For better or worse, there is no better arbiter of what Americans are truly doing than Pornhub. And just like the Super Bowl, their annual data analysis of what people did (or did not do) during the big game has become an annual tradition for reminding ourselves that we’re all gross monsters who should be ashamed of ourselves.
Remember, not everyone was sitting on a couch with a big group of people watching the Eagles defeat the Patriots on TV. Some of them were…otherwise preoccupied. Or perhaps worse, they were perusing Pornhub on their phone while sitting on a couch with a big group of people watching the game. Per Pornhub, those people made some very specific searches on Super Bowl Sunday.
The most searched term was, of course, “Super Bowl,” which saw a 2,781 percent increase on Sunday. Not sure what exactly those people were looking for, but perhaps it’s best not to know.
The most searched terms included plenty of football players and celebrities as well. Tom Brady was the third-most searched term on the day, rising 1,620 percent. It’s unclear if that’s because people wanted to see a Tom Brady lookalike in action or perhaps they were hoping that his long-awaited sex tape would finally drop. Brady can take solace in knowing that, at least in this category, he got the better of Nick Foles.
Other celebs to be among the top-searched terms include Janet Jackson, Gisele, Olivia Culpo, Justin Timberlake, and Jennifer Lopez. Some of those make sense because of the Super Bowl, and the rest simply make sense because you’re all a bunch of predictable creeps.
As for Pornhub’s user traffic during the game itself, they report that they saw a 24 percent drop in traffic compared to a typical Sunday. That number maxed out at 28 percent around 9:00 p.m. EST, which lined up with the start of the fourth quarter. The Eagles had just scored a touchdown to go up 29-19. After the game ended, football fans appeared to be looking for other forms of entertainment as the site’s traffic surged 9 percent higher than average levels around 11:00 pm EST. Pornhub notes that 11:00 pm is also their highest traffic time of the week in general, so that was a significant boost.
When it came to breaking down state-by-state numbers, it looks like football fans from Delaware were the most dedicated as the site saw a 45 percent drop in traffic overall from the smallest state. Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania all saw 40 percent drops as locals took time out of their usual evening activities to root on their respective football teams. The smallest change in traffic occurred in Kansas (-11 percent), Nevada (-12 percent), and Alabama (-14 percent).
Philadelphia Eagles fans spent much of the evening celebrating their big victory. That likely explains why Eagles fans “held out” longer than Patriots fans from returning to the site. Pornhub saw a 58 percent drop around Philadelphia around 10 pm EST when the game ended. Meanwhile, Boston users were clearly looking for a post-game distraction as traffic there spiked 20 percent above normal in the hours after the game ended.
[Pornhub]
