1. Intro
Pornhub Insights: Original (Research) Sin
Why porn, of all things? Plenty of people ask me when & why I started this research. In a way, one could say I started this research around age 12--although not yet cognizant of its academic value. And as to why: given that porn sites consistently occupy multiple slots in the top 50 most-visited sites on the entire internet, and sometimes many within the top 10, it is hard to believe that anyone would find it odd that I'm curious about porn. Plus, honestly, I just love porn, and I think "smut" media can exist in really personally positive creative forms.
Yet the first time I truly focused on pornographic statistics was in 2016, just after the presidential election, when a chronically overlooked site caught my attention: the official PornHub Insights blog. This shockingly under-appreciated statistics offshoot of PornHub had been posting fascinating analyses of its users' consumption since June of 2013. I had first stumbled onto it via article in partnership with Vocativ in February of 2016 which provided a map of U.S. States each labeled with their most-viewed porn categories.¹ I could not get enough of this blog for the rest of the year, and so after the elections as I scoured electoral maps for answers, the first thought I (weirdly enough) had was: "I wonder what the porn says?"
I placed the 2016 Pornhub most-searched-terms next to a US electoral map from the election to see how they compared--and I started noticing all these interesting and weird overlaps between the two. From this point on, Pornhub just became a common resource for me in any hxstorical or gender & sexuality work that I encountered throughout college. And I noticed it appearing more & more in journalism and research--with some writers even stating that they were "given access" to PornHub's data. PornHub Insights is lauded as an absolute goldmine that some have even called "...the Kinsey report of our time."² And I can't disagree, given it's essentially the only real large-scale resource on porn consumption in existence--you can find everything from post-debate porn viewership to site visits from Hawaii after that false missle-alert--it's incredible.³
But lately, given my research on & experience in the tech world and its monopolized business models, I've been increasingly critical of all private data sources. And as I got further and further into PornHub's practices, hxstory, & fairly opaque inner-workings, I grew uneasy in trusting it as a near sole source. How could there be so little information about a company so unbelievably massive?
A first trigger for this concern came from noticing the significant amount of branded/targeted content. For example the analyses of the newly-released video games like Tekken or Overwatch. This is clearly made to appeal to targeted viewers and possibly could involve undisclosed payment from brands or advertising agencies. There is no open PornHub API for getting anonymized viewership data--it's actually rather unclear how one can acquire data from the site, and how much anonymity exists--and so each time anyone works with them, they have undoubtedly made a private agreement of some kind. Some news agencies and researchers have been granted access, but have never clearly stated how much access, and what was required of them when handling the data.
And a second trigger for concern occurred when I actually started uploading content onto my own profile--yes, I make my own porn, consider it engaged scholarship, if you must. As a nonbinary transfemme person, the selection of porn is pretty bleak. Go type either of those words into a porn site and see what pops up, it's not great. To combat this, I look to some words to live by: "be the porn that you want to see in the world." If you want access to porn that reflects your identity and works towards a more pleasure-centric and supportive sexual culture--maybe you just have to make it yourself. Teenage me sure wished more people did, and current me does too. In this piece, you will find that this initial mentality is much more complex and problematic, but it is critical for understanding my research process. My curiosity lead to vastly more in-depth understandings of inner-workings of account-registry, tagging, monetizing, and the emotional labor of putting one's body on the site--and it would have been impossible to explore without this first-hand engagement. And most importantly, without becoming a Verified Model, I would have never noticed the myriad of mysterious payment systems, algorithmic biases, and consent violations that the process relies upon.
Due to their status as the only sizable disseminator of porn data to journalists & researchers, and a lack of engagement with firsthand producers, we've been forced to trust that PornHub is giving us the real results, and not just sharing & publishing entertaining data while selling separate sets on the side. And we do it gladly, since frankly most people cannot even recall & validate their own consumption data, let alone fact-check the company's. Chances are, if you watch porn (which you statistically most-likely do) you are doing so in "Private Browsing" or "Incognito" or are clearing your browser hxstory afterwards. For most, personal responsibility & reflection on consumption are wiped away by the magic of apparent anonymity. Very few people actually have an account where they track, save, and playlist interesting content (like on other media platforms) in an attempt to figure out what they're feeding into their brains. And even fewer are actively posting media on their accounts. People enjoy this lack of culpability, but it sets them up to be taken advantage of by big tech & advertising. These companies are recording every video you watch and click you make--even if you're not.⁴ While PornHub's data is certainly incredible, it's difficult to confirm if it is also actually credible, when we don't ever even consider trying.
So I started wondering: how I could personally test this data from a free, public-access perspective? What data is just sitting out there online that anyone can grab without explicit corporate permission? Essentially: how could I create my own public version of PornHub Insights without any private access to company's data?
Open Data & Public Discourse
Very importantly, let’s clarify my praxis right off the bat, I am only going to use publicly available, free data & tools for this analysis—if I am to be criticizing the lack of available data about porn, this seems pretty important. This may give me less access to more detailed data, but frankly, that’s the point. Porn is run by a fairly mysterious market, its regulations are loose, and the amount of public knowledge about porn essentially ends at viewing videos. And the problem with most scholarship on this data (which is already very difficult to find) is that it fails to clearly present methods and therefore fails to help build a real academic space for these conversations. What I aim to do here is provide analysis as well as clear methods for getting this data so that any interested public entity can further engage and prod the system for information.
This is not meant to magically tell you the state of porn, or use consumption data to answer frankly kind of tired questions like “how many men are gay?”⁵ that have become increasingly less useful as gender discourse develops—it’s meant to showcase tools at our disposal, prove/cast-doubt-on some apparent “given knowledge,” and make some interesting observations useful for others’ research. As both a consumer and producer of porn, I am incredibly curious about accessible data on this subject, since it’s frankly shamefully under-studied given its market-size.
That’s partly because academia doesn't love the internet, and that porn is made to be a less-serious area of study. But it’s mainly due to the fact that modern internet porn is actually incredibly young. It’s really only been a little over 20 years since the inception of the first usable web sites. Frankly, my generation is the first to grow up with full access to internet pornography right around puberty. More specifically, we’re the first to possess personal private devices like smartphones and tablets that allowed for private consumption in our bedrooms, as opposed to on some massive family-living-room dial-up computer (bless those brave souls). Armed with our 1st Gen. iPod-Touches, we were the first to crash headfirst into the seemingly limitless swath of sex & ads that the internet had to offer in the mid-2000s.
Really think about that—there was no finding your parent’s porno mags or VHS tapes (or erotic pottery)--kids just instantly had random access to absolutely anything in the online sexual universe, with their only guidance coming from porn sites. This represents a massively significant hxstoric sea-change in the consumption of pornography. And the breadth of methods for distribution has only gotten wilder--trust me, I watch a ton of porn now.
It is critical to understand that this piece isn’t about finding just the most popular sites for specifically trans porn, it’s about finding how trans porn is consumed on the overall most-visited porn sites on the internet. I want to look at where the biggest “unfocused” market and consumption is occurring—where are people just starting, like I did on my iPod Touch, and where people are first finding porn first for free. Plus, I want to examine sites of the most economic activity via ads, clicks, and pay-per-stream services. So for the purposes of this piece I’ll be specifically focusing on the intersection of one of the world’s most popular porn sites, PornHub, and how performers, specifically trans models, operate culturally & economically within its constraints. As we proceed, I will further explain the economic & cultural reasons behind why I chose to first study this site over competitors Xnxx, Xvideos, and Xhamster.
- Clark-Flory, T. (2016, March 3). The Porn Americans Are Searching For, State B State. Vocativ.
- O'Connor, M. (2017, June 12). Pornhub Is the Kinsey Report of Our Time. The Cut.
- PornHub Insights. (2018, January 17). Hawaii on Alert. PornHub Insights.
- Curran, D. (2018, May 27). Browsing Porn In incognito Mode Isn't Nearly As Private As You Think. The Guardian.
- Stephens-Davidowitz, S. (2017). Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What The Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. HarperCollins.