Ban or no ban, India watches porn – lots of it.
Despite the Indian government imposing a temporary ban on pornographic websites in 2015, Indians remained one of the world’s most voracious consumers of online porn. PornHub, one of the world’s largest adult websites, found India was its third biggest contributor to global traffic last year.
In an annual review of how people around the world consume porn, PornHub reveals traffic and other related data from its own website. Compared to 2014, India gained one rank on the list, replacing Canada. Only the US and the UK were ahead of India.
However, the US alone accounted for 41% of the total traffic, almost as much as in 2014 when 40% of visits on PornHub originated from the country.
PornHub – in its third edition of the annual review – recorded 21.2 billion visits in 2015. That’s 40,000 visits every minute or 2.4 million per hour. And the average time spent on PornHub during each visit increased by four seconds – from 9 minutes 16 seconds to 9 minutes 20 seconds.
India – at 9 minutes 30 seconds – not only recorded higher average time spent than the global figure, but also saw a one-minute increase in the duration of each visit.
What women want
There’s a big difference in the numbers of porn-loving men and women in India, but the gap seems to be gradually closing in. From 26% in 2014, the proportion of women viewers spiked to 30% this year.
That’s better than the 24% average proportion of female visitors worldwide. There, only a slight increase in the proportion of women was recorded, as they accounted for 23% of traffic in 2014.
“This number will likely keep increasing as more and more women are feeling empowered about their sexuality and experience less shame in liking sex,” psychologist and sex therapist Dr Laurie Betito told PornHub. “More and more women are also more open about masturbation (doing it and talking about it!).”
On the list of countries with the highest proportion of women visitors on PornHub, India ranked third.
While men gravitate towards “teen” and “big dick” categories, women are “drawn to categories featuring lesbian and gay male content”, according to PornHub.
Indians searching for “Indian”
The most famous keyword in 2015 among Indians was “Indian”. And everything related to Indian, including bhabhi (sister-in-law), aunty, and teen.
“While the vast majority of top, gaining, and relative searches here contain ‘Indian’,” PornHub’s yearly review noted, “search terms ‘Japanese’ and ‘Indonesia’ both made some impressive leaps to get into the top 10 list with 14 and 47 place jumps, respectively.”
Gaining keywords are those that recorded the most spike in terms of searches. For India, that phrase was Indian bhabhi devar (Indian sister-in-law and brother-in-law).
Sunny everywhere
Sunny Leone – an erstwhile pornstar who now acts in Bollywood films – is an undisputed favourite among Indians. Even in 2014, she emerged as the most searched pornstar. More recently, Indo-Canadian Leone was found to be the most searched personality on Google in India in 2015 – for a fourth consecutive year.
Lebanese-American porn model Mia Khalifa emerged as the second-most searched pornstar this year. In September, the Indian media was rife with rumours about Khalifa participating in the ongoing season of reality show, Bigg Boss, a homegrown version of Big Brother. Khalifa, however, denied the same in a rather strong tweet.
Coincidentally, Leone’s entry into Bollywood – and her retirement from porn films in 2013 – was thanks to Bigg Boss, where director Mahesh Bhatt saw her and signed her for his film.
After Leone and Khalifa, Lisa Ann ranked third among the most searched pornstars. Ann was at the second position last year.
Across the globe, Kim Kardashian is the most searched for pornstar, followed by Khalifa, Ann, and Leone.
Suitable for all age?
India is a young country – and nothing probably depicts that better than the large proportion of young viewers on PornHub. Half of the traffic from India on PornHub came from viewers aged between 18 and 24.
Where does India watch
Indians are typically moving away from desktops to smartphones – even on the matters of porn.
The second-largest smartphone market in the world – and one of the world’s fastest growing internet markets—India is expected to reach more than 650 million smartphones by 2019, according to a 2014 study by the US-based networking solutions giant Cisco.
Globally, visits from smartphones alone accounted for 53% of traffic shares – up from 45% last year.
Recess because holidays
Across the world, there was a fall in traffic during holidays. On New Year’s Eve, traffic from India fell 21%. Globally, the fall was even bigger – at 44%.
During Christmas, however, India saw a slight rise in traffic. On Christmas Eve, traffic from India increased 1% as against 39% dip worldwide. On Christmas Day, the traffic spiked 2% as against 18% drop globally.
This article was originally published on qz.com