Tell Me How You Fap: A Browser-History Analysis

Le Tag Parfait is a website dedicated to porn culture. Driven by some success in France, we wondered what was turning our readers on. In big letters, we knew who they were: for the most part, they belong to what could be called the “Youporn Generation”, people who have known almost nothing but tubes. But we didn’t know what they enjoyed watching. So we asked them to send us screen-shots of their browser history with a few informations (age, gender, city and sexual orientation, if they cared to specify), otherwise anonymously. Here is our analysis of their consumption.

All the figures that follow shall be handled with kid gloves (if I may say so), knowing that the sample group is meager and that 15% eventually chose to remain totally anonymous. Above all, those figures reflect the consumption trends of some of our readers, not only French.

– 67% of you are men – 33% are women
– Your average age is 23.8 years old.
– 7% declare themselves bisexual (50% men – 50% women), 3.5% consider themselves bi-curious (50% men – 50% women) and 5.2% gay (100% men). The rest of the group is made up of straight men and women, or people who didn’t wish to give information on that matter.
– For the most part, you live in large French towns and French-speaking capital cities.

Tube supremacy

First assessment: 92% of you use tubes to watch porn, with an overwhelming majority favoring xHamster and xVideos-XNXX (which are the same tubes with a different interface). Then come Pornhub, Redtube and other less known ones. Youporn is rather scarcely used, in the end, which shows one thing: you want and need to have access to a catalogue as large as possible, and you are starting to turn away from tubes that multiply partnerships and sponsored videos (the edited-with-an-axe ones that last 5 minutes).

The results also show the upsurge of xHamster, whose becoming one of the leading porn sites in the world is anything but a mere coincidence, despite rather slow servers and a lazy on-site search (on should beware of the figures displayed by LiveJasmin, whose traffic is very much inflated by advertisement). Right now, xHamster is the best-provided tube, whether for hacked contents (they are not very cautious regarding the rights…) or for homemade contents, and doesn’t have a real barrier between genders (contrary to the other tubes). What’s more, its 2.0 strategy gives it an interesting community advantage by winning the loyalty of its users.

Where everything-for-free mentality rules

You don’t mention subscriptions to any paying sites in your browser history, except for free previews (like Brazzers or Kink); also, none of you quotes any illegal downloading platform, which means free streaming is the big winner of this survey. With porn culture comes web culture, and the free-of-charge culture going with it.

The arrival of the tubes, in 2006-2007, marked a clear departure from the old ways of consumption, and even lead to what we can call the third revolution of online porn (after the advent of Internet, and the democratization of the ADSL, that opened up the video market), to the great displeasure of the industry, who really has a hard time considering advertisement as an alternative to the traditional charged-offer system. This of course also raises the question of rights, but does the consumer really care about that? This little survey shows that as long as there is content, people watch it, wherever the images come from, whether pro, hacked, buff or homemade, only its abundance matters (as well as its accessibility and gratuity).

The culture of zapping

Today’s consumer is a pecking one: you spend 5 to 30 minutes stringing videos together, with an average of about 10 minutes, which is quite noteworthy (in publicity terms) compared to the average time spent on a news site for instance (3 to 6 minutes average). Your searches fall into two methods: some search by tag, others by actress. In both cases, you only very scarcely stay on the same scene or a particular actress during the whole session: you are into pecking consumption, either to double up enough images to come, or because you find the right video last. Your average number of requests is a good twenty by session.

No distinction by gender or sexual orientation in this consumption: you all use tubes the same way, and this is one interesting element coming out of your history, something we already caught a glimpse of some time ago (via Les Parfaites, or simply by chatting with you): there is no such thing as a masculine or feminine consumption of porn.

Various lush fantasies but only a few perfect tags

There is so much diversity in your histories that it would be a rather risky business to try and define your favorite tags. Only a much larger sample group could yield convincing results, with a survey set on the basis of the tube-users’ connection logs, for instance. Even so, one thing we can already do is put to rest, once and for all, the generally accepted idea that women watch soft and “respectful” porn, while men watch macho and violent porn.

A few examples:
– People watching DPs (double penetrations) are primarily women.
– It can be noted that women watch more submission scenes (even humiliation ones) than men.
– The only user who visited x-art to check out some teens was a man.
– Women (straight or not) significantly watch gay porn (male).

We can still draw some principle elements from our statistics. Among the most frequently used tags, the all-round champion is anal and its derivatives (rim-job, DP…), showing in 44.19% of your histories, followed by teen (32.56%), which leads us naturally to the perfect tag that seams to be bugging you more than others: the “teen anal” combo, or “first time anal”… Innocence and secret door, one eternal fantasy.

You also particularly like tags related to some sort of “violent” behavior: BDSM, punished, humiliated, or forced come up in 34.88% of your queries. Anal, teens and violence… OK, vice-wise, there is indeed a strongly interesting picture taking shape here.

Porn as we use it being mostly the on-screen representation of fantasies for masturbatory purposes, it is quite logical to tend towards what you would like to try, what turns you on, and in particular what you don’t have within reach. To draw from this some abominable and decadent conclusions is of course not something we are ready to do here at Le Tag Parfait, since we know you a little, and we noticed the vast majority of you are perfectly normal (but unfortunately for you, you don’t do the headlines with normality).

The rest of the results is not significant enough for us to draw any relevant analysis, but it does reveal that porn is rich and that your fantasies are just as much; in the intimacy of a room with ADSL connection, creativity is expressed. There are as many fantasies as there are people. It would therefore be dangerous to produce a portrait of the average fapper.

YouPorn today, Spotiporn tomorrow?

We weren’t really amazed by this outcome. We were expecting such a profusion of different tags, but maybe not such a dense and rich one. We were nevertheless surprised by the total domination of the tubes, which speaks volumes about the gap between real porn consumption among those under 30 and the little effort the porn industry makes– except for webmasters – to adjust to it.

Part of the porn industry would therefore be well advised to take a fresh look at the tubes and their economic model based on advertising (CPM, affiliation, fixed); no doubt this is the ground on which the future will be at stake. If the record industry is now managing to slowly make up the lost ground it is partly thanks to the streaming via Spotify, Deezer, or Youtube (whether through paid subscriptions, or through advertising for free media). Just like porn, music had to confront hackings and the young users’ refusal to put any money in. It took quite a long time for people like Pascal Nègre (head of Universal Music Group, which accounts for 38% of the total market) to reconsider his position on streaming (yesterday’s evil is today’s good).

Porn is a changing market. Ignoring it, or avoiding going through any evolution, is having a race to the bottom. So, what is the industry waiting for? Fabian Thylmann – who (not anymore, ed.), with Manwin, embodies a considerable part of the business going on today – to end up buying everybody up and imposing his vision (knowing the bloke is far from altruistic, and, most importantly, doesn’t give a fuck about porn in itself)? This supremacy isn’t sane. Other powerful actors need to step into the breach and put forward new solutions for the future of online porn, unless we will come to a pornographic world where all power is concentrated in the hands of the same group.

Today’s porn users should be seen as locusts hopping from field to field to feed themselves, regardless of customs charges, due to habit or culture. Then why not stick a tiny billboard on their backs to benefit from their jumping around, or put forward quality subscription offers, instead of having one’s crops devastated? It’s about time someone would start up a Spotify of porn, or set the situation straight the way Youtube did in his time (when, in terms of rights, the pre-Vevo era was just as anarchical as the porn tubes). This is what Fabian Thylmann has been doing lately, except his bulimia makes him look like some Kim Dotcom of porn rather than a savior (even if he is only shamelessly putting into practice the philosophy fostered by the creators of Brazzers/Pornhub he is the worthy successor of).

In the meantime, fappers keep on fapping, and lead the way toward what porn should be in the coming years: an exceptional catalogue of fantasies, where all types and desires shall be endlessly represented. The future lies in powerful search engines, on-demand porn, contextualized pornographic menus adjusting to the users’ consumption habits, but also in content purchasing advisors who will show you what to look at. A patchwork of pro, amateur, homemade and live porn on a social, clean, precise, attractive, fast and functional platform. A war machine dedicated to solitary pleasures.

Originally translated from this post by Ms Alice

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