MONTREAL – At some point, one hopes, each release of statistical data from Pornhub will stop being treated like the end-all, be-all of porn-related data — but given the media’s continuing Pavlovian response to each of the site’s press releases, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Pornhub certainly can’t be blamed for running their stats-pony into the ground. They’re in the business of promoting their brand, after all, and over the past few years, releasing traffic data is working like a charm toward that end.
What bothers me here really has nothing to do with Pornhub and everything to do with the inability of many journalists to discern the substantial difference between things like absolute numbers and proportions — an ability which is pretty important to distilling anything useful from the sort of data Pornhub offers.
Let’s start with a very basic example: If your country (India) is the second most populated nation on the planet, but fourth on the list of traffic sources for the world’s largest porn site, the proper conclusion is your countrymen are actually underrepresented, proportionately speaking, in the stats. It doesn’t come close to meaning “Indians are the fourth biggest consumers of porn online,” because this is a measure which should be looked at in terms of a per capita rate, not an absolute number of visits to the site, or of video views produced by Indian visitors.
When you consider the Chinese government blocks and filters the living hell out of the internet, it’s quite probable China would sit in the No. 1 spot on Pornhub’s traffic sources list were it not for the “great firewall” used to restrict and restrain the web-surfing habits of its people. We know for a fact porn is widely consumed in China, otherwise the government wouldn’t regularly make a very public point of shutting down domestic porn sites and social media accounts that display and share porn.
There’s a host of other factors involved, of course, like language, culture and any given country’s technical infrastructure and availability of broadband access to consumers. These factors likely go a long way in explaining why Britain (a term that really ought not to appear in this particular Pornhub list to begin with, since “Britain” is a group of countries, not a single country) is third on Pornhub’s list, well above where one might expect based on its population alone.
Above all else, of course, is that Pornhub, while no doubt very popular and very large in terms of the amount and variety of its content, is not actually representative of all online porn.
Viewers in search of videos from certain highly litigious gay porn studios, for example, or looking for content that fits within any of a variety of micro-niches probably don’t rely on Pornhub as their primary source, if they use the site at all.
Yes, Pornhub gets a ton of traffic and, yes, it and other tube sites have effectively gnawed off a substantial chunk of market share that used to be in the hands of other sites, both free and subscription. But 40 million visitors per day (or whatever Pornhub is up to now) and 78.9 billion video views in 2014, while certainly impressive, isn’t even close to accounting for the entirety of internet porn-surfing that goes on day to day.
Due to its central position in the long-running controversy surrounding user-generated-content sites and pirated intellectual property, Pornhub often takes a rhetorical beating among industry insiders, some of whom flatly deny the stats offered by the site have any validity or value, so strong is their antipathy toward Pornhub and its corporate parent, MindGeek.
I’m not one of those people. I do believe there’s value in the Pornhub stats, and I believe they’re being reported accurately by the company — or as accurately as one can report such stats, given the vagaries and uncertainties inherent in the ways such data is collected and measured in the first place.
Where things go wrong, as I see it, is when these numbers are wrongly interpreted by journalists. Unfortunately, such misinterpretations occur in the dozens every time Pornhub issues a new set of data. These misinterpretations aren’t Pornhub’s fault, although the company’s own interpretations occasionally stray into the absurd, too — like when it speculates (with tongue in cheek, one hopes) that an area in India produces particularly potent black tea, and the tea explains longer-than-average viewing sessions for users in the region.
So, to the extent you’re interested, please knock yourself out digging into the stats reported by Pornhub. Just be sure to read them for yourself rather than paying attention to interpretations offered by people who can’t be bothered to fact-check important news stories, much less scrutinize their own porn-stat fluff pieces.
