Pornhub Traffic During Super Bowl 51

The 51st Super Bowl took place on Sunday February 5th and saw AFC champions the New England Patriots play NFC champions the Atlanta Falcons. In the year’s largest televised sports event, millions watched as the Patriots overcame the largest deficit in Superbowl history to beat the Falcons 34 to 28 in overtime. Many live sports events cause a major drop in Pornhub’s traffic, but few are as drastic as the Super Bowl, when even non-football followers tuned in to see Lady Gaga’s halftime show, and the myriad of big budget commercials. Our friends at Cnet checked in to see how this year’s game stacked up.

Shortly after the game kicked off at 6:30pm, traffic across the United States dropped by -27%, and remained well under normal Sunday levels right up to the game’s end at 10:30. Pornhub visits immediately surged after the game ended, not just returning to normal levels, but reaching 9% above average at 11pm. Now there’s some real overtime ball play!

Everyone likes to root for their home teams, so we found some of the largest traffic fluctuations in the states of Massachusetts and Georgia. In both, traffic dropped sharply at the beginning of the game, with Georgia reaching a low of -37% below average at around 9pm. Even as defeat seemed certain, Massachusetts traffic still remained lower at -40%. Then something amazing happened — the Patriots began one of the largest turnarounds in football history. As word quickly got around to Bay Staters, traffic plummeted to -53% below average at 10pm, about the same time as it began to increase in Georgia.

At the end of the game, fans for both teams headed back to Pornhub to either celebrate their win or feel better about their team’s loss. At midnight traffic in Georgia was up +18% above average, but an amazing +30% increase in Massachusetts as fans did their own version over-cumming.

Visitors to Pornhub clearly had the Super Bowl on their mind as they visited the site on game day. Searches for “Super Bowl” and “Superbowl” were up 2451% on February 5th, along with a 407% increase for “NFL” and a 394% increase for “Football”. Once again “Patriots” won with a 1608% increase for their team name versus 386% for “Falcons”. For many viewers it was “Lady Gaga” that stole the show with a 598% increase in searches for her name, and 2432% for “halftime”.

While traffic was down 24% across the entire U.S. from 6pm to 11pm, not all the states were united in their love of football. Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire all dropped more than 40%, while some Southern states like Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi only dropped by 17% to 18% during the game. See how your state stacked up the full list below.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Pornhub Insights. Compare these results to our coverage of last year’s Super Bowl 50, and other historical games like the MLB World Series between the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians.