3. Audience & Identity

Alexa results for PornHub.com on 12/2/19.

First, we need to get a snapshot of the overall state of the market using tools like Similar Web & Alexa to compare sites and investigate their “overlapping” competitors. This relational data can help us zero in on sites for research that we may otherwise fail to find. These sites can provide plenty of tools, but some more advanced features are limited by paywalls. For example, we can only see 6 months of activity for each site without a premium account. But, we can take this info over to Google Trends to further gauge search interest on the sites--while it's not visit data, it does show interest. This data can help contextualize what we find on sites and place site changes and market shifts in a hxstorical data perspective. By comparing info across these platforms, we can start to get a good idea of how different site traffic stacks up.

For example, here is a comparison of search for the most popular porn sites in the world: Xnxx, PornHub, XVideos, & Xhamster. For the record, Google Trends registered Xnxx & PornHub websites, while Xhamster was labeled as a Social Platform, and Xnxx as just a search term (and it's unclear why that it is, given its traffic). It's important to remember this shows Google searches for the sites, not visits themselves (you need some premium Alexa and SimilarWeb accounts for that).

As a general note: I'll be including screenshots since unfortunately Google Trend's embeds can be buggy or even fail to appear on certain browsers--I will provide links to all the trends searches I utilized so you can go explore the results yourself.

Site comparison of top porn sites via Google Trends.

Site comparison without xnxx via Google Trends.

Global map of site comparison via Google Trends.

There's a lot going on here, but your first thought may be: why aren't you studying Xnxx when they're so much more popular? I have a quick answer: that site is basically a ghost--it is near impossible to get any info whatsoever about it (except for on their forums), and many have tried and failed (one day, I will get you Xnxx).¹ You can't even get an embed dump like from Xvideos, you can only register as an advertiser via something called Traffic Factory (apparently a representative will reach out to me soon). They are possibly owned by the same holding company, WGCZ, which owns Xvideos, Bang Bros, and Penthouse, but this all requires further investigation.

So I'd like to also show a graph without xnxx in it to get a closer look at these other sites. One interesting observation I'd like to make here is in the split between PornHub and XHamster occurring between 2012 & 2013 which may be due to the addition of PornHub's ad-monetizing service that XHamster still does not really have. Amateurs we able to earn revenue from their views, which I think drove more content and viewership to the platform.

We can also display maps of these search terms to compare regional activity, like in this global comparison of term searches for these top porn sites. While this is map can only be so useful, given language barriers, bans, etc. it does align fairly closely with my previous map analyses of price-per-click via affiliates in the previous section. We see a clear clear for PornHub in wealthy western countries, although this time with an interesting lack of dominance in much of western Europe. Google Trends data does not point towards a popular future for Xhamster, but it does show increased interest in PornHub.

Uploader button from PornHub.

Sitewide-tag selection in video uploader on PornHub.

From this data, we can choose a site to dive further into. As you now know I’m particularly interested in PornHub, so this is where things get fun: we get our hands dirty. Explore the site, browse categories and inspect stags and trends, click every small footer link and info page you can find—you have to use the site enough to gain some idea of how people use it, and how you can get data from it. Plus, it simply takes a certain amount of random digging before you run into things like affiliate program registries, webmaster pages, and other useful tools & resources that only those very involved in the porn sphere would find. You can create a free account, and even verify and upload content like I do if you so choose. This is frankly the only way you’ll gain access to the actual process required for posting media, and frankly to even begin to understand the aspects of the process performers have to work through—it’s critical to really dive in.

You’ll be forced to choose your official “orientation” (which is straight, gay, or transgender--as if transgender was a sexual orientation) as well as the dysphoria inducing gender identity requirement that must “match your presentation” in your media, and to tag all of your clips with both system-wide tags as well as custom-entry ones. If you want to work with monetization, you’ll have to verify yourself via a photo of you with your ID and a piece of paper with your username written on it (yes, you must show your face), and hold a valid PayPal account. After uploading, you’ll get to see how stats & subscriptions work in relation to your earnings & payouts page.

I can't even begin to describe how much stress this rigid binary process puts on non-binary and trans performers --especially when if you want to "change your gender" you have to contact a model coordinator and re-send verification images. That being said, to be honest, the process of actually putting myself out there was very much worth it to me on many levels. There's something simultaneously stressful and affirming about realizing a porn company cannot accurate categorize you in their system (we'll get to that). And if you’re going to write about people’s internet body-rights and try to understand their positions, I think putting your own in play is rather important.

Wayback Machine logo via Internet Archive.

I know from the Categories page as well as my own experience uploading that "Transgender" is the site-wide tag that encompasses trans videos--but has it always been that way? Data we find going back to 2004 probably doesn't share this more modern language. If only we could see what PornHub looked like for the last two decades...oh wait we can because of the incredible humans at Internet Archive. We can use the Wayback Machine to track the development towards the Transgender category on Pornhub over time. When referenced against the hxstory of the site, Mindgeek’s acquisitions, forum posts, and public discourse—it can tell us a ton. Plus, we can see lots of weird forgotten relics like these 2012 ads against the California bill requiring porn performers to wear condoms on camera² which ran in the same month as the promotion of the Susan G. Komen Foundation for breast cancer awareness.

One of the more fascinating trans reddit threads: r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns.

"

will_i_be_pretty: Ironically, this is going to make it harder to find the non-gross trans porn ... :(

...

gallyguru: Porn that is more humanizing to trans actors in a way that trans people generally enjoy will generally say "transgender" or "trans" instead of shemale or tranny or whatever. But if it all starts getting called transgender, you can't just use key words to get a better chance of finding more "non-gross" porn.

[deleted_user]: Oh I think I see what you mean, you mean that it's just going to be filled with porn of trans women designed for straight guys rather than being porn for trans people?

saoirse-on-Thames: Still much better than normalising [sic] that slur in a way that people think it's a non-offensive term.

[deleted_user]: Yeah, that's why I was initially confused and tbh I do agree, we were always gonna get the shit end of the stick though, basically another lose-lose situation for us!

...

addy-bee: Yeah, because there was just so much of that [porn by trans people for trans people] to be found on pornhub?

"

And the convo just goes on from there and is absolutely amazing--I strongly suggest reading through it. There's a really diverse range of perspectives, experiences, and identities represented throughout the thread, and it's just very thorough and engaging as an archive of first-reactions to the syntactical shift. The question that really bothers me is around access. Changing the labels and "properly" sorting Transgender porn does make it easier to find and more organized, but does it also force a heteronormative absorption of the content? And furthermore, was having trans content simply living within categories like "Big Boob" and "Big Dick" rather than in their own space actually making it more likely to be engaged with by a wider swatch of browsing users? While most videos using the "shemale" label were likely not those chosen by trans performers themselves, if they were intentionally named that way, is it okay to just change all the tags of those videos to "transgender" overnight without consent? This question raised on Reddit is so critical because it cuts straight to the point: who does this "official" category really exist for? Statistically, I need more data, but from personal browsing experience in the space as well as external analyses, I would resoundingly say: cis men.⁴

Related topics for "trans porn" search term via Google Trends.

From searching related topics or queries for “trans porn” (by the way, just searching “trans” is basically useless given how many usages it has in language) we find a lot of interesting related topic & query terminologies like transsexual, shemale, tranny, and sissy—as well as related fields like virtual reality, hentai (Japanese animated porn), the Pontiac Firebird (because of the Trans Am), Chaturbate, and then most interesting to me Trap Music which is likely due to the word “trap” as used to describe a trans woman. From clicking around into each topic more specifically, we can locate lots of terms we may not even know existed—like futanari (Japanese term roughly for a hermaphroditic being) and kathoey (the Thai word for essentially a transfemme person—or a “ladyboy”).

Global mapping of the search term "ladyboy" via Google Trends.

To better understand the context of these various terms, we can compare as well as map them by region. For example, when we map the term “ladyboy” we can see its search prevalence in southeast Asia and Australia, likely due to the prevalence of its usage and possibly to the popularity of sex tourism amongst western visitors.

Terminology comparison search results via Google Trends.

We can also gauge usage of terminology when searching for trans pornography with these same tools. For example, we can compare interest in the search terms “trans porn” “ladyboy porn” and “shemale porn” from 2004 to present.

The massive prevalence of the term “shemale” is clearly shown to have little competition globally. I find it really interesting that 2006 has the biggest spike in interest in shemale porn for some reason—I’m assuming some sort of viral effect occurred that year, but I’m honestly not sure and am pursuing research on it. We can explore searches for “shemale porn” as a term globally or for “trans porn”, but given language barriers (since it's not a "topic"), it's unclear what it can accurately tell us.

Shemale porn searches global 2004-present via Google Trends.

Transgender porn searches global 2004-present via Google Trends.

Shemale porn vs Transgender porn searches global 2004-present via Google Trends.

What I do find interesting are the graphs of popularity in searches for "shemale porn" and "transgender porn" from 2004-present, in which we can clearly see the declining popularity of shemale as well as the more recent rise of trans terminology usage. However, when compared against each other, we see that the overall usage of shemale still so vastly outweighs that of transgender in terms of porn searches on Google as a whole, making their respective changes almost negligible. It's critical to run not only individual popularity results on Trends, but comparative ones as well, lest you completely lose overall context in their world of pretty graphs.

On the topic of general practice on Google Trends: it is important to note the difference between “search term” and “topic”.⁵ “Search term” is language specific, so when we look here we are seeing western words searched in Roman alphabet that directly match our terms.“Topics” are more useful because they are language-agnostic, however, Google does not disclose what specifically is included in each topic—so we don’t really know what’s in the secret sauce. Both can be useful for exploratory context, although they should probably not be taken beyond that stage, given the lack of verifiable methods.

However, it can be interesting to see which terms get their own “topics” and which do not. "Transsexual Pornography" is only trans porn-related topic I could find for any keywords—and it’s unclear if it encompasses most of these “fetish” terms we’ve found in their own non-explicitly-pornographic topics. How does google differentiate between Transsexual Pornography and Shemale content? Why this Transsexual the specific wording of this catch-all main topic, when it may not be the most searched term? I do not know, but it certainly makes me curious what’s in the special “topic” sauce that defines pornography—and we’ll get into that possible “adult” algorithm more in the next section. Given what we’ve seen in terms of related searches and their relationships to fetish, it could be possible that a great deal is included or excluded improperly.

HubTraffic embed dump selector.

This is the really good stuff. The "Webmasters" section of porn sites are a treasure trove of public information. They host the infamous "Embed Dumps" for many sites, which I discussed earlier. You do not need to somehow contact Pornhub and receive/buy access to their data--you can just download it and start checking out tons of data. PornHub's embed dump consists of over four million videos in a CSV that contains titles, site-tags, custom-tags, links, thumbnails, views, likes, dislikes, favorites, and pornstar names--and it's just sitting there for you. You can get a live RSS feed of the adds, updates, and deletions as well. If you don't want the entire file, you can also register for free as a HubTraffic affiliate and pull tag-specific CSVs from PornHub, Redtube, Tube8, YouPorn, XTube, Spankwire, Keezmovies, and ExtremeTube's databases. You can even embed those videos and start your own porn shell-site as I previously mentioned...

Personally, I wanted the entire database, because I wanted to not only grab videos in the "transgender"/"shemale" category, but also to find any video with custom tags matching the similar terms found from Google Trends. The problem is, this is a 4 million line database--it's huge. And rather than take up time on a supercomputer running Excel, I wanted to find a quick way to sort through the data.

For the sake of those here with no interest in database management, I've placed the methods & tutorials over in my methods page. It took months to figure this out, and I've painstakingly condensed everything I learned from the process of trial & error in that tutorial page--I hope it is helpful.

TLDR (for those not interested in my cool methods page): using a series of queries based on the overall Transgender category (30k videos, including all former Shemale which were appended during the shift, nearly matching the site number), combined with the terms discovered in exploring Google Trends and the Waybackmachine archives (another 30K videos), I pulled 60k video entries from the Embed Dump. I believe this represents the total trans-porn available on PornHub fairly well.