It seems like just the other day that Prince Harry announced his engagement and Pornhub Insights revealed that Searches for Meghan Markle shot up by 2208%. In fact that was only last November, and their romance culminated with a fairy tale wedding at Westminster Abbey on May 19th.
Metro UK asked if the ceremony’s live coverage had an effect on Pornhub’s traffic and searches. Our statisticians soon discovered that as the ceremony began, worldwide traffic plummeted by a massive 10%, lead by a 21% drop in the United Kingdom and 6% in the United States.
Across the United Kingdom, traffic during the ceremony was down -21% in England, -19% in Wales, -15% in Scotland and -14% in Northern Ireland. Traffic remained below average throughout the rest of the day, with a further drop of -17% in England around 5pm.
We were surprised to see that France was the country with the biggest traffic drop of -23% during the ceremony. Traffic in Chile was down -20%, -19% in Italy and -18% in New Zealand, The Netherlands and Turkey. Commonweath countries Australia and Canada were down -17% and -16% respectively.
Once again it was Meghan Markle that most captured everyone’s attention, as Pornhub searches for her name increased steadily in the days before and after the wedding, reaching as high as +2812% on May 21st. Only about 75% of searchers manage to spell Meghan’s name correctly. The next most searched variation is “Megan Markle”, followed by “Megan Markel”.
We also saw a large number of searches for “Prince Harry”, but because he had few daily searches prior to the wedding it was difficult to calculate a percentage increase. So instead our statisticians compared all searches containing the words “prince” or “princess” to see who was most driving people’s fairy tale fantasies.
“Princess” is more popular daily search, so the 187% increase surrounding the wedding means more in terms of raw searches, but the 403% increase in “prince” popularity is quite impressive as well.
All searches containing the term “royal” grew by an impressive 1865% in the days following the ceremony.
Many celebrities attending the wedding also caused increased interest from fans searching Pornhub. Meghan’s fellow Suits co-star “Abigail Spencer” saw searches increase by +178%, “Kate Middleton” was up 988%, “Serena Williams” +108%, “Victoria Beckham” 4213% followed closely by “David Beckham” up 3440%. There were many searches for “Priyanka Chopra”, but because we lacked searches prior to the wedding we couldn’t calculate a percent increase value.
We hope you enjoyed this edition of Pornhub Insights, and our best wishes to the newlywed couple!