Super Bowl 54 took place on Sunday February 2nd, with the Kansas City Chiefs playing the San Francisco 49ers. In the end, Kansas defeated the 49ers 31 to 20, making it their first Super Bowl win in 50 years. Super Bowl Insights have been a tradition at Pornhub since 2014, so we once again checked in to see how 2020 stacked up compared to previous years.
U.S. traffic began to drop after 5pm, reaching -19% by 7pm. Around 8pm when the halftime show was on, traffic was only -14% below normal levels, then returned to a low of -22% at 9pm.
Shortly after the game ended, U.S. traffic to Pornhub surged +12% higher than normal, representing a massive increase when you consider that 11pm is Pornhub’s peak traffic time in the United States.
Our statisticians used live pageview data (based on ad impressions) to see how traffic levels changed minute by minute. The first quarter had the most sustained traffic decrease, while the very end of the game had the lowest overall traffic.
The per-minute data also shows us that as soon as halftime began, a large number of people immediate headed to Pornhub before returning to the show. Then just before the beginning of the third quarter, we see more people return to Pornhub for a quick break.
Across the United States, Missouri had the lowest game-time traffic drop of -30%, followed by -27% in Connecticut and -23% in North Dakota. California’s average game-time drop was -18% while some states like Alabama, Oklahoma and Louisiana saw a traffic drop of less than 10%.
The average drop in U.S. traffic during the 2020 Super Bowl was -20%. That’s actually the smallest drop in Pornhub traffic that we have recorded since 2012, with the largest game-time drop being -28% during the 2016 Super Bowl when the Denver Broncos played the Carolina Panthers.
Traffic changes in the San Francisco Bay area closely followed that of the U.S. average, but traffic in Kansas city dipped as far as -50% below average in the fourth quarter. After the game ended, San Francisco’s traffic was up only +7% above average, whereas excited football fans from Kansas City stayed up late and celebrated their win by visiting Pornhub up to 22% more than usual.
When looking at hourly U.S. traffic by gender, it’s interesting that female traffic changed very little during the halftime show, whereas men used that time to visit Pornhub before returning to the game.
So what was on everyone’s mind when they visited Pornhub on game day? Searches for “Super Bowl” and “Superbowl” increased by over +5000%. Our statisticians found massive increases for anything related to cheerleaders like “football cheerleader” and “cheerleader orgy”.
Searches for “Demi Lovato”, who sang the national anthem, increased by +270%. The halftime show caused a +1401% increase in “Shakira” searches and +381% for “Jennifer Lopez”. We also noted an increase in searches for “Latina” and “Latina MILF”.
We hope you enjoyed this edition of Pornhub Insights. Stay tuned for more sports stats coming soon!