South Africans love sport, sunshine and boerewors — but Web traffic shows that locals also love their online racy content, too.
According to statistics from global online pornography provider Pornhub, South Africans have a deep relationship with the skin industry.
Locals spent 10 minutes 35 seconds per visit on the porn platform, more than the global average of eight minutes, 56 seconds, said Pornhub.
Gauteng is the most prolific visitor to the site, with residents of South Africa’s economic hub accounting for 55% of page impressions, followed by the Western Cape (26%) and KwaZulu-Natal (12%).
The Northern Cape demonstrated the lowest appetite for porn, with average visits lasting only nine minutes, 29 seconds.
South Africans also have a wide variety of porn appetites. The most common search term on Pornhub is “indian” which scored a search index of 100, the maximum. The terms “milf” (78,51), “lisa ann” (72,14) and “ebony” (66,99) round out the top four.
Globally, the top search term on Pornhub was “teen”, followed by “lesbian”, “milf” and “step mom” and the top country delivering traffic to the platform was the US, followed by the UK, Canada and India.
The most popular day to access the porn site for South Africans is on Tuesdays, but locals prefer to visit the website outside normal working hours, from 10pm to midnight. Sunday is the least popular day for South Africans to visit the site.
As mobile devices become cheaper and Internet services increase in accessibility, more people in South Africa are also consuming porn content on smartphones.
Pornhub research indicates that while South Africa is somewhat behind the mobile technology consumption patterns of developed countries, locals are clearly following international trends.
Desktop porn access made up 55% for South Africans, but mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are rapidly increasing their market share. And if trends continue at the current rate, mobile devices are likely to overtake desktops by the end of 2015.
Internationally, Internet technologies have been a boon to the porn industry. Beyond technologies that are able to deliver rich media online, the growth in payment systems makes it easier for consumers to purchase porn content.
Pornhub revealed that in 2014, 78,9bn online porn videos were viewed, representing 1 577 petabytes (PB) of bandwidth.
That number matches industry predictions of the growth of rich media services such as video online.
According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI), global video traffic will grow from 67% of all Internet traffic in 2014 to a whopping 80% of all Internet traffic by 2019.
Cisco research also showed that internet traffic was 59 851PB in 2014, and that it will rocket to 167 973PB by 2019.
In particular, the VNI showed that traffic in Africa and the Middle East will show the healthiest growth — from 1 505PB in 2014 to 9 409PB by 2019, though that number is far lower than the usage of the Asia Pacific region, expected to hit 54 423PB by 2019. — Fin24
