Well, dear readers, I’m pleased to report that I’ve found it at last. No, not my esteemed editor’s wallet, although unlike him, that did make a brief appearance this week to mark his 61st birthday when we managed to nick it out of his coat and splash the cash on some “staff entertainment and drinks”. Why, of course, the big news is that I’ve managed to finally uncover the Pornhub 2021 Year in Review.
OK, it might have actually been released just before Christmas but that means it fits perfectly with our mantra of “you read it here eventually”.
You see, every year, the Pornhub Insights team – definitely one for most of the data geeks I’ve ever met – sift through data from billions of visits to see what content defined the year. The top searches are often influenced by pop culture and other worldwide events and many of these terms define the year not just on Pornhub but in mainstream media as well.
In 2018 the list included ‘Fortnite’ and ‘Bowsette’, while 2019 was led by ‘amateur’ porn and ‘aliens’ and 2020 was ‘quarantine’.
For 2021 though, it seems all over the world people are “turning Japanese” in more ways than The Vapors allegedly sang about, with Hentai porn being the site’s most searched term globally, ranking number one in the US, number three in the UK and in the top ten of almost every country worldwide.
Apparently porn lovers simply can’t get enough of the hundreds of thousands of adult anime and manga characters hosted on the platform.
Dr Laurie Betito, clinical psychologist, sex therapist and director of the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center, noted: “Cartoons are more fantastical than regular porn. They may offer more visual stimulation in terms of movements, angles, colors, and facial expressions. Because it’s not real, it can go further, with less constraints that reality offers. Hentai porn also tends to have more of a storyline and people seem to be more and more drawn to context.”
If you say so Laurie.
The second search that defines 2021 is ‘Romance’. The popularity of searches containing ‘romance’ and ‘romantic’ more than doubled, alongside a 139% increase in ‘passionate’ searches.
Over to Dr Laurie again: “Human connection has become far more important this past pandemic year. Many people have experienced loneliness and isolation and may be craving love, intimacy and romance. So the next best thing to a partner it seems, are the fantasies of romance.”
Of course, given this industry’s penchant for jumping on any bandwagon that rolls into town – metaverse anyone? – it does beg the question, what are the lessons for marketers in all this?
Well, to be fair, I’m no expert but these findings certainly prove one thing: porn lovers really are a load of wankers…
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