It's all in the 🌽 data
What viewer data on election day says about us
Hey horny readers! Today’s newsletter is a quickie because I’m on set filming an exciting interview. Last week, pornhub released its data about viewership in the United States on election day. What does it say about how people experience news and release stress? Let’s examine it together.
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Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. In case you’re new, I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a comedy writer, film producer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter last year. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Want to know more? Read the whole description on substack here.
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Confession: I LOVE digging through Pornhub Insights, the company’s research and analysis arm. They typically publish an annual roundup, plus analytics around a few special events per year. Well, the New York Post asked them for their data on Election Day, and the Pornhub Insights statisticians were happy to provide it. Here’s what it showed:
South Carolinians were the horniest on Election Day, with traffic up 21% throughout the day. Trump bested Harris by 18 percentage points, so I can only imagine the statewide urge to crack one off was celebratory.
Washington D.C. had the wildest swing throughout the day, with traffic up 18% throughout the day, but way down at night when the votes were being counted. Could the daytime horndogs be working out some anxiety? It’s important to note that Pornhub can’t be accessed in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Virginia due to specific age verification laws, so we won’t know how much people were scratching the itch in those states.
Nationwide trends reveal what people were going through (I mean, if you can tell these things from when they watched porn). Overall, traffic was up 9% as early as 5am and reached its peak at +15% by 7 and 8 a.m. It’s unclear to me if people would have been working out pre-voting jitters at the time, or just blowing off some steam before going to the polls. Daytime traffic remained up by 7% until 3pm and that’s when the drop off happens.
Traffic remained below average from 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. The biggest drop happened at 7pm when traffic decreased by a whopping –19%. Millions of people access the site each day and a drop like that accounts for tens of millions of people logging off. What was the other thing that occurred at 7pm? The polls closed in several states and votes started to come in.
Traffic remained below average the rest of the night. That is, until 3am when traffic went up by +17% once Trump’s victory was secure. Did his victory speech really make people horny? Did people just need to take the edge off? Did so many people turn to Pornhub at that point because their partner thought the candidate they voted for was repulsive and wouldn’t sleep with them? We’ll never know.
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