Turns Out Americans Will Watch Porn on Their Phones

Photo: Flickr/MagnusD

Despite Steve Jobs’s best attempts at creating a smut-less device, it turns out Americans really do want to use their phones for porn: According to new data from Pornhub, 52 percent of the site’s traffic from the United States came from mobile devices in 2013. 

That number is up from 47 percent last year. The United States is the only country in the world where the majority of the site’s traffic comes from mobile devices. Mexico and the United Kingdom are the only other countries where more than 40 percent of traffic comes from mobile devices. Worldwide, about 40 percent of Pornhub’s traffic came from mobile devices, up a quarter from last year. Tablet traffic from also increased in the United States, from 7 percent in 2012 to 10 percent in 2013.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the majority of all porn accessed in the United States is done through mobile devices: Many porn websites don’t work on mobile or charge users for mobile access, even if the desktop sites are free. And, though it’s the world’s largest porn website (according to them, there were nearly 15 billion visits in 2013), it’s hardly the only big player in the game. Overall, there’s probably still more people watching porn through their computers. 

The move to mobile has implications for cell phone data plans, as streaming porn is, by default, a high-data proposition. And with Pornhub one of the few sites offering its services free to mobile users, they could eventually force other sites to follow suit, pushing even more people to ditch their laptops for their smartphones.

Regardless of what the actual Internet-wide mobile-to-desktop breakdown is, Pornhub’s numbers do show that, Americans at least, are now demanding that they be able to take their porn on-the-go, even if that trip is just down the hallway to the bathroom.