When you think of Porn, you know it’s a taboo subject. However, in the tech world, the porn industry provides up with some very insightful and interesting data. Every year Pornhub collects user search data and complies it into their year in review. For this panel, Open Sourcing Data and Porn, Michael Bucchino gave us some insights into what this data means for the tech world.

Michael Bucchino has been working for the past 6 years as a producer for ad agencies such as R/GA and Havas Wordwide.

Buchino starts his panel by giving the rundown of the number of videos viewed on Pornhub in 2016: 91,980,225,000. Wonder what country is the number one on the list of countries who are watching? We are. The United States is number one in Pornhub viewership in 2016 as seen in this chart to the right.

Now porn isn’t a new media, it has been around since the 1800’s where it had its beginnings in France with renowned film makers exploring the genre. Porn has come a long way from what it once was but has also pioneered many technological advancements:

1. Online Payments, E-Commerce and Security
   1. People wanted to buy content online so their needed to be a safe and secure way to process payments online
2. Closed Captioning
   1. The industry found that people wanted to hear so they then added closed captioning to their videos
3. SEO, Mobile Streaming, Mobile G-Spot
   1. First streaming video service was Danni’s HardDrive created by Danni Ashe who worked with computer engineers to aggregate a website that streamed these videos. This paved the way for Netflix, Hulu and YouTube.
   2. As screens got bigger and mobile devices smarter, there was demand for high speed data. The industry helped pushed toward the use of 3G service
4. Pop-Up Advertising
   1. Time on site was decreasing as the internet grew bigger so pop-up ads made the user stay longer and led the way toward pop-up ads.
5. Blu-Ray
   1. The industry found that they could use Blu-ray to their advantage by using the opportunity to include extras on high definition.
   2. Happened at a time where people were not convinced that Blu-Rays were worth buying instead on DVD’s because they were so expensive.
   3. By adding the extra features, the industry made Blu-Ray the clear winner in the race.
6. Domain Name hacking/re-directing
   1. The industry would buy up domain names and re-direct them to their websites instead.

The most insightful information found in 2016’s year in review is what women were watching and searching for. It was found that more women search for women on women videos and roughly 1 out of 4 viewers of videos in general were women. It was also found that the women making these searched were done in states in the US that swing heavy red in elections, also states with hardly any sex education.

This data tells a story. It tells us that by looking at the statistics that one might assume women are turning to Pornhub for education, ideas, validation and inclusion. One might say that Pornhub is the wrong place for all of the above. “We need sustainable programs that promote health, understanding, and education,” Bucchino said.

The main point of this panel was to analyze the data and make predictions. “Don’t rely on search trends to discover what people want. Give people what they want so they search for it,” Bucchino stated multiple times throughout the presentation.

Check out this promo Michael Buccino made for his SXSW 2017 talk: