Performance anxiety, anyone? Michigan's porn-watching took a dive on election day

Nov 9, 2020 at 1:38 pm
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click to enlarge Performance anxiety, anyone? Michigan's porn-watching took a dive on election day
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Nothing kills a boner, or the desire to fap, quite like the words “key race alert” — though CNN's John King did get us worked up with his digital map work and Jake Tapper's frequent use of the word “spawn” to describe President Donald Trump's children got us hot and bothered.

But on election day, Michigan, you kept your hands out of your pants and on your ballots and/or preferred device to see which old white dude would be elected to the highest office in the country. (Spoiler alert: the non-fascist old white dude won.)

Porn streaming giant Pornhub released some election day data which saw most states, including Michigan, putting a pause on their usual daily porn-watching habits in favor of tracking election updates.

However, early the next morning traffic was up, as Pornhub saw a 14% increase in traffic around 6 a.m.

It wasn't until 3 p.m. that traffic dropped country-wide and, by 6 p.m., the X-rated site reported a -11% drop and remained below average for most of the evening. In Michigan, this decrease averaged to -4% when compared to non-election day numbers. The opposite could not be more true of Arizona, a battleground state that must have been jerking it most of the day because Pornhub traffic was up in the state by 9%.

It wasn't until 1 a.m. when most people had given up hope the results would be finalized that they muted Anderson Cooper to fire up Pornhub in search of a release that no cable news network could provide. The result? Pornhub saw an abnormal increase of 14% in traffic around 3 a.m.

click to enlarge Americans gave their wrists a break on election day. - Pornhub/Insights
Pornhub/Insights
Americans gave their wrists a break on election day.

The Pornhub anal-ytics team (sorry, not sorry) also compared web traffic between red and blue states.

At 6 p.m., Republican-led states were not in the masturbating mood, apparently, and reported a 14% drop in traffic, compared to Dems who were semi-hard/wet, but not as much as normal, reporting a 6% drop.

At 3 a.m., however, Republicans were probably pretty excited that mail-in ballots hadn't been counted yet because their old white dude was in the lead on early Wednesday morning, and to prematurely celebrate they logged on to Pornhub, which saw a 16% increase in red states. Blue states were up late, too, and were responsible for an 11% increase in traffic.

America, we may be divided but we all salute the same freak flag.

Now, if you'll excuse us, we have some very pressing work to do in a private browser window on our phones, which we've disconnected from company WiFi on our lunch break.

click to enlarge Performance anxiety, anyone? Michigan's porn-watching took a dive on election day
Pornhub/insights


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