The shift to mobile internet browsing has slowed. According to data from web analytics firm StatCounter, mobile accounted for over 50% of global web traffic at the beginning of 2017, up from 30% just two years earlier. But since 2017, mobile’s share of traffic has slowed or plateaued in nearly every region of the world.
Not for porn, though.
Pornography site Pornhub, the 46th most popular website in the world, reports that its share of mobile traffic reached 77% in 2019, 10 percentage points higher than in 2017. Mobile traffic accounted for only 40% of Pornhub traffic as recently as 2013. The data comes from Pornhub’s annual year in review, which it has published every year since 2014.
The mobile trend occurred in all of Pornhub’s 10 major markets. The only country where mobile traffic did not grow by more than five percentage points was India, where the share of porn watched on phones had already hit 86% by 2017. This is likely due to the relative cheapness of phones and cellular data in India, compared to buying a desktop and getting internet service.
One reason mobile traffic may be slowing down generally, but not for porn, is that there aren’t many popular porn apps. While Facebook, Instagram, and news site like the New York Times have successfully encouraged people to download apps to use those sites on their phones, popular porn sites like Pornhub and LiveJasmin (the world’s 33rd most popular site) are generally accessed through a browser. Not one of the 100 most downloaded free or paid apps is for pornography, according to data from mobile analytics site App Annie.