We’ve rounded up, as much as possible, an extensive list of up-to-date statistics on pornography. However, we were careful to avoid terms and porn stats that could be triggering.
On this page you’ll find a range of stats on:
- Pornography Demographics
- Social Media and Pornography
- Pornography Industry Market Size
- Business Impacts on Porn
- The Environment
- Adult Actors
- Effect on Relationships
- Porn and Children
- Church Goers
- Virtual Reality
- And more…
Content
Who Watches Porn?
Porn demographics by age and gender
- The average age that children first view porn (usually accidentally) is now 7 or 8
- Pornhub’s 2021 porn stats note that the average age group that frequent the site are 37 year-olds
- Women visitors to Pornhub increased to 35% of total visitors in 2021, up 3% since 2019
- Women in the Philippines watch more porn (52%) than men 49%
- The United States watches far more porn than any other nation,
- 67% of male teens and young adults view porn as least 1x a month, 2016 Barna Study
- 33% of female teens and young adults view porn 1x a month, 2016 Barna Study
- 42% of male adults, 25 years +view porn 1x a month, 2016 Barna Study
- 12% of female adults, 25 years + view porn 1x a month, 2016 Barna Study
Children, Social Media, and Child Sexual Abuse Material — How Kids Get Into Porn
- On NCOSE’s Dirty Dozen list is Discord’s chat and video sharing app which has around 140 million monthly users. Its lax age verification guidelines and no parental controls make this app a dangerous child predator’s hunting spot…
- The BBC reports nudity, porn advertisements, and children exposing themselves in the recent video chat app Omegle which almost doubled in users from 34 million monthly visitors to 65 million a month between January 2020 and January 2021
- BBC also named TikTok as the most downloaded app of 2020 with 689 million monthly active users. TikTok attracts a generally younger audience. It’s full of “soft” porn, homemade porn star influencers, and easily becomes a gateway to harder-core porn
- Instagram is a leading site for grooming and child sexual abuse materials. Using Instagram is also known to cause mental health harms to children
- The UK charity, Internet Watch Foundation, (IWF) reported a 77% increase in 2020 of self-generated child sexual abuse content online.
- Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) is growing so rapidly that the Internet Watch Foundation and others cannot remove CSAM rapidly enough.
Who actually pays for porn — market demographics
In fact, millennials and Gen Z are now the largest paying market for porn — despite the large amount of free porn available.
“They now actually make up the largest paying porn consumer base for several producers, outspending older generations substantially. All of which leads Hawkins to assert that ‘millennials may well be the saviors of the porn industry’.” — Mashable.com
A major porn site confirms this in their own words:
- “Almost half — 48% — of all sales on …. Premium are made by users under the age of 35, even though they make up only 45% of total visits…”
- “Users aged 45 and over accounted for only 18% of sales, even though they made up 23% of total visits. In other words, younger millennials and Gen Z purchase porn at a higher rate than the Boomers…”
Does porn leave this world a better place for our children?
We think keeping tabs on the porn industry matters for that reason alone. We want to help you protect our future generations.
Business Impacts
Porn As A Big Business Influencer — The Stats About Porn Don’t Lie.
If you’re a living, breathing person, your life is certain to be touched by porn. Is porn really that big of an influencer on society? And does our day-to-day level of porn use really matter to our world?
A popular often-cited 2014 article by Chris Morris in NBC news online states, “Globally, porn is a $97 billion industry, according to Kassia Wosick, assistant professor of sociology at New Mexico State University…”
In contrast, this 2020 report estimates the global porn market around 35.17 billion — yet still a significant revenue
MindGeek — a porn industry monopoly and mother company of many major porn sites — is not publicly reporting their income
Of the top 15 most-viewed websites world-wide, 3 of them are porn sites. That’s a minimum of 20% of all websites viewed globally
Netflix and Amazon, along with other major corporations were recently outed on the National Center On Sexual Exploitation’s 2021 Dirty Dozen list for selling sexual exploitation through porn-infused videos and more. This list is updated yearly.
According to IBISWorld, the US porn industry has grown from about $600 million in revenue in 2018 to over $800 million in revenue in 2021
Pornhub’s 2021 data reports: “Over 125 million daily visits to Pornhub’s network of sites…” These represent a wide variety of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. By analyzing these billions of yearly visits and pageviews, we get a glimpse of porn’s widespread influence.
What’s missing from the data? MindGeek’s revenue, quite possibly.
Societal Impacts
Porn’s Impact On The Environment
The Smartphone — the Most-Traveled Porn Highway
According to Forbes. “… in 2020, smartphones accounted for 80% of porn traffic. That should be extra interesting as many of us were stuck in quarantine, with our desktop or laptop computers right there but still preferred to access porn on our smartphones…”
- In 2021, Pornhub’s latest statistics revealed that smartphones now account for 83% of traffic to their website, with 88% of the US viewing porn on mobile
Does porn use on cell phones contribute to global warming?
Plastic waste — Cell phones are hard to recycle & less than 1% end up being recycled
Production emissions — cobalt production for lithium ion batteries uses a lot of electricity, plus the production process of the actual cell phones, estimated at 11% of emissions for Information and Communication technology (ICT)
Mining waste — lithium mining is harmful to the environment both with excessive water consumption, about 500,000 gallons per metric ton of lithium
Sex Positivity and Porn — True or False
When violence is a sexual script commonly found in porn, can we consider this “sex-positive”?
A recent, large-scale UK study found scripts of sexual violence including incest in 1 out of 8 porn titles (about 12%). And that number is conservative — considering the study excluded BDSM
The word ‘Teen’ was a more commonly used term to describe pornography than any descriptions of sexual acts or body parts. The word ‘Teen’ was also used more frequently in sexually violent content…” (8.5%of porn titles)
Researcher Dr. John D. Foubert reports: “Over 50 studies show a strong connection between pornography and sexual violence…
8,900 and 10,500 children, ages 13 to 17, are commercially exploited each year in the United States — attributable to porn consumption in part
Porn Actors — Real People Harmed in the Process
The porn industry takes advantage of porn stars at the expense of their health — porn actors speak out
Porn stars testify that they feel trapped doing types of porn they never agreed to
Porn and Racism — Messages That Influence Generations
Another revealing study randomly selected titles from popular major porn sites. These porn stats reveal a racist slant in the porn industry.
In these titles, “Black women were more often the targets of aggression compared to white women. Black women were the targets of aggression in 50.8% of scenes, while white women were targets of aggression in 36% of scenes…”
“Black men were more often portrayed as perpetrators of aggression compared to white men. Black men were depicted as aggressors against women in 47.3% of scenes, compared to 35.3% of scenes depicting white men as aggressors against women…”
Marriage Impacts
Impacts of Porn on Marriage
- Longevity of marriage — A 2016 peer-reviewed study from the American Sociological Association shows divorce rates double with beginning porn use in marriage
Statistically, women are more impacted than men:
“Beginning pornography use is associated with a substantial increase in the probability of divorce for married Americans, and this increase is especially large for women…”
Porn’s links to sexual violence includes domestic abuse.
First responders, such as police and paramedics, are noting the links between porn and domestic abuse. This includes intimate partner violence (IPV). Women are most often the victims of sexual violence.
Churchgoers, Marriage, and the Effects of Porn:
“For those who did not attend religious services every week or more, beginning pornography use was associated with an increase from 6 percent to 12 percent in the probability of getting divorced by the next survey…
Effects on Churches
Churchgoers Across All Denominations — Not Immune To Porn
As the Barna group study highlighted, 4 in 10 teens and young adult males in the church use porn once or twice a month
But wait… there’s a bit of light at the end of this tunnel.
Though disheartening, porn’s influence on the church is usually measurable by the devotedness of the church-goer.
“Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), Lyman Stone looked at the connection effect of both religious identity and religious attendance:
Across all religious groups in America, people who attend religious services more frequently are far less likely to view pornography.”
Future Trends
Virtual Reality and Porn — Another Major Player in the Porn Industry
In a world where virtual reality is growing in popularity and availability, virtual porn is highly sought after.
VR porn searches are near the top of Pornhub’s own compiled customer data search list
According to Insider.com, “The global Virtual-Reality Pornography Market is expected to exceed more than US$ 1 Billion by 2025 in the given forecast period…”
Scientific evidence and sound research for the neurological impact of VR porn stats is limited, says Daniel Sher, clinical psychologist and consultant for the Between Us Clinic
Future Generations — Porn and the Long Term Effects
“Does porn leave this world a better place for our children? We think keeping tabs on the porn industry matters for that reason alone.”
We’ve seen that from porn stats that porn harms the world’s most valuable resources: our children, individuals, the environment, and our valued relationships.
Do you want to be a world-changer? Lessen your carbon footprint? Live the Golden Rule? Consider the implications of porn use in your daily life. You can regain precious time, and invest in your mental and emotional fitness.
What would quitting porn enable you to accomplish personally?
At Ever Accountable, we help empower people to quit porn! Using our simple, high-quality app and the power of human connections, accountability, and relationships, you have so much to gain.
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