The world's large porn website, Pornhub, has been publishing analytical reports on the nature of traffic to its website at the end of the year. The Pornhub Insights report sheds light on India's rise as a hub of porn viewing.
According to news agency IANS, the latest Pornhub Insights report notes Indians topped the list of porn consumers on smartphones in 2019. "89 per cent Indians watched porn via mobile devices in 2019,” the report claims.
As a market, India outdid the US in consumption of porn on smartphones; US consumers were second on the list, with 81 per cent people in the market using their phones to watch porn. Pornhub Insights claimed that mobile traffic to the website had reached "77 per cent in 2019", which meant three out of four people were using their smartphones to watch porn. In 2013, this figure was a mere 40 per cent.
The rise in mobile consumption came even as traffic from India to Pornhub fell in 2019. In 2017 and 2018, India was among the top three countries providing traffic to Pornhub. In 2019, India fell to 15th place; Pornhub Insights attributed the fall to the Indian government's ban on the website and over 800 others in October 2018.
Ironically, the importance of the Indian market to Pornhub can be gauged by another finding on Pornhub Insights: iOS-based devices outdid Android in terms of traffic. According to Pornhub Insights, iOS accounted for 52.8 per cent traffic and Android 46.6 per cent. According to Android Authority, the fall in Android traffic was 14 per cent for 2019. Pornhub Insights attributed the fall to India: "Android-based devices are quite popular in India, so when India’s traffic decreased in 2019, it caused the share of Android devices to decrease.”
Indians are however, trying, to reach Pornhub in different ways. According to a report by Top10VPN in November 2019, the number of downloads of virtual private networks (VPNs) increased by 405 per cent in a year since October 2018. VPNs allow users to hide their location and bypass restrictions.
The Pornhub report claimed the website transferred 6,597 petabytes of data in 2019, which works out to 209GB per second. Pornhub Insights claimed 115 million visits were made to the website in 2019 and 6.83 million videos were uploaded. The website claims, “If you started watching 2019's new videos in 1850, you would still be watching them today!”