The xHamster 2020 Trend Report
Thanks to tech innovation and changing demographics, the adult industry is changing rapidly — perhaps more quickly than in 2007, which saw both the launch of the iPhone and the birth of sites like xHamster.
While 2019 saw the continued rise in women viewers and censorship fights across the globe, 2020 will be the year that Gen Z flexes its porn muscle, shifting millennials as the dominant force shaping what gets made, and how it gets consumed.
We analyzed the past several years of data to look at the major trend-lines of 2020, and what consumers — and adult producers — can expect as we start the new decade.
HOW WE GOT HERE
To understand where we’re going, we have to look at where we’ve been. We gathered the top Google searches related to porn over the last decade to give us an idea of what's been popular over the last 10 years — and when.
The graph below shows what year and month each porn term peaked in search popularity, according to Google Trends. We started out with Sasha Grey (peaked Feb 2011), Bukkake (peaked Feb 2012), and ended with Polyamory (June 2019), Bisexuals (June 2019) and Trans Porn (Dec 2019). Welcome, sexually fluid Gen Z overlords!
“Generation Cam”
In the past few years, we’ve seen a steady decline in the number of 18-24 year olds coming to xHamster, even as the overall traffic has grown. Some of this could be ascribed to aging millennials moving out of the demographic. But when we looked at data from xHamster Live, we noticed something different. Cam fans are significantly younger than their tube site counterparts.
For example, this is what age distribution looks like on a site like xHamster.
And this is what age distribution looks like on xHamsterLive.
Cam users skew much younger — dramatically so.
Generation Z — the so-called Digital Natives — expect and crave interaction. From video games to Twitch to FaceTime, they’re used to live media that engages with them. For this emerging generation, which now fully compromises the 18-24 demographic, live cam content dominates.
And forget the conventional wisdom that younger generations won’t pay for adult content.
Almost half — 48% — of all sales on xHamster Premium are made by users under the age of 35, even though they make up only 45% of total visits. Meanwhile, those users aged 45 and over accounted for only 18% of sales, even though they made up 23% of total visits. In other words, younger millennials and Gen Z purchase porn at a higher rate than the Boomers. Looks like pensions and social security isn’t the only thing younger people are subsidizing!
It’s important to remember that Gen Z, in particular, has LESS disposable income than other generations. However, when they do have money, they are more likely to spend it.
While there’s little historical data to show how much Boomers spent on porn in their youth — it was barely legal, and we don’t mean pigtails — Gen Z and late millennials are proving to be a much more avid consumer of adult content than their forebearers.
Gen Z is also more diverse than previous generations, which may also help explain the increase in spending. In a recent survey, porn consumers who identified as “white” or “Caucasian” were actually less likely to spend money on adult material than members of nearly every other ethnic group.
We fully expect that as Gen Z comes of age and has disposable income, they will be more willing to spend money for quality adult content, which often means custom content and live cams.
The End of Rough Sex?
Another trend that seems to be fading — the outrageous and rough porn that dominated in the last decade. Last year, we noted that searches for BDSM had dropped 25%. This year, we see a host of terms falling seemingly in unison: POV (-17%), creampies (-11%) and gangbangs (-12%). Could sex be becoming … *gasp* … gentler?
Maybe. “Anal” and related keywords have been trending downward as well. In the past few years, searches for anal have been flat or dropping. This year, we saw a continuation of the downward trajectory. While buttsex is certainly fun, and perhaps even mainstream, the taboo has fallen. And that means there are fewer people searching for it in porn.
For years, anti-porn activists relentlessly prophesied that exposure to adult material will only lead to more extreme material — a theory that might have seemed supported by the growth of BDSM and anal during the 2010s — but now? It looks like the surge may have been curiosity — a side effect of the 50 Shades phenomenon.
Polygamish
That’s not to say that we’re going back to vanilla sex and fake nails.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a growing interest in a broader idea of sexuality — especially with newer generation. Trans porn, long a niche part of adult, is now part of almost every major adult studio line-up. As is fluid sexuality and open relationships. While the fascination with cuckolding seems to have peaked — it’s fallen for the last several years — it’s been replaced by hotwifing. The difference between the two is more than semantic. Like cheating (which is also falling in searches) cuckolding often requires the humiliation of the male partner as part of the fantasy (and, in some cases, the assumed degradation of the wife.)
Hotwifing, on the other hand, is the proud embrace of open relationships, with the man getting off on his wife’s pleasure. It’s up 34% this year.
As we move into 2020, let’s hope this next decade welcomes more open forms of sexuality — with more sharing and less shame.
Back to Nature
Another data point supporting an anti-shame trend? Interest in amateur and homemade content has surged. Amateur remains our top category in the US, and the third most popular worldwide. Within that category, we’ve seen a surge in people looking for “natural” bodies and authentic situations (such as public sex or voyeuristic content).
We suspect part of this is due to the rise of “real” productions, such as independent amateur performers, paid social, performer-produced custom clips and fan-based subscription sites, where fans can see the supposedly (and sometimes actually) real-life sexual encounters of porn stars. Often filmed with high-end phones, this next wave of production moves sex out of the studio and into the home, college dorm or hiking trail.
Expect this trend to only to increase in coming years, as high-definition, easy-to-edit pro-am phones such as the iPhone 11 Pro grow in popularity.
Desktop Is the New VHS
And this year, we need to make it official. No one watches porn on desktops anymore. Nearly 80% of visitors are currently watching porn on their mobile device, a continuation of a trend we’ve seen for years, and which has only accelerated — desktop porn sessions fell -19% in the past year alone.
We also saw tablet sessions fall 29% — too obvious, perhaps, to bring into the bathroom. Everyone watches porn on their phone.
And yet, we still see sites that aren’t optimized for mobile. While it’s true that major legacy distributors still might sell the occasional VHS tape, none of them rely on it for income. Unfortunately, too many studios and sites in our industry concentrate their redesigns on how it looks and functions on desktop (since that’s what they use at the office), treating mobile as an afterthought. Time to fast-forward to 2020!
The Money Shot 2020
If there’s one word that porn studios should heed in 2020, it’s ‘authenticity.’ With porn stars documenting their own sex lives, and a new generation raised on sexting and shifting gender norms, we’re increasingly turned on by people we can connect to — whether because of we can talk to them (cams), look like them (amateur) or imagine them out in the world (natural).
Perhaps, in a world stretched by political division, geographic strife and senseless vioIence — we’re looking to porn for comfort and validation, not just escape.
Download the 2020 Trend Report here
CONTACT:
Alex Hawkins
Vice President, xHamster
alex.hawkins@xhamster.com
While 2019 saw the continued rise in women viewers and censorship fights across the globe, 2020 will be the year that Gen Z flexes its porn muscle, shifting millennials as the dominant force shaping what gets made, and how it gets consumed.
We analyzed the past several years of data to look at the major trend-lines of 2020, and what consumers — and adult producers — can expect as we start the new decade.
HOW WE GOT HERE
To understand where we’re going, we have to look at where we’ve been. We gathered the top Google searches related to porn over the last decade to give us an idea of what's been popular over the last 10 years — and when.
The graph below shows what year and month each porn term peaked in search popularity, according to Google Trends. We started out with Sasha Grey (peaked Feb 2011), Bukkake (peaked Feb 2012), and ended with Polyamory (June 2019), Bisexuals (June 2019) and Trans Porn (Dec 2019). Welcome, sexually fluid Gen Z overlords!
“Generation Cam”
In the past few years, we’ve seen a steady decline in the number of 18-24 year olds coming to xHamster, even as the overall traffic has grown. Some of this could be ascribed to aging millennials moving out of the demographic. But when we looked at data from xHamster Live, we noticed something different. Cam fans are significantly younger than their tube site counterparts.
For example, this is what age distribution looks like on a site like xHamster.
And this is what age distribution looks like on xHamsterLive.
Cam users skew much younger — dramatically so.
Generation Z — the so-called Digital Natives — expect and crave interaction. From video games to Twitch to FaceTime, they’re used to live media that engages with them. For this emerging generation, which now fully compromises the 18-24 demographic, live cam content dominates.
And forget the conventional wisdom that younger generations won’t pay for adult content.
Almost half — 48% — of all sales on xHamster Premium are made by users under the age of 35, even though they make up only 45% of total visits. Meanwhile, those users aged 45 and over accounted for only 18% of sales, even though they made up 23% of total visits. In other words, younger millennials and Gen Z purchase porn at a higher rate than the Boomers. Looks like pensions and social security isn’t the only thing younger people are subsidizing!
It’s important to remember that Gen Z, in particular, has LESS disposable income than other generations. However, when they do have money, they are more likely to spend it.
While there’s little historical data to show how much Boomers spent on porn in their youth — it was barely legal, and we don’t mean pigtails — Gen Z and late millennials are proving to be a much more avid consumer of adult content than their forebearers.
Gen Z is also more diverse than previous generations, which may also help explain the increase in spending. In a recent survey, porn consumers who identified as “white” or “Caucasian” were actually less likely to spend money on adult material than members of nearly every other ethnic group.
We fully expect that as Gen Z comes of age and has disposable income, they will be more willing to spend money for quality adult content, which often means custom content and live cams.
The End of Rough Sex?
Another trend that seems to be fading — the outrageous and rough porn that dominated in the last decade. Last year, we noted that searches for BDSM had dropped 25%. This year, we see a host of terms falling seemingly in unison: POV (-17%), creampies (-11%) and gangbangs (-12%). Could sex be becoming … *gasp* … gentler?
Maybe. “Anal” and related keywords have been trending downward as well. In the past few years, searches for anal have been flat or dropping. This year, we saw a continuation of the downward trajectory. While buttsex is certainly fun, and perhaps even mainstream, the taboo has fallen. And that means there are fewer people searching for it in porn.
For years, anti-porn activists relentlessly prophesied that exposure to adult material will only lead to more extreme material — a theory that might have seemed supported by the growth of BDSM and anal during the 2010s — but now? It looks like the surge may have been curiosity — a side effect of the 50 Shades phenomenon.
Polygamish
That’s not to say that we’re going back to vanilla sex and fake nails.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a growing interest in a broader idea of sexuality — especially with newer generation. Trans porn, long a niche part of adult, is now part of almost every major adult studio line-up. As is fluid sexuality and open relationships. While the fascination with cuckolding seems to have peaked — it’s fallen for the last several years — it’s been replaced by hotwifing. The difference between the two is more than semantic. Like cheating (which is also falling in searches) cuckolding often requires the humiliation of the male partner as part of the fantasy (and, in some cases, the assumed degradation of the wife.)
Hotwifing, on the other hand, is the proud embrace of open relationships, with the man getting off on his wife’s pleasure. It’s up 34% this year.
As we move into 2020, let’s hope this next decade welcomes more open forms of sexuality — with more sharing and less shame.
Back to Nature
Another data point supporting an anti-shame trend? Interest in amateur and homemade content has surged. Amateur remains our top category in the US, and the third most popular worldwide. Within that category, we’ve seen a surge in people looking for “natural” bodies and authentic situations (such as public sex or voyeuristic content).
We suspect part of this is due to the rise of “real” productions, such as independent amateur performers, paid social, performer-produced custom clips and fan-based subscription sites, where fans can see the supposedly (and sometimes actually) real-life sexual encounters of porn stars. Often filmed with high-end phones, this next wave of production moves sex out of the studio and into the home, college dorm or hiking trail.
Expect this trend to only to increase in coming years, as high-definition, easy-to-edit pro-am phones such as the iPhone 11 Pro grow in popularity.
Desktop Is the New VHS
And this year, we need to make it official. No one watches porn on desktops anymore. Nearly 80% of visitors are currently watching porn on their mobile device, a continuation of a trend we’ve seen for years, and which has only accelerated — desktop porn sessions fell -19% in the past year alone.
We also saw tablet sessions fall 29% — too obvious, perhaps, to bring into the bathroom. Everyone watches porn on their phone.
And yet, we still see sites that aren’t optimized for mobile. While it’s true that major legacy distributors still might sell the occasional VHS tape, none of them rely on it for income. Unfortunately, too many studios and sites in our industry concentrate their redesigns on how it looks and functions on desktop (since that’s what they use at the office), treating mobile as an afterthought. Time to fast-forward to 2020!
The Money Shot 2020
If there’s one word that porn studios should heed in 2020, it’s ‘authenticity.’ With porn stars documenting their own sex lives, and a new generation raised on sexting and shifting gender norms, we’re increasingly turned on by people we can connect to — whether because of we can talk to them (cams), look like them (amateur) or imagine them out in the world (natural).
Perhaps, in a world stretched by political division, geographic strife and senseless vioIence — we’re looking to porn for comfort and validation, not just escape.
Download the 2020 Trend Report here
CONTACT:
Alex Hawkins
Vice President, xHamster
alex.hawkins@xhamster.com
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