Fortnite and Stormy Daniels dominated Pornhub in 2018
Ah, December, a perfect time to sit back and reflect on what kind of porn you watched in 2018.
Pornhub, the online adult video site has released a nice, long look at the year across the site, and while there are a lot of things that seem typical for a porn site, there are a number of results that are pretty eye-catching.
For starters, Pornhub claims that by the time 2018 draws to a close, the site will have been visited 33.5 billion times this year, none of those by anyone you know, surely. In addition, the site averaged around 92 million visitors a day, which is equal to the combined populations of Canada, Australia, and Poland.
AdultFriendFinder — readers’ pick for casual connections
Hinge — popular choice for regular meetups
As for what users were looking up, porn star and Donald Trump wooer Stormy Daniels was particularly popular in 2018, thanks to all of those headlines about her and Trump's past tryst, topping the site's list of "searches that defined 2018." That list also includes your standard adult fare like "romantic" and "threesome" and gaming terms like "Fortnite" and "Bowsette."
Of course, while Bowsette is a fan-made video game character, she's not the only gaming character to see millions of video searches. Bowsette had the most searches at nearly 35 million but Overwatch’s Brigitte and Mercy, as well as Lara Croft were other top gaming-related searches. And in case you were wondering, Mario received 2.6 million searches and, yes, Pokémon characters also popped up on the list.
As far as real people go, Stormy Daniels also rocketed to the top of the list for "most searched porn star" on the site, a jump of 671 spots over 2017. Stormy also ranked as the number one searched porn star in the United States, and beat out Kim Kardashian and Blac Chyna as the most-searched celebrity.
Not to be outdone, Fortnite-related searches jumped over 17,000 places to crack Pornhub's top 15 search terms for 2018. That's quite an active life for the game's apparently many, many unauthorized, uh, fan videos.
One more note on the gaming end: in a bit of a surprising twist, it seems Super Mario's Toad didn't get the same boost from his appearance in the headlines as did his counterpart, Stormy Daniels. There's always 2019, I guess.
Whether searching for these videos or maybe just doing some casual browsing as one does on Pornhub, users in the United States propelled our marvelous, not-at-all-in-crisis country into the top spot for yet another year, outpacing the other usual suspects like the United Kingdom, India, Japan, and Canada.
There's tons of other interesting data available with Pornhub's full report, from which game console sees the most visits to the site (Playstation), to gender and age breakdowns (overwhelmingly male, a majority under 35), to what operating systems the visits come from (mostly Windows).
But my personal favorite is seeing what specific events caused the biggest drops and surges: Apple's September live event and the Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's Royal Wedding caused the biggest drops in the non-sports category.
Meanwhile, the Super Bowl was the U.S.-based sporting event that caused the biggest drop in traffic, while globally those honors went to the World Cup Final.
For all the fun stats, including which holidays cause the biggest traffic changes and where First Lady Melania Trump ranked for celebrity searches, check out the full report here.
Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.
