New from Dr. , Associate Professor of Urban/Regional Planning, University of Western Australia. Follow him on Twitter: @planographer
Big down under: despite the nation’s small size, Australians are the 8th biggest viewers of Pornhub
Pornhub, one of the world’s largest online porn sites, provides us with a department store-sized window into our online viewing habits of “mainstream porn”.
In 2017 Pornhub had 28.5 billion visits, up from 23 billion (24%) in 2016. According to internet analytics firm, Alexa, Pornhub is the 27th most popular website in the world. It ranked 18th within Australia (and 14th in the US, 15th in Canada, and 16th in the UK.)
Australians made the eighth highest number of visits to the website – the same position it held in 2016. Given the comparatively small population of Australia, its inclusion in the “top 10” suggests that Australians are, at the very least, curious about porn.
Here’s a snapshot of the geographies of online pornography down under.
Whereas two-thirds (67.3%) of Australia’s population in 2017 lived within the various state and territory capital city regions, these same areas accounted for about 90% of the unique pageviews to the multitude of porn category pages on Pornhub’s website. Melbourne and Sydney, which account for 40.6% of the population, made more than half of all visits to the site.
The significant over-representation of porn consumption from metropolitan Australia may also be explained, in large part, by better telecommunications infrastructure and faster internet download speeds compared to regional and rural Australia.
