Another year, another tranche of Pornhub data.
Much like 2015, the past year too witnessed Indians enthusiastically hitting their keyboards and smartphones in search of some smut, according to data from Pornhub.com, which calls itself the world’s biggest porn site. In all, the website streamed nearly 92 billion videos over 23 billion visits during the year. The US and the UK led the charge, with Canada unseating India from the third spot on Pornhub’s ranking of the top 20 countries by traffic.
In India – now the fourth largest country by traffic – a large number of users were looking for something specific, as Pornhub.com explained in a blog post:
Most countries take great pride in their nationality, but India takes it to a whole other level as made evident by their top searches on Pornhub. A majority of searches (top, relative, and gaining) include “Indian.” One top term that came seemingly out of nowhere to make it to the top-10 list was “Indian aunty with young,” flying up to the top by 81 spots. India’s own Sunny Leone (NSFW) is again, the number one searched pornstar in the country and “Lesbian” makes it to the number two spot in the top categories.
India’s propensity to search for Indians becomes even clearer if you stack up the top-10 searches from both years:
As you’d notice, no Japanese or Indonesian distractions this year.
However, alongside India’s pornographic nationalism, there’s another standout datapoint from Pornhub’s 2016 analysis: The average time spent on the site dropped by a precipitous 70 seconds. The average visit duration for Indian viewers in 2015 stood at nine minutes and 30 seconds, among the highest in the world. In 2016, it’s dropped to eight minutes and 20 seconds, although the average duration worldwide has increased by 16% during the year.
Off the cuff, there could be two reasons. One, that India’s appetite for porn is waning. Or, that improving internet speeds in the country have cut down buffering and stream lag issues, thereby making visits short(er) and sweet. And with India’s smartphones-wielding users continuing to increase their share of Pornhub traffic – from 60% in 2015 to 70% in 2016 – those new 4G networks may well be kicking in.
Surely, this isn’t the Digital India many had dreamt of. But at least some are having a good time.
This article first appeared on Quartz.
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