Global porn preferences? Surprisingly patriotic, says PornHub’s data blog

Data's getting even sexier these days, thanks to new tools and applications, new analytical capacities and unfortunately, new ways to breach individual privacy, as the NSA spying scandal shows. But who's looking at the data of sex itself? 

The answer is Insights, the data blog run by PornHub — a.k.a., the world's largest porn site. Its dedicated team of statisticians has compiled information from over 14.7 billion (!) site visits in 2013 to share the heartwarming story of porn usage around the world.

You can check out disaggregated data — such as top search terms by country, top visits by month (January), top visits by weekday (Monday) and average time spent on site (9 minutes). You can also peruse trends — such as spikes after major world events, how income levels affect viewing habits, what Americans do during government shut downs and which Latin American country is winning at porn. 

Some key findings:

– "British" is among the top 3 search terms in England and Scotland and Northern Ireland and Wales. The Queen would be very proud.

– "German" is the top search term in Austria. It's also the top search term in Germany! Meanwhile "Japan" is popular throughout Asia, according to data analysis of a similar website, PornMD. What's really fascinating is how often countries actually do search for their own nationality. But this may be less about patriotism than the fact that the United States still dominates the internet, including online porn.

– Brazil's traffic deflated 27 percent during the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup, held in Brazil.

– Among gamers, Sony Playstation drives a larger share of global traffic to PornHub than Nintendo Wii. The blog notes, "While theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase 'the medium is the message,' it would seem that, in the case of consoles, 'the medium is the fetish.'"

– Economic crisis is a libido killer, even for free porn. Greece's porn-surfing has decreased 7 percent in recent years.

– And finally, Kentucky is really into Japanese hentai. Who knew?

For more "research," visit PornHub's blog itself. [Note: there are no nude photos or racy box-and-whisker plots but there are some adult topics. Plus, your browser may block the site.]

For work-friendly reading, check out The Guardian's related aticle about porn trends in the UK.