A new survey by Pornhub says Indians account for the third highest daily traffic to the site.
New Delhi: Indians love watching porn. India has been ranked among the three countries that have accounted for the highest daily traffic to Pornhub in 2018.
According to the 6th annual review report of Pornhub — the mammoth Canadian porn site — India was only ranked behind the United States and the United Kingdom.
The top 20 countries on the list alone make up 80 per cent of the total daily traffic, the report notes.
Pornhub clocked in a total of 33.5 billion visits in 2018, an increase of 5 billion over the previous year. For context, the current world population is 7.53 billion.
“To put that (92 million daily average visits) into perspective, that’s as if the combined populations of Canada, Poland and Australia all visited Pornhub every day,” Pornhub wrote in their annual report.
In India, as around the world, around 30 per cent of the traffic comprises women.
Just two months ago, in keeping with an order of the Uttarakhand High Court, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had ordered internet service providers to block 827 websites containing adult graphic content.
A similar order was passed in 2015, but subsequently tweaked to only affect portals that host child pornography.
Home-grown porn
One thing quite clear in Pornhub’s research on consumer behaviour online is that nothing gets Indians quite as excited as other Indians.
India’s fondness for watching ‘desi’ porn stars was strong for the second year in a row, with top searches containing the words ‘indian’ or ‘hindi’.
In a slight deviation from last year’s trends, where ‘Indian wife’ was the most-searched-for term, this year’s most popular search was just ‘Indian’. ‘Indian college girls’ was second, with searches for ‘hot sexy teacher’ growing by 423 per cent.
‘Indian bhabhi devar’ was the third-most-searched-for porn category in 2017.
Sunny Leone and Mia Khalifa remained the most searched for pornstars in India for the second consecutive year, while ‘MILF’ and ‘Lesbian’ were the top two categories of porn.
Compared to the worldwide average, the report said, visitors from India were 315 per cent more likely to view ‘Behind the Scenes’ videos, and 152% and 128% more likely to search for ‘Arab’ or ‘College’ respectively.
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HD porn on the go
Not surprisingly, given that more Indians are using smartphones and accessing increasingly inexpensive data plans, 95 per cent of the porn viewed by Indians was on a mobile phone.
This is in keeping with global trends, as “mobile porn continued its meteoric rise throughout 2018, with 80 per cent of Pornhub’s worldwide visits now coming from smartphones and tablet”, the report stated.
This marks an 8 per cent increase for porn viewership on smartphones over 2017.
The demand is also on the rise for high-definition content. There has been a notable shift in favour of searches for 4K videos, said the report. Among Indians, ‘indian HD sex’, ‘hindi sexy video HD’, and ‘hd xxx hindi video’ rounded up the top five searches. ‘HD’ was entirely absent from the top searches of 2017.
Also read: Does watching porn make us better lovers or shrink our brain?
Youth activity
India’s age demographics – with 50 per cent of its population aged below 25 – were also reflected in the report.
While the age of Pornhub’s average visitor grew by half a year, to 35.5 years old, 85 per cent of India’s traffic was millennial, averaging 29 years of age.
The United States, in comparison, saw its Pornhub viewership mature by two years from an average of 36 to 38, as did the United Kingdom.
Another interesting finding is that traffic to Pornhub from India drops during festivals, with the fall as sharp as 15 per cent during Holi.