India’s porn crackdown isn’t working — but China’s is

Given the scale of xHamster’s audience, there’s usually something noteworthy in the company’s annual porn audience breakdowns and 2019’s report is no different.

Buried among a tranche of data covering all manner of search trends (it’s out with ‘tattoos’, ‘Hentai,’ and ‘babysitters’ this year, and in with ‘Stormy Daniels’ and ‘sisters’, in case you’re wondering) lie some rather telling global stats about some countries’ attempts to limit access to adult material.

India vs China

This year we’ve learnt censorship may prove effective in one country, but not so much in another. It’s certainly working in China, where late last year a combination of a crackdown on VPNs and ‘financial incentives‘ for any citizens reporting ‘illegal [adult] content’ saw porn figures plummet by a whopping 81 percent, according to xHamster.

Hop over the border to India though (saying a quick ‘hi’ to Nepal en route, which witnessed a similar crackdown) and it’s a different story. The Indian government outlawed over 800 porn sites in October 2018, but that didn’t seem to slam the brakes on the country’s porn viewing habits: India’s adult traffic rose by some 44 percent last year, the single biggest rise across the globe.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Looking at the bigger picture in terms of global censorship, there were no big surprises in general, with the likes of Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines all trailing not far behind China in keeping with their strict views of pornography.

For clarity, the difference in efficacy of porn site blocks and bans could likely partly be explained by the differing regulations, and severity with which they are dealt. For example, in China, pornography is illegal and even watching it in the privacy of your own home can land you in serious trouble. Previously, circumventing via VPN’s was a trivial task, but these are also now under pressure to be blocked.

By contrast, while India has attempted to limit and block access to huge porn sites, watching adult pornography isn’t actually illegal, so the disincentive to watching isn’t nearly as significant.

Here come the girls

This time last year we noted the rise in female porn consumption and there’s no sign of that declining anytime soon, according to these most recent figures.

Women now represent 28 percent  of the total adult content audience worldwide (up from last year’s 26 percent) with xHamster’s female viewership growing by 12 percent globally this year and by 41 percent in the US alone, highlighting the obvious need for the industry to up its game and better cater for women’s needs, in terms of both content and style.

The biggest international markets for female-friendly porn include the world-beating Dominican Republic, with an astonishingly high audience share of 53 percent, South Africa (40 percent) and Brazil (38.5 percent).

Countries with the lowest proportion of female viewers skew largely towards the Middle East and the Far East, unsurprisingly, (taking in the likes of Saudi, UAE, Oman and Japan) but with good old Blighty being one particular outlier. Women in the UK make up a mere 19 percent of the country’s porn watchers, putting them only just ahead of Qatar.

In other news from the very same report, Barcelona (home to production companies such as BaDoink) is now being hailed as an upcoming global ‘porn capital’ with a notable growth in the number of adult producers emerging from the Catalonian city, alongside its popularity as a filming location, thanks to its photogenic beach locations and relative lack of stringent nudity laws.