Lesbian porn has been crowned the most popular genre of 2018 on leading adult film sites Pornhub and YouPorn – and it’s all largely thanks to female viewers, according to the statistics.
Boasting a collective 40 billion yearly visits between them, the two sites released their annual ‘Year in Review’ reports this week, and found ‘lesbian’ to be the most commonly searched term across the board.
Interestingly, the category was deemed to be the most popular search for women across the two sites for the second year in a row.
Pornhub has said that across 2018, women, who make up 30 per cent of their audience, were 151 per cent more likely to watch ‘lesbian’ videos than their male counterparts.
For the second year in a row, ‘Lesbian’ searches were crowned the most common on Pornhub and YouPorn, among their 40 billion visits this year
Director of Pornhub’s Sexual Wellness Center, Laurie Betito, speculated in the report that women’s sustained interest in the genre is likely because they ‘get to see the acts they enjoy on themselves.’
For men, lesbian was just the sixth most popular on Pornhub and ranked only 10th on YouPorn.
But with 4,791,799 adult videos – or 151 years worth – uploaded to Pornhub in 2018 alone, Timaree Schmit, a sexuality researcher, said there could be a number of factors behind the disparity of interest between the two genders.
Speaking to NBC News, Schmit said: ‘They are desiring a view of a sexual experience in which they cannot, by definition, take part.’
‘So it has this voyeuristic, naughty, fantastical element,’ but that’s not for everyone, she insisted.
Not for the first time, searches for ‘trans’ saw a significant jump in interest among men, according to Pornhub.
The website determined a 167 per cent general increase among male searchers and a 200 per cent increase for those over 45.
Porn hub released its annual ‘Year in Review’ this week, showing some surprising additions from pop culture entering the list
In contrast, Pornhub found that women were responsible for more than 30 per cent of the site’s gay male porn views.
A study published in Porn Studies by sexuality researcher Lucy Neville in 2016, found that women are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with heterosexual adult content, because of ‘the invisibility of female pleasure’ and the fact ‘most heterosexual porn invited them to view the sex acts occurring from a “male” perspective.’
With more than 125 million people visiting Pornhub everyday, the report also revealed a number of specific audience search habits that coincided with social trends and current affairs.
Following the disclosure of her alleged affair with President Trump earlier in the year, Stormy Daniels topped the list for the most searched adult performer.
When the news broke of Daniel’s claims of a $130,000 cover-up, Pornhub’s data analysis found that searches containing ‘Stormy Daniels’ increased from a daily average of 2,500 to over 2 million within five days.
The Data showed that Pornhub users in Washington DC were more likely to search Daniel’s name than anywhere else in the US.
President Trump also received 302,177 searches this year.
Stormy Daniels (left) saw an increase of nearly 2 million searches over a five day period, when her alleged affair with the President was announced. Online video game Fortnite (right) also made the list. During a server crash in April, Pornhub saw a 60 per cent spike in ‘Fortnite porn’ searches
Online gaming sensation Fornite was also searched millions of times on the adult site, proving players wanted to do more than just play the battle-royal extraordinaire.
When the game’s servers went down in April, Pornhub experienced a 60 per cent spike in searches for ‘Fortnite porn’.
‘Searches like these serve as an indication that people use this site to not only satisfy sexual urges but also to get a different angle on something they are already interested in,’ said Pornhub’s Betito.
‘[People want] to see a famous character or hot topic in a sexual context.’