UnSplash/Franco Alva

In 2013, a highly provocative article in the Huffington Post titled “Porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined” shocked the world. Everyone wondered: With the explosion of online digital platforms, do online porn sites really receive that much more traffic?!

A decade of technological advances later, the authors of a new study published in the Journal of Sex Research ask a fascinating and very pertinent follow-up question: Where does pornography fit in the contemporary digital media landscape today? Not only are all the options from the Huffington Post story still available, but those options have also vastly expanded their offerings and appeal. New technological advances have also exploded onto the scene, fueled by customer demand, advances in AI, and social norms reset by a pandemic that caused people to move almost every aspect of their lives online.

The question is: With so many more techno-communicative offerings (e.g., TikTok, Zoom, ChatGPT) and with people relying on these sites more than ever before, does traffic to pornography sites still dominate in the way it did a decade ago?

To explore this answer to this question, the authors took advantage of a free tool offered by Similarweb that lists the “Top Websites” while offering summaries of website traffic data for the world’s top 50 websites. The data they report is from April 2023.

What the Study Found

By comparing the amount of traffic to the three highest globally ranked pornography sites (Xvideos, Pornhub, and XNXX) with several prominent digital media properties, it remains true that Americans visit porn sites at astronomical rates.

Using a set of metrics that includes indicators of monthly unique visitors as well as monthly pageviews, the authors found that the top three pornography sites are more highly ranked than the most well-known household name sites (Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo) as well as those that are the most up and coming (TikTok, OpenAI/ChatGPT, Zoom).

Exactly how great is this disparity? In a word, huge. Xvideos, the top-ranked pornography site, had 700,000,000 more total visits than Amazon and 900,000,000, 1,100,000,000, 1,300,000,000, 1,500,000,000, and 1,800,000,000 more total visits than TikTok, OpenAI, LinkedIn, Netflix, and The Weather Channel, respectively. Winner, winner!

The authors also looked at bounce rates, which indicate the percentage of visitors who leave a website after only viewing one page. They found that pornography sites (Xvideos, Pornhub, XNXX, and Xhamster) had lower bounce rates than non-pornographic sites. They also found that the pornography sites XNXX and Pornhub had higher pages per visit figures than nonpornographic sites.

In other words, not only do people visit porn sites more often than non-porn sites, but they tend to stick around once there.

Which site kept users around the longest? Except for Twitch and Reddit, Xvideos had a higher average visit duration than the comparator nonpornographic sites. It appears that pornographic sites tend to be far “stickier” than non-pornographic sites in a multitude of ways.

In addition, the Similarweb data suggested that some pornographic websites have either comparable or higher levels of global reach and engagement to both legacy and avant-garde nonpornographic digital media properties. In other words, porn sites appear on more people’s screens globally than even the most well-recognized non-pornographic sites.

Which country comprises the largest percentage of traffic to all porn sites combined? Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pornhub, Xvideos, and XNXX had higher traffic rank scores in the U.S. than all the nonpornographic sites except for Amazon and Yahoo.

Regarding the gender breakdown of porn site visitors, the authors found that men comprised 79.96 percent and women 20.04 percent of Pornhub’s global audience. The authors point out that this gender breakdown mirrors that in national surveys where people are asked to self-report how much porn they watch. This means that not only do a significant number of women watch porn, but they are also not afraid to admit it on an anonymous survey, perhaps reflecting shifting cultural gender norms.

How old do porn site visitors tend to be? According to Similiarweb’s data, nearly half of porn site visitors are between 18 and 34. After that, pornography usage tends to gradually decline as users get older.

In conclusion, although Similarweb’s figures are estimates only, and though web analytics can’t possibly capture all varieties of digital media access, it appears that pornography remains a tremendously popular media genre both globally and in the U.S.

This is particularly impressive when one considers all of the barriers that make watching porn often difficult. Even with content filters, even with the risk of discovery by one’s family or romantic partner, even when one lives in a culture or has a religion where porn is viewed as evil, pornography sites still rule the day.