Midterm elections took place in the United States on November 6th, as voters headed to the polls to choose who their representatives in the House and Senate would be for the next four years. Rather than analyzing what the political results might be, Mashable asked Pornhub’s statisticians to see how election day affected Pornhub’s traffic.
When compared to an average day, traffic across the United States (adjusted by time zone) increased by as much as 20% in the morning hours and remained above average until mid afternoon. This may indicate that voters were looking to get some Pornhub time in early in case they had to wait in line at the polls, or perhaps they woke more anxious than usual and needed to relax.
From 4pm to 7pm traffic dipped as much as -5% below average for that time of day and dropped again from 10pm to 2am as people were watching the live election results come in.
If we take a look at traffic by gender, it’s women who had the biggest traffic increase by nearly 21% at 7am on election day. From 9am through mid-afternoon, traffic from male visitors was proportionately higher than usual compared to women. From 5pm to 7pm, women saw the biggest traffic drop compared to an average day.
Visitors over the age of 35 saw their biggest traffic change at 6am by +17% compared to an average morning. From 7am to 1pm, Millennials 18 to 34 saw a bigger change, with their traffic up over 24% at 9am. In the evening, traffic from all age groups balanced out, which may indicate that watching the results of this election were equally important to young and old.
The following heat-map illustrates that Pornhub traffic from Noon to 7pm dipped the lowest in Indiana, Arkansas, Nebraska, Nevada and New York. Traffic was up higher than usual in Delaware, West Virginia, Virginia and Minnesota with the largest increase of the day in the District of Columbia by a massive +39% above average. It would seem that midterm erections were on more people’s minds in the capital.
During the evening from 8pm to midnight as election results were coming in, it was again Indiana where traffic was down lowest by -14%, followed by New York, Nebraska, Nevada and Arkansas. And once again, visitors from the District of Colombia, many of whom may have had jobs hanging on the election results, saw a surge of traffic by 31% above normal for that time of the day.
