‘Fallout 4’ Release Leads to Drop in Pornhub Traffic

Pornhub’s Insights blog is a guiltier pleasure than their actual site — it’s data porn about porn. It turns out gamers change their porn viewing habits around new releases, or at least for Fallout 4.

“Compared to an average day, we saw a slight 5% increase in traffic among gamers in the early morning hours from 3-4 am. At this point we assume everyone’s download completed and the gaming commenced,” the post reads. “Starting at 5am traffic began to drop, down as much as 10% from 7am till noon. In the afternoon traffic returned to normal, but after 6pm it dropped again when we assume that 9-5 workers arrived home and fired up their games. After midnight it seems like everyone finally took a break, and traffic jumped as high at 15% above daily norms.”

If you’re wondering how Pornhub knows gamers specifically were taking a break from the site, it’s based on “data that Google Analytics provides.” Before you sheepishly go clear your browser history, don’t worry, they anonymize the data.

Seems that Pornhub’s millions of users “enjoyed” their content more during the download period, then once the game was ready to play a few hours later, traffic dropped fairly significantly (more than 10%.) What’s funny is past midnight traffic spiked back up over 15% — suggesting  if their data is accurate, hardcore gamers like video games more than masturbating… but only for so long. It’s the lesser-known 4th law of thermodynamics: a fap can neither be created nor destroyed — only shifted through time.

I did a double-blind test of both products, like any responsible journalist would, and found that Pornhub’s HD videos provided an overall superior experience to the pre-patch Fallout 4 universe. While Fallout 4‘s soundtrack, open world gameplay, and violence provided a decent user experience, Pornhub’s superior crafting interface, replayability, character models, and ability to actually deliver 1080p 60FPS with no stuttering makes it a tough choice… or it will be once the first PC patches are in and I stop falling through the goddamned floors. I did have to sort through a lot of junk in both cases.

After careful consideration, the solution is clear — Fallout 4 fans need to add additional monitors, so they don’t have to make such terrible choices.