Fallout 4, the latest installment in Bethesda’s epic game series was released on November 10, 2015. Like watching a good Pornhub video, anticipation of the release had been building up, and once the moment arrived, dedicated gamers thought of little else – including visiting Pornhub.
Thanks to the nifty (and entirely anonymized) “affinity” data that Google Analytics provides, we can see that many of our 60 million daily visitors are interested in gaming, based on their Google search and web browsing habits. Thankfully, our team of statisticians put down their controllers just long enough to look at how Fallout affected Pornhub’s traffic in the United States.
Compared to an average day, we saw a slight 5% increase in traffic among gamers in the early morning hours from 3-4 am. At this point we assume everyone’s download completed and the gaming commenced. Starting at 5am traffic began to drop, down as much as 10% from 7am till noon. In the afternoon traffic returned to normal, but after 6pm it dropped again when we assume that 9-5 workers arrived home and fired up their games. After midnight it seems like everyone finally took a break, and traffic jumped as high at 15% above daily norms.
Google’s affinity data can also make assumptions about the particular type of games that someone is interested in. Based on this, we looked at the overall daily change on November 10th and found the largest decrease in traffic came from Sports Games Fans (-13.7%), followed by Action Gamers (-7.7%) then Adventure and Strategy Gamers (-7.2%). Interestingly, the smallest daily decrease came from Shooter Game Fans (-1.2%).
Focusing on a few specific genres, we can see some interesting changes in the hourly graphs. Although shooter fans had the lowest overall change, they did have the highest increase in traffic before (+12%) and after (+25%) the Fallout 4 release. Action Fans and Adventure and Strategy fans followed each other closely throughout the entire day.
Would you like to learn more about the porn viewing habits of gamers? Would you like to hear more about Google’s other “affinity” interest categories (nsfw)? Let us know in the comments!
I would imagine a normal day has a similar 3 peak, 2 trough traffic distribution. To measure “Compared to an average day” doesn’t specify if you are comparing traffic data that are normed for time of day, or to an average across the entire day. If just an average (like the orange horizontal line suggests) then we would expect to generate this type of distribution regardless of a new Fallout launch or a newsless day… Is there a methods section? In my opinion the most interesting result is that action and adventure gamers have reduced activity in the prime time (12a-3a) compared to the shooter and hardcore gamers – this may suggest that they were playing more games instead of taking breaks. Overall I feel unconvinced that Fallout 4 led to a reduction in traffic, but would love clarification of the measures. I am interested in what role major news relevant to “affinity” categories affects their traffic on the site, more for the sake of statistical methods rather than for the results. =)
Thanks,
Evan
The Y axis of the graph is labelled “% change in traffic compared to average day and time” which suggests that the time of day is being taken into account. Therefore there is a standard fluctuation in the traffic each day that the day in question had a significant deviation from.
Good question Evan. The data is graphed so that 0 is equal to the traffic we have on an average Tuesday and also for each individual hour throughout the day. Our peak hours in the United States are 10pm to midnight. So 0 is equal to a much larger volume of traffic at 10pm than it is at 4am for example. The % change shows the deviation from the average traffic for that hour.
The stats in this article are for the United States specifically, and our statisticians went a step further and adjusted for the timezone of each source of traffic. That way the 6pm traffic change is actually 6pm in Eastern time and 6pm Pacific time, so it’s more accurate for us to suggest “when people got home from work”. Hope that helps!
Just saying: If Pornhub teamed up with Fallout modders to make a Pornhub themed mod for Fallout 4, we could kill two sticks with one fist.
> kill two deathclaws with one bottlecap mine
FTFY
By god. :O
But what accounts for the 15% increase after midnight? Were that many new players frustrated from their new excursion into the wasteland? If not, then this just seems random.
I totally agree !! And even more : my friends playing fallout all the time. After work -> ps4 -> sleeping. Work -> after that ps4 -> sleeping. Since 1 week now. Before fallout he wasnt watching porn BUT he touched me xD: Now hes even not doing that!
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