Pornhub’s Year in Review is an annual tradition that provides a pseudo-comprehensive analysis of the platform’s data from the previous year. It offers a fascinating glimpse into global and local trends in viewership, searches, demographics, and more, including emerging trends such as VR porn engagment. As Forbes reported in 2018, it really does “Satisfy Your Data Fetish”. The report also provides an in-depth look at the most popular videos, categories, and porn stars of the year, as well as an overview of the most searched terms.

Can you trust Pornhub’s Year in Review?

While it’s an entertaining read, and opening up honest conversations about sex and pornography is definitely commendable, ultimately the Pornhub Insights Report is a cleverly calculated publicity stunt. It is a win-win for Pornhub’s parent company Mindgeek and media outlets alike; the former gains mainstream news coverage that reinforces Pornhub’s reputation as the world’s #1 porn website, and the latter is able to use data to justify edgy content that appeals to Pornhub’s 18-34 year old demographic. In 2022, this was as successful as in previous years, with publications around the world such as New York Post, BuzzFeed, The Sun, and Daily Mail eagerly lapping it up. They found interesting, funny and sometimes bizarre porn habits, and localized data provided great clickbait headlines, such as “Pornhub reveals Ireland’s most-searched porn terms for 2022”. However, few outlets actually scrutinize the data in the report or even mention the problem of relying on self-reported and unverified data as news.

Porn in times of war

Porn in times of war is a fascinating subject, as it can give us an insight into what people are thinking and reacting to during a time of conflict. Just as we avoid conversations as society relating to pornography and sex, our sexual and pornographic habits can reveal a lot about us. Freud famously discussed the importance of understanding our sexual desires in order to understand our psychological dynamics. By examining the porn consumption of different countries at war, we can gain an understanding of how people are reacting to the conflict and its implications. By delving into this data, perhaps we can gain a better understanding of the social, political, and economic impacts of war. 

Every year, Pornhub identifies the Top 20 Countries, which includes both Russia and Ukraine, and provides a localized breakdown. As the war in Ukraine was one of the defining events in 2022, it could have been that Pornhub was uniquely positioned to shed some light on the situation.

Porn habits in Ukraine during Russian Invasion

According to Pornhub in 2022 there was a drastic decrease in the popularity of “Russian Homemade” porn amongst Ukrainian users. Of Ukraine’s top search terms, it went from #1 position to #8. It’s a bit confusing that in 2021 the Year In Review reported “Russian Homemade” as being #2 position, after “sex” (Ukrainians, apparently, get straight to the point). But regardless, that’s a rapid decrease in interest in Russian porn. At the same time, it was reported that “Ukrainian porn” rose from relatively obscure position of #84 position, to position #5. That’s a brilliant statistical illustration of the increase in patriotism that the invasion has created in Ukraine. A few other interesting trends were: a 553% increase for “stuck” (presumably in a BDSM context?), a 493% increase for “black woman” (American savior?) and a 292% increase for “truth or dare”. While a bit more abstract than previous examples of patriotism, these seem to have some resonance with the underlying situation, and are a fascinating insight into the changing psyche of Ukrainians. 

Porn habits in Russia during the Invasion

The perfect counterpoint to Ukrainian trends would be some insight into how Russia’s viewing porn habits have changed over this critical year. But alas, there was nothing to be found on Russia in the 2022 Year in Review. This absence is surprising, given that it is the world’s 9th largest country and had been featured in all previous reports.  The last we heard was in 2021, where the top Russian searches were for ‘Russian’ ‘hentai’ and ‘MILF’. There was also big rank changes for terms ‘bdsm’ (+23), ‘anime’ (+14) and ‘furry’ (+13). Why wasn’t Russia featured in the 2022 Report?

Did Pornhub Geoblock Russia?

You might think that, like many of the world’s responsible corporate citizens, Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, would have placed sanctions on Russia. It would have been a noble move to sacrifice that portion of its advertising revenue for a gesture of solidarity with Ukraine. And in 2022 social media reports had circulated that Pornhub had “cock blocked” Russia in this way by placing a Ukrainian flag and message of solidarity for Russian visitors instead of allowing them to access the site. It might have been another brilliantly calculated PR move by Mindgeek to place such a “geo-cockblock” up. And maybe they did for a few days – enough time to gain the resulting positive press – because the reports of any geo-blocking were later debunked. Russian bators are still able to visit the countries #6th favorite website. 

Why Wasn’t Russia Featured in the 2022 Pornhub Report?

So why wasn’t Russia featured in the 2022 Report? It’s possible that Pornhub had quietly dropped it to avoid alerting people to the fact that they are still heavily profiting from Russian traffic as one of the largest population groups in the world. It’s a shame that this information wasn’t included in the report, as it would have been incredibly interesting to see if there had been a shift in the national psyche, similar to the Ukrainian population. Did their own self perception of the invasion trigger a masochistic sexual desire, or a sadistic tendency? We just don’t know.

Please excuse the porn conspiracy theory, but it may have been the case that this information was not included in the report because it would have not been seen favorably by the Russian government. At a time of intense nationalism, maybe the Russian government would be embarrassed if it was revealed that the 2021 trend for “furry porn” had overtaken their “homegrown russian”. Obviously, I’m just speculating.

But it’s probably true that the Russian government wouldn’t care if Pornhub sanctioned them, even if they did it through a “cockblocking” Ukrainian flag. It’s actually the other way around: MindGeek would be worried that they would be blocked by the Russian government. This was the case in 2016, when the Russian media watchdog blocked access to Pornhub for violating child protection laws. When a twitter user asked the media watchdog “If you block Pornhub, could you offer an alternative?”, the official twitter account replied “as an alternative, you could meet someone in real life”. 

While Pornhubs insights claim to offer an insight into even the darkest of desires, it is clear that they are choosing to keep certain information away from the spotlight. Was this a lost opportunity for porn to help prevent war? Or just a sneaky move by a massive corporation covering up it’s ongoing profits from the Russian population? Either way, it’s time to grow some balls, Pornhub.