Video games are a popular search genre on Pornhub, including Fortnite which is searched for more than a million times each month. So perhaps it’s no surprise when Fortnite’s game play servers were taken down on Sunday, October 13th that players went to find their fix on Pornhub instead.
Searches containing “Fortnite” were 152% above average by Monday the 14th, representing hundreds of thousands of additional searches while players were deprived of their game.
While Fortnite was preparing to launch a new map, the game’s world was replaced with an ominous black hole. So naturally, we found that searches containing “black hole” increased by an astronomical 9640%. While some of those new searches contained “fortnite black hole”, we can only assume that the previous “black hole” searches were for something completely different.
Pornhub Traffic from Gamers
Using “affinity” data provided by Google Analytics, our statisticians were able to view traffic changes from only visitors who are interested in video games. We found that traffic from “gaming fans” increased shortly after the server outage began, and remained higher than normal over the first 24 hours. The peak traffic increase of +10.6% occurred at 9pm on Sunday, a time that gaming fans might normally be too busy playing with their joysticks to play with themselves.
This isn’t the first time our data team has recorded changes due to a Fortnite server outage. In April of 2018 we found similar search and traffic changes which can be seen in our earlier Fortnite Server Outage Insights. When new updates have launched, we have also found increased searches for the game including Fortnite Season 5 and Fortnite Season 6.