In many ways, and for many people, the upcoming Presidential election will be the defining event of 2020, a year that’s already been like no other in recent memory. The first presidential debate between current President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden took place on September 29th, and was described by news outlets as everything from “unruly” to a “hot mess”.
We’ll leave the political analysis to the talking heads, and instead focus our insights on how the first presidential debate of 2020 affected traffic coming to Pornhub. Since 2013, the Pornhub Insights blog has shown how live events lead millions of people to briefly change their daily porn viewing routine. In fact, we revealed similar data for the 2016 First Presidential Debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
This year, U.S. traffic to Pornhub dropped by -18.5% at 9pm (ET) and during the first hour of the debate. That represents a significant change in visits during one of Pornhub’s peak daily traffic periods. Compare that to the 2016 debate, when Pornhub’s traffic dropped by -16%.
After the debate ended, traffic to Pornhub immediately jumped +5.2% above normal levels at 11pm.
Perhaps more interesting, is how each U.S. state reacted to the debate. Some states like Michigan and Pennsylvania saw their traffic drop by over -20% during the debate, while visits in New Mexico and Virginia were down by only -10%. The following heat-map shows that the Northern and Eastern states had larger traffic drops than those in the South and the West.
Our statisticians then broke down the states based on their red (Republican) or blue (Democrat) affiliation in 2016, or their status as a battleground state in 2020 (according to the New York Times).
The following chart illustrates that traffic drops during the debate were highest in 2020 battleground states (-17.2%). Traffic in Red (Republican) states was down an average of -14.4%, and -15.1% in Blue (Democrat) states.
Post-debate traffic was higher than average across all blue (Democrat) states, by an average of +5.6%. Connecticut seemed to be the most excited after the debate, with state-wide traffic being +15.1% higher than a typical Tuesday at 11pm. The battleground states of Maine and New Hampshire also saw significant increases in Pornhub traffic, +12.6% and +11.7% respectively.
On average, the battleground states had a +2.7% increase in traffic, while red (Republican) states were the least interested in a quick visit to Pornhub after the debate ended, with their traffic only increasing by an average of +1.4%.
It wasn’t only Americans who were more interested in watching the debate than visiting Pornhub. During the first hour, traffic in Italy was down by -18%, Spain -13%, Taiwan -11%, Canada -10%, Paraguay -9%, Portugal -8%, France -6%, United Kingdom -5% and Puerto Rico -4%.
Stay tuned for more Pornhub Insights into the 2020 Presidential Election.
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Source: PornHub Insigits