Our obsession with older married women continues (thank you Sunny Leone).

PornHub is the Apple of porn sites. Innovative, ahead of the curve, and with a distinct human brand personality. PornHub's innovations, like the thumbnail preview by hovering the cursor, have been adopted by YouTube and become a part of our lives. Their Twitter page is hilarious, and they won a cult following when they gifted a loyal viewer a laptop – because it froze when his mom entered the room!

But personally, PornHub earned my respect when the government banned porn sites. They released a mirror site based on .net instead of .com - and that is the brotherly sensitivity that one needs from a porn site.

PornHub clearly believes in transparency, and has been releasing well-researched statistics for six years now. India has found decent representation on the results since the year they were introduced.

Related: The Ban On Porn Sites Began With Reliance Jio's Gagging Of Adult Websites

Sabka haath. Sabka vikas.
2018 was a difficult year for Indian masturbators, with the government banning over 800 un-sanskari sites. However, there wasn't any distinct difference in our performance. We stood up to the challenge and consolidated our position as the country with the 3rd largest traffic on the site.

Bhabhiji definitely ghar pe hain!
2018 continued to witness our obsession with older, married women. MILF was the most viewed category by Indians, ranking third globally in overall categories. If anything, it proves that we are consistent, steady, and faithful to our fetishes. Of course, no analysis of India is complete without a comparison with Pakistan. A peek into their fetishes reveals that 'Big Dick' is their most searched query.

Zoom out a little, and one finds that much of the developed world is obsessed with lesbianism. While this could be due to a liberal exposure to porn - one also finds that developing countries use queries that are easier to spell - 'Arab', 'Anal', and 'MILF'.

Jio dhan dhana dhan?
Jio Telecom launched in 2016, and took the nation by 4G storm. I was curious to see if access to high-speed 4G data had a proportional impact on our browsing. Turns out the change is negligible. Mobile usage for porn shot up to 98%, but then we hovered around the 3rd and 4th position in the last three years, with Canada and Japan being our biggest competitors. Which probably means that we would masturbate fervently whether we had 3G, 2G, or old issues of Crime and Detective.

Related: “I Even Recommend Pornography As A Treatment Sometimes.”

Who's who?
'Sacred Games' and 'Mirzapur' are common search trends on the site, proving that our kinks have adapted to digital platforms. However, the most popular person for the last three years is Sunny Leone.

Sunny Leone's career is a story of steely entrepreneurship. In spite of a successful career in the West, she acknowledged that 80% of her visitors and 60% revenue came from India. She embarked on a risky switch, and in spite of our conservative ideas of morality, she has gone on to become a popular actress and performer. In spite of narrow-minded bias, she has lent her voice to spread awareness, and composed herself with poise and grace. Even though Sunny has stopped producing adult content since 2010, she continues to rank No.1 in the list of performers. Mia Khalifa has been a steady No.2. But unfortunately there are no Indian men on this list. We are not great with porn, we prefer trolling others on Twitter.

Kitna time lagega?
While we might rank 3rd globally in terms of traffic, we don't spend too much time in finding a happy ending. India's time spent per visit on the site ranks relatively low at 8 minutes 23 seconds. This isn't too much of a change, a mere 3 second improvement over our score of 8 minutes 20 seconds last year. But instead of being judgmental about my co-citizens, I would attribute it to other factors.

The largest chunk of Indian masturbation connoisseurs are in the age bracket of 18-24 (more on that below). Now, Indian youth face a number of unique issues - privacy in hostels, flatmates, siblings, and nosy parents. It's no surprise that in 2016, Diwali ranked as the festival when most Indians decided to beat one off. After all, it is a festival of lights and sounds!

Indian youth are lending a 'big hand'.
Modiji has been repeating since 2014 that the future of India belongs to the youth. Our future is in our hands, clearly. India has the largest bracket of youngsters jacking off on the site, with 44% visitors in the age of 18-24. This proves that there are more types of drain in engineering colleges than just brain-drain.

Related: Will Indian Porn Ever Come Of Age

As the recent Assembly elections proved, India is not a homogenous country. This was evident in trending search queries too. Last year only one trending search item made it to the list - Tamil Aunty Sex. This year though, other parts of India found representation in the most trending search queries. There was Indian Bhojpuri XXX, and our Gujarati friends also found a place by looking up Desi Gujarati Sex (there is an element of patriotism too).

So there you have it. That's what India gets off on.

The government might try to ban porn sites, but where there's a willy, there's a way. India managed to retain its position in the rankings in 2018. We will only be able to tell if the ban has had any effect when next year's results surface.

Till then, Fappy New Year!

PornHub Top 20 countries

All images taken from PornHub 2018 Year in Review. You can access the complete insights here - https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2018-year-in-review (Be careful though, the site might be banned on your server. But then, when has that ever stopped you?)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are independent views solely of the author(s) expressed in their private capacity and do not in any way represent or reflect the views of 101india.com

By Hriday Ranjan
Photographs credit: PornHub.com