a lot more data where all this comes from. You can read the rest at Pornhub Insights.