Super Bowl 53 took place on Sunday February 3rd, with the New England Patriots playing the Los Angeles Rams. In the end, New England defeated the Rams 13 to 3, to win their 6th Super Bowl. Super Bowl Insights have been a tradition at Pornhub since 2014, so Mashable checked in to see how 2019 stacked up compared to previous years.
U.S. traffic began to drop around 5pm, reaching -20% from 6pm to 8pm when it dropped as low as -23%. Immediately after the game ended, football fans making up for lost time headed to Pornhub where traffic surged +9% above average at 11pm. That’s a massive increase in traffic when you consider that 11pm is Pornhub’s peak traffic time in the United States.
If we look at the average state-wide traffic changes, Massachusetts and New Hampshire had the biggest game-time drops of -42% during, followed by -37% in Maine and -37% in North Dakota. The Smallest changes happened in Mississippi and Louisiana with only -2% and -3% drops respectively.
The average game-time traffic drop across the United States was -21%. That’s the lowest traffic drop we’ve ever recorded. For comparison, the 2018 Super Bowl saw a -24% drop, with the biggest change happening in 2016 at -28%.
As you might expect, the United States has the largest traffic drop when compared to elsewhere in the world. Canada saw an overall game-time drop of -10.2%, Mexico -8.1% and worldwide -7.3%.
Fans rooting for their home teams typically have the biggest traffic drops, but Los Angeles and California came nowhere close to fans from Boston and Massachusetts.
Traffic drops in Los Angeles ranged from -21% to -22% during the game, while Boston traffic reached -52% below average at 9pm. After the game ended, traffic returned to normal in L.A., while fans from Boston caused a +13% surge in Pornhub traffic from 11pm to Midnight, when compared to traffic on a normal Sunday.
It was much the same state-wide, with traffic reaching a low of only -21% in California at 7pm while Massachusetts traffic dropped by -52% at 9pm and surged +14% above average at Midnight.
As the following chart illustrates, Boston’s football fans are about as consistent in their behavior as their team is likely to appear in the Super Bowl. Traffic dropped a bit further in previous years with a -54% drop in 2017 and 2018, however the previous traffic increases after the game ended were much greater, reaching +32% in 2018 at Midnight and +28% in 2017 at 1am.
Our statisticians broke down U.S. traffic by gender to see if women were as likely as men to take an interest in watching the game (as opposed to visiting Pornhub). Which the timeline changes were quite similar, the peak drop for female traffic reached -17% below Sunday’s average, compared to a -24% drop for men.
Finally, let’s take a look at the search terms that increased on game day. As you might imagine, “Super Bowl” (and “Superbowl”) were on many people’s minds so their search popularity increased by 3341% compared to an average day. Searches for “patriots” increased by 3115%, and “touchdown” by 1880%. Cheerleaders were on A LOT of people’s minds, so the already popular term “cheerleader” increased by 179%, with more specific searches up like “football cheerleader”, “cheerleader orgy” and “naked cheerleaders”.
My big question is that ¿How do you know if a boy or a girl is watching?. I can’t sleep when I think about it.
Our data comes from Google Analytics and is completely anonymous. Google has it’s own algorithms that determine the likely gender of visitors based on what websites they view and the searches they perform (outside of Pornhub). Generally this data is use for targeted adverting by many of the websites you visit, but we use it to compile our anonymized Insights data.