Pornhub Statistics – Analysis of +9,000 Hours of Porn

The porn industry is enormous around the world. It’s one of the largest industries on the planet, with estimated global revenues of $100 billion a year. Every year the biggest player Pornhub.com releases user statistics that get huge exposure in the media. Maybe not surprisingly, there is a dark side to the statistics of Pornhub. One that is not included in their “Year in Review”.

We have the last 12 months spent over 9,000 hours watching porn videos on Pornhub to provide statistical evidence for what the videos on Pornhub contain. Because whether we like it or not Porn videos are seen by very many people every day (numbers from the yearly Pornhub stats say more than 40 billion people a year).

So what is it exactly that we look at in these videos, and how will this implicitly affect our view on women, sex, etc? Here are the key takeaways from our in-depth report.

Key Takeaways

• 98% of Pornhub videos feature a white female and only 16% feature women of other colors.
• Male porn actors are 3 times more likely to receive oral sex compared to women.
• Male porn actors are 7 times more likely to get an orgasm compared to women.
• 50% of Pornhub videos are incestuous (title or video content).
• Every third Pornhub video is violent
• The 100 most popular videos have an average of 65.41 million views.
• The most popular video on pornhub has 230 million views and the least popular has a total of 40.1 million views.
• The average length of the top 100 most popular porn videos is 14 minutes and 8 seconds. The longest is 39 minutes and 50 seconds, and the shortest is 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
• The most popular sex positions on pornhub are; Missionary, Cowgirl, and Doggystyle

Ethnic Distribution – Racism

Although the porn industry has moved toward inclusivity in recent years, our data shows that much more still needs to be done. We were disappointed to find that the majority of male porn actors were Caucasian at 90%.

The lack of diversity also continued when exploring female actors. It was revealed that caucasian females appeared in all but two of the videos we investigated, making up a total of 98%. We were shocked to find that only 3% of the female actors featured in the videos were Black and 16% were of Latin background.

However, an increasing number of x-rated performers of color are taking control and directing their videos and owning their sites.

Nyomi Banxxx, an African American pornographic film actor, spoke on the topic and said: “I think for a lot of women of color who you’ve seen come up, including myself, it’s because we took charge of our brand and started making our stuff and doing things outside of the industry,”

However, she added that “Black porn sells, but it will always be a niche. It will never be mainstream. Asian porn will always be a niche. Remember, we’re in white America.”

Gender inequality

Most people might just assume that Pornhub is a platform where gender inequality is very prevalent.

However, no one has the data to back it up before now.

We found gender inequality to be prevalent in multiple areas:

A study by the University of the Pacific and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published in the Journal of Sex Research has highlighted gender inequality in sex. The study discovered that younger women are more likely than men to perform oral sex with their partner, despite not wanting to.

Ruth Lewis, the co-author of the study and sociologist at the University of the Pacific, said: “It’s clear that we also need to be encouraging young people to think critically about how women’s and men’s bodies are talked about in society, the nuances of consent and coercion, and how gender equity might be negotiated in practice.”

Our research further highlighted the issue and revealed that in 1 out of 4 videos, the male receives oral sex, whereas this reduces to only 1 out of 10 where the female does.

Oral sex

We counted all the male actors and the percentage of which received oral. And then we did the same for female actors on Pornhub.

• Male porn actors on Pornhub are 3 times more likely to receive oral sex compared to female actors.

The orgasm gap

Again, we counted the number of female orgasms and the number of male orgasms. The results are stunning!

• 9 out of every 10 videos include a male orgasm, whereas only 1 in 10 videos includes a female orgasm.
• Male porn actors are more than 7 times more likely to orgasm compared to female actors.

Incestuous Videos

Pornhub is filled with incestuous videos, that allude to an illegal and socially taboo act.

How is that legal? Well, basically because they use “step” as a safeword.

What was surprising was the number of video titles that contained any incestuous words.

And the share of incestuous videos has only been growing over time:

• 50% of all Pornhub videos are incestuous (stepdaughter, -son, -sister, -brother, -mother, -father).
• Incestuous videos share of the total videos on Pornhub grows on average by 1.5 percentage points each year.

There has been increasing interest in taboo porn categories, such as incest. Besides being illegal in most areas of the world, it is also extremely socially taboo and viewed in a negative light in most cultures worldwide.

There have been a plethora of different explanations for the rise in interest in incest-related pornography. Many experts have commented this is because of the popular series, Game of Thrones. The show includes many scenes that include incest, which may have uncovered many viewers’ fetishes.  

Dr. Paul Wright of the Indiana University Media School Esquire spoke on the topic and said: “As types of pornography that were less common in the past — for example, violence, this or that fetish — become more and more common and easily accessible, consumers get bored by them and need the extremity and deviance upped a notch to once again become aroused and excited. Few sexual acts are more extreme or deviant than incest”.

Violence

• 1 in 3 videos on Pornhub is violent.

Of course, by “violent” we do not imply that it is necessarily unwanted violence. It is simply an observation of more hardcore sexual acts such as:

• Choking
• Pulling hair
• Verbal aggression
• Dominant behavior

Sex positions

The Kama Sutra has between 1,800 and 2,400 sex positions and is a collection of Hindu texts. Hindus view the Kama sutra as a necessary resource for learning about the topics of relationships and sex. 

The kama sutra includes 97 sex positions, including positions many may have never even heard of before, such as the yawning position, the Indrani position, and the Congress of a cow.

We, therefore, investigated the most popular sex positions featured in porn videos. The top five were more well-known than those featured in the kama sutra: 

1. Doggystyle (79%)
2. Cowgirl (65%)
3. Missionary (45%)
4. Reverse cowgirl (42%)
5. Eagle (38%)

The deep dive into Pornhub statistics and biases

The following two statistics you’ve heard:

• 90% of porn videos feature a white male
• 23% of porn men receive oral sex.

But what happens when we isolate white males and look only at the percentage that receives oral sex versus men of other colors?

• Only 10% of non-white males on Pornhub receive oral sex, while 27% of white males receive oral sex.
• You are 3 times as likely to receive oral sex as white and male compared to if you were black, Asian, or female.

Methodology

After sourcing through more than 150.000 applicants for the position of “Head of Porn Research” we managed to find the perfect fit in Rebecca Dickson. A story about Rebecca has been posted at e.g. NyPost: https://nypost.com/2022/05/18/im-paid-to-watch-porn-all-day-i-cant-believe-i-have-the-best-job-in-the-world/

Over the last 6 months, she has watched over 9,000 hours of porn material on Pornhub.

The videos were picked based on popularity to get a representative sample of what content is watched on Pornhub.

Each video was manually reviewed and data was input in a spreadsheet for each pre-determined factor (see at the bottom).