MONTREAL – Gizmodo and other media outlets believes Pornhub is correct to assert Kim Kardashian’s much-ballyhooed sex tape is now “the No. 1 porn video of all time” in terms of viewership.
There’s only one problem with the impressive claim to porn fame: Pornhub has no way to know whether or not it’s true.
For starters, Pornhub’s stats only measure viewership across the breadth its own network. Yes, Pornhub’s network is large, but it’s safe to say if you add together the total number of visits to other porn networks across the entire history of the internet porn industry, the sum would easily dwarf even Pornhub’s admittedly large audience.
Second, Pornhub was launched in 2007, and pornography has existed for just a little longer than that.
To cite just one example, there’s no way Pornhub has accurate historical data about the consumption of porn movies like Deep Throat. I strongly doubt Pornhub has any sense whatsoever of just how many people watched that classic movie in theaters back in the day. (Yes, once upon a time, people really did go to movie theaters in pretty significant numbers to watch porn.) Pornhub also probably has no way to judge how many times Deep Throat was watched on VCRs during the years when VHS was the undisputed king of distribution formats for porn.
There’s no doubt 93 million views is a lot. I also don’t doubt Kardashian’s video is the most-watched in the history of Pornhub, but this whole thing of the mainstream media treating Pornhub like it’s the official scorekeeper of the porn industry has become patently absurd.
Not that I’m revealing any secrets here (at least to people within the porn industry), but the infographics Pornhub puts out are marketing materials, and the “analysis” of the stats is about as reliable as the Chicago Bears offense.
The good news is the unreliability of Pornhub’s stats is merely in keeping with tradition, because reliable statistics regarding the adult entertainment industry are, essentially, nonexistent.
Take the oft-repeated (but completely unfounded) claim the industry generates $97 billion a year in revenue, for example. If you trace the sourcing of the claim, you should get a good belly laugh out of the fact anybody believes it.
In truth, the $97 billion figure was derived by “analysts” from an outfit called Top Ten Reviews (TTR), which at the time was in the business of selling internet content filters. In an effort to make the products they pushed seem more desirable to parents and schools, TTR emphasized the ubiquity of internet porn and cooked up a handful of deeply flawed metrics to accomplish their goal, including the $97 billion figure.
The problem with the $97 billion sum is the means by which TTR came up with it: The geniuses added together previous estimates about the industry’s size from a variety of sources.
Let that soak in for a moment; TTR didn’t average the figures offered by these other sources; they added them together. That’s akin to taking the reported casualties from the Vietnam War as provided by 12 different sources and concluding 700,000 American soldiers were killed in the conflict. Your conclusion would be wrong, of course, but so long as you cited your sources in a footnote at the bottom of the infographic reporting the 700,000 KIA, media outlets might just run it without question.
I will say this for Pornhub: Their stats are probably more accurate than those offered by TTR back in the day. To be fair, I haven’t seen the original press release accompanying the infographic, so it’s also possible Pornhub put out its Kim K infographic under the more modest claim that her video is the most-watched in the history of their network, and the media just ran with the notion and dreamed up the idea the Kardashian video is the most-watched porn video of all time on their own.
Regardless, it would be nice if mainstream media outlets were willing to put in the work to determine whether any given porn stat floated their way has a modicum of validity. I suspect that’s asking too much from the modern journalistic profession, though. The news media is a content-based industry, too, and these days some outlets will take just about any excuse they can get to slap up a quick story about porn.
There’s a certain irony here, perhaps: Pornhub, a site and network built largely on content produced by others, is now producing non-porn content in the form of infographics that are eagerly snapped up by mainstream media outlets, which hail from a sector that has had its own struggles with the impact of free online content and the question of whether or not to erect paywalls around their online presence.
Maybe the next step is for Pornhub to move in on the news media business, directly. Maybe soon they’ll have a news aggregation site featuring “user-uploaded” news videos—in which the logos for FOX and NBC have been scrubbed from the lower right corner of the video frame, naturally.
And wouldn’t you know it? Newshub.com appears to be for sale….
