CYBERSPACE—While the always-reliable “lesbian” held its position as the top search term on the free porn mega-site Pornhub, an early look at the site’s “Year in Review” statistics for 2017 reveals some surprises—with the term “fidget spinner” showing the sharpest upward trend line, despite the fact that there is little actual hardcore action involving the popular toy (or its young female counterpart) available on the site.
Most “fidget spinner” videos, though they often bear titles such as "1000MPH Fidget Spinner Bisexual Threesome,” depict nothing more than fidget spinners doing what they are advertised to do: spinning. But a nearly 300 percent increase in Pornhub “fidget spinner” searches back in May, when the toy first began its quick rise in popularity, led to the term retaining its hot-trending status.
Pornhub will release its full 2017 “Year in Review” data on January 9. But according to information made public by the site in the first week of the New Year, of the year’s top 25 most-searched terms, the queries that showed the greatest increase in interest over 2016 were “cheerleader,” which climbed 366 places to finish at number 19, and “Korean,” which jumped 56 places into the 24th spot.
Virtual reality porn also saw a spike in popularity in 2017, with “VR” making its top 25 debut at number 6. But the biggest drop among the largely unchanged top 25 terms was suffered by “lesbian scissoring,” falling seven places to rank at 21 for the year.
Nonetheless, despite the seemingly unshakeable popularity of “lesbian” porn searches, “lesbian scissoring” was the only search on the top 25 list to combine the keyword “lesbian” with what SEO specialists call a “long-tail keyword”; that is, a second term or phrase that makes the main keyword more specific.
According to earlier Pornhub data, some of the top long-tail keyword combinations have included “lesbian seduces straight girl”, “lesbian strap on” and “lesbian squirt.’ But none of those registered in the top 25 for 2017.
Searches for porn involving video game characters also remained popular in 2017, with the top three spots in the video game category all occupied by characters from the blockbuster sci-fi shooter game Overwatch. The Overwatch character D.Va led the pack with nearly 4 million searches, while the top non-Overwatch character searched on Pornhub last year was Pokemon’s Misty, in fourth place with 2.6 million searches.
Most of all, the 2017 Pornhub statistics confirm once again the overwhelming popularity around the globe of online porn. In 2017, visitors to the Pornhub site alone transferred—that is, either downloaded or uploaded—3,732 petabytes of porn. One petabyte is equal to one million gigabytes.
To put that amount of porn in perspective, according to the Pornhub stats, the total amount of data transferred on the site last year would fill the memories of every iPhone now in use in the entire world.