Big data on pornhub insights: Datafication and the making of a new sexual culture

Big data has been crucial to the expansion of the pornography industry and its online evolution over the past 40 years. The datafication of digital users’ desire is the economic basis of free porn platforms. These now dominate the industry and foster an easy accessibility that has made pornography so profoundly culturally influential. The Pornhub Network is well-known as the world’s largest collection of free porn sites, receiving over one hundred million visits a day. Only Google, YouTube, Meta and Reddit receive more of digital users’ attention. Porn viewers therefore constitute a massive global audience. The data gathered from them provides important insights into contemporary sexual culture. Pornhub Insights is an important part of this datafication of viewers’ desire. This site parses the big data gathered from the hundreds of millions of daily ‘hits’ across The Pornhub Network, using Google Analytics ‘to dig deep into the data’ about the sexual preferences of its viewers. Where the dataveillance conducted by corporations is often a relatively clandestine practice, Pornhub Insights explicitly foregrounds its datafication. Because the ‘statisticians at Pornhub’ (Pornhub Insights) are able to draw from such huge data stores, Pornhub Insights is used as a resource for journalists and researchers. Its statistics are conceptualised as providing definitive facts about sexuality, drawing on big data’s associations with the scientific and objective. Where statistics and counting have served a regulatory function in relation to sexuality, this article explores what this big data really tells us about contemporary porn consumption and sexuality. It investigates the ideological objectives of data visualisations and asks what the company’s objectives are in publishing the data. This article asks whether the ‘bigness’ of Pornhub’s data makes it more meaningful than other important sociological studies of sexuality. Ultimately, it considers the significance of these massive data sets lies less in their insights about sexuality and more in what they reveal about cultural perceptions and expectations of big data itself.