Pornhub 2016 stats: how does South Africa fare? [Slightly NSFW]

Adult streaming website Pornhub has enjoyed a bumper year, according to its 2016 year in review.

The network revealed that it used 3100 petabytes of bandwidth last year, equivalent to 99GB per second or six terabytes a minute. It said that this data would fill 194 million USB flash drives and, if laid end-to-end, would be 11 000 kilometres long.

Pornhub also revealed that users watched almost 4.6 billion hours of porn — or 524 641 years.

As for the top nations by traffic, South Africa managed to climb four positions since 2015 to land at number 20 for the first time. Otherwise, the USA, UK, Canada and India rounded out the top five.

Pornhub also took a closer look at South Africa, revealing its top ten searches of 2016, top gaining searches and more. The website noted that we’re quite a patriotic bunch with “black South African”, “black” and “South African” being the top searches. Interestingly enough, VR was easily the top gaining search, seeing a spike of 532%.

South Africa wasn’t just content to sit at number 20 on the list, as it was the top country for proportion of users on mobile devices. Pornhub reported global traffic being 61% mobile, 28% PC and 11% tablet, but South Africa’s figures sat at 73%, 16% and 11% respectively. The USA, India and Philippines were close behind with 70% mobile traffic.

As for time spent per visit, this was another department where South Africans made huge global gains, climbing eleven positions to wind up number two on the list (10 minutes, 46 seconds). The Philippines had everyone soundly beaten though, with an average time per visit of 12 minutes and 45 seconds.

The streaming website also noted the rise of virtual reality porn, with Pornhub notably giving away 10 000 free VR headsets last year.

VR porn is seeing a sharp uptick in popularity on Pornhub, but will it keep up the momentum?

It said that views in its VR category grew 302% by the end of the year, while users conducted 38 million VR porn searches in 2016. Interestingly enough, China, Thailand and Hong Kong were listed as the most popular markets for VR porn by Pornhub.