Pornhub & Chicago

For today’s edition of Pornhub Insights, our dedicated team of statisticians are digging through the data in Illinois with a special focus on the Windy City. Recently we have been especially interested in these more focused type analyses which allow us to tease out data trends in a smaller geographical area, as we have just lately done for the State of New York. It’s fascinating to see how search trends and user demographics vary from one part of the country to another, and we’re at it again today. Let’s get started!

CHICAGO TRAFFIC

We’ll begin with a look at how much of Pornhub’s traffic Chicago accounts for in and of itself. As you can see in the infographic below, it’s pretty significant. The Windy City ranks in at 4th place within the US and 7th worldwide, accounting for nearly 1% of all traffic to the world’s biggest adult site.

DEEP DISH SEARCHES

As we observed in several different areas of  New York State, cities with larger African American populations tend to have search terms like ‘black’ and ‘ebony’ rank quite high on their lists of most popular search terms. This is also the case in Chicago, where nearly 33% of the population is African American according to the US Census Bureau, compared to around 13% in the United States overall. Incidentally, ‘black’ tops off the list as the most searched term in Chi-town, followed by ‘ebony’ in at third and then ‘ebony lesbians’ in at 16th place. As noted in our 2014 Year in Review ‘ebony’ was one of the top gaining search terms in the US overall last year, hopping 94 spots to its current 6th place position, indicating a considerable overall increase in the American desire for more of this type of content.

Other national favorites such as ‘lesbian’ and extended family themed terms like ‘step mom’ and ‘step sister’ all rank considerably high here too. Let’s move on to a look at the most popular porn stars in the city.

She’s the undeniable queen of social media, prime-time television and arguably contemporary pop culture and she also happens to be the most popular porn star in Chi-town. Kim Kardashian takes the top spot from Lisa Ann, and is followed by two other reality-turned-porn stars a little further down the list with Teen Mom Farrah Abraham (NSFW) in 5th place and Love and Hip Hop’s Mimi Faust (NSFW) in 14th. We’ve also compiled a list of search terms that are significantly more popular in Chicago than in the rest of the state of Illinois, with your girl Mimi taking the top place here in that ‘mimi faust’ is 849% more popular within the Windy City limits.

What’s really interesting here is the high number of entries on the list that have to do with ebony content or Afican American porn stars. This again supports the idea that larger African American populations within a city generally means a heightened preference for ebony content within that area. Other ebony stars like Jada Fire (NSFW), Mandingo (NSFW) and Pinky (NSFW) are 748%, 615% and 513% more searched for in Chicago than the rest of the Prairie State, with the same going for terms like ‘big black dick,’ ‘ebony threesome’ and ‘ young black teen’ all at around 300% higher search rates.

PORN IN THE PRAIRIE STATE

Now that we have established what kinds of porn the residents of Chicago like to watch the most, we’re going to broaden things out to look more closely at who Pornhub’s viewers are by comparing demographics and and general on-site trends within Illinois. We’ll begin with session duration averages.

As it stands, the current Pornhub session lasts an average of 9 minutes and 7 seconds on a global level, and 9 minutes and 38 seconds within the the United States. Illinois shaves 3 seconds off of the national average with their 9:35 average session duration, though this figure varies considerably within the State. For instance, in the heavy equipment and engineering epicenter of the state, Peoria, visits to Pornhub are extended by a whole 16 seconds on average, and by 7 seconds in Chicago. On the other hand, efficiency is the name of the game in Champaign (yes, the city in that Bob Dylan song) visits are cut short by 22 seconds. Now on to a look at gender demographics within each of these cities.

When we look at the proportions of women to men among Pornhub viewers, we are currently sitting at 23% women to 77% men on a worldwide level and 21% to 79% within the US. Illinois is up 1% for the ladies in that 22% of viewers here are female. These figures don’t vary much from city to city. We’ve seen countries like New Zealand where women comprise as much as 35% of the population and as low as 13% in Germany – Illinois is sitting comfortably in the middle of the extremes. There is much more variety when we look to age demographics within the state, however.

At the time of writing, the US and worldwide age demographics were quite closely aligned, as seen at the bottom of the chart above. There were some huge spikes in the 18-24 age category in both Edwardsville and Champaign though, likely due to the fact that these are both University towns. The presence of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign significantly impacts the distribution of age demographics in each of these parts of the State, especially considering that that the former only has a population of around 80,000 and the latter of just 24,000. We observed a similar trends in Ithaca, NY in that Cornell U’s presence in the town significantly impacted top search results – at the top of the list was ‘college’. We’ll end this portion with a look at device proportions.

In our 2014 Year in Review, we observed that more and more people were using mobile technology to access Pornhub. In the United States, this accounts for the vast majority of traffic shares in that 61% of traffic originates from smartphones and another 12% from tablets. Chicago has one of the highest proportions of mobile traffic we have ever seen, at 80%. On the other hand, Champaign has the largest proportion of desktop traffic in the state at 40% – perhaps a sign of some of the students over at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign taking Pornhub breaks in the midst of paper writing.

WINDY CITY TRAFFIC JAMS

We’ve seen that holidays like Easter and Chistmas impact traffic numbers on Pornhub because people are generally spending this time with loved ones. This can mean travel or extra time being spent with loved ones, which logically means less time to spend watching porn. When we surveyed which holidays cause the most significant changes in our Year in Review, New Year’s Eve was when we observed the most significant drops. Countries like the Netherlands and Germany showed drops as high as 66% on December 31st, and while the holiday is where the biggest drop is also noted in Chicago, it is significantly less severe at 46%.

On Labor Day however, it seems that the people of Chi-Town are mourning the last bit of summer with more visits to Pornhub, as traffic increased by 18% on the holiday. Sporting Events like the World Cup and the Stanley Cup Finals have also been known to interfere with regular traffic numbers. Here we have a series of charts that show how a few key Blackhawks games affected Porhub traffic.

When the Blackhawks played in Nashville, the game was tied and went into a second period of overtime in which Chicago ultimately took the win. Throughout most of the afternoon and even well into game time, traffic dipped slightly below average, nearing a 10% drop around 3pm. When tensions were running high during overtime traffic increased by almost 9% statewide at around 11 o’clock right around when the winning goal was scored. Traffic also increased by around 8% between the hours of 10 and 11 pm in Chicago, again when the game was in the critical extra frame, before the Blackhawks scored.

On the day of game 7 in the Western Conference Finals when the Blackhawks played the Anaheim Ducks, traffic began to drop steadily from 5 o’clock on leading up to the game in both Chicago and Illinois at large. At 5, traffic was up 20% in Illinois and almost 10% in Chicago, perhaps due to folks easing some of those pre-game jitters. By 9pm when the game was well underway and it was becoming clear that the Blackhawks were once again going to be taking it home, traffic spiked back up indicating that people were celebrating the win on Pornhub.

These celebrations were brought to another level at the end of game 1 of the finals. When the first game against Tampa Bay began at 7, traffic was down by nearly 10% in Chicago and nearly 25% within all of Illinois. As the game progressed to a 1-1 tie in the second period, traffic began to climb back up steadily. Once the Blackhwaks scored again in the third period and secured the win, traffic shot way up from 10pm on, peaking at 1am at a 20% increase in Chicago and nearly 25% increase overall in Illinois.

When Tampa Bay finally claimed victory in Game 2, the opposite took place. The game was close throughout and ended in a 4-3 win for Florida. You’ll notice that at the game’s end around 9pm, traffic dips down form a 6% increase in Illinois then hovers right around average traffic rates both statewide and in the Windy City for the rest of the night.

That does it for our Chicago coverage! Have a great idea for an installment of Insights? Let us know in the comment section below.