3Comments
People's porn habits may be one of the weirdest ways to get insights into what's going on in the world, sports events, and popular culture. Last year, for instance, people spent a long time searching for "Bigfoot" pornography after it turned out a candidate for Congress was a devotee of Bigfoot erotica.
There was also a massive spike in people searching for Red Dead Redemption-related terms pre-release, pun not intended.
The same is true of Fortnite, Minecraft, and – oh God – Bowser and Bowsette. Yep, at the peak of the trend, 323,179 people searched for “Bowsette” on Pornhub in one day, whilst 51,882 people searched for "Bowser".
So what happens during huge sports events like the Super Bowl?
Well, the short answer is that people stop cranking it quite so much during the biggest sports event of the year, but that's not the whole story. There were also some strange searches in the lead-up to the event.
This year so many football fans took a break from watching Pornhub that there was a whopping 21 percent average dropoff in traffic during the game.
At 11pm, when the game ended, there was a huge surge in traffic again as sports fans caught up on their other "interests". They are varied people with rich, full lives.
While this is a big dropoff, this year's Super Bowl was less effective than previous years in dragging people away from spending some alone time with their genitals. 2016 saw the biggest decrease in Pornhub traffic. Coincidentally, it's one of the few Super Bowls that didn't feature the Patriots.
On game day, there was also a huge spike in football-related searches and oh boy do you all need Jesus. Among the strangest spikes saw searches for "cheerleader" as well as generic terms such as "touchdown" and "NFL", which went up by 1,880 percent and 1,225 percent, respectively.
In our favorite weird surge of searches, Patriots fans were apparently masturbating to whatever kind of Patriot-related content lurks in the depths of Pornhub. Apparently, their minds were so focused on the game that day that they couldn't even take a break from thinking about their team in order to watch regular pornography.
A little tip, sports fans, not everything you do on game day has to be football-related.
Now for the big question: Which team's fans watched the most pornography during the big game?
Looks like it was the Patriots who stopped watching porn the most, possibly due to the fact they were always going to win. In Boston, traffic fell up to 52 percent below average during the Super Bowl, whilst LA only saw a dropoff of 22 percent.
Turns out maybe the Los Angeles Rams fans just didn't want to win hard enough.
