Adult Material Hints
The year has begun with Pornhubs, now traditional, Year in Review, which details trends in the popular pornography sites traffic. This can include a breakdown of what users happen to be viewing over the past 12 months - and, remember, makes for some interesting reading.
The first clear message is that pornography is popular. Quite popular. An astonishing 28.5 billion visitors visited the site in 2017, the equivalent of 81m people each day.
But what were they looking at? Well, apart from the fairly pedestrian search terms, for example lesbian and excellent sexually explicit material massage, that youd expect, the review once again raises the question of how close users are skating to the limits of legality.
In 2016, I questioned the recognition of searches for teen porn. Viewing pornography featuring teens over the era of consent is legal - but in the majority of jurisdictions, including the US and UK, viewing indecent images of men and women under the age of 18 is a serious criminal offence.
Despite this, teen remains the seventh most searched for term by Pornhub users globally. In the UK, on the flip side, the term has now vanished from the very best ten most viewed categories, with users perhaps erring on the side of caution as the categories of mature and Milf rise in popularity. Within the US, teen dropped from first place in 2016 to ninth in 2017, while in Canada it went from the 4th most searched for category in 2016 to the tenth last year.
An ever-growing market
Generally, alternatively, demand for online pornography has grown in lots of countries, such as the UK, which is now second (after the united states and before India in third) on the top 20 list of countries using Pornhub.
There's a good reason for this. In the UK, for example, pornography produced and distributed for the video-on-demand (VoD) marketplace is now regulated by the British Board of Film Classification. Content that might not get an R18 certificate if released on DVD is now also prohibited for sale as VoD and this includes acts such as spanking, fisting and female ejaculation.
This has limited the availability of some pornography and means people are now much more very likely to turn to free internet hosting sites such as Pornhub to view footage of more unconventional sexual acts.
It seems porn users will also be increasingly taking their viewing habits public. The well publicised report of a man watching porn on his phone while travelling on a bus prompted people to come forward with their very own experiences of being exposed to pornography in public. The results supports this trend. The Pornhub figures reveal that more of us are now using portable devices to view pornography, with 64% of the sites UK traffic coming from smartphones.
It seems users have got more creative with their top search terms, too. Step-sister and step-mom were among-the UKs top five searches in 2017, while teacher and babysitter were also popular searches in 2016. Its no great surprise that the suggestion of illicit sex attracts significant quantities of traffic, something perhaps best illustrated this coming year by a huge surge of interest in British amateur dogging.
