Our first Insights post to focus on the porn interests of women was What Women Want. One of the most interesting take-aways from that study and it’s follow-up More of What Women Want was the large amount of gay porn viewed by women. Not only do women view a lot of lesbian porn, but the second most popular category among women was gay porn featuring men. Our friends at Cosmopolitan asked the Pornhub statisticians to dig a little deeper.
In our 2016 Year in Review we found that Pornhub’s proportion of female users had grown to 26% worldwide (from 24% in 2015). The gender split viewing gay male porn is actually much higher at 37% female. Proportionately, that means women are 69% more likely to be viewing gay porn than their male counterparts.
Overall, Gay Male porn is still the second most popular category among women, but for those over the age of 45 it surpasses “Lesbian” to become the #1 most viewed category. To see what types of Gay porn women like the most, we broke it down into the most popular categories.
Gay “black” men are by far the most popular, followed by gay porn involving “straight guys”. Older gay men are more appealing than younger, with “daddy” ranking 6 spots above “twink”.
In our More of What Women Want post, we expanded the demographic statistics and found that 36% of Pornhub’s female viewers are aged 18-24. The number of 18-24 year old women watching Gay Male porn is slightly higher at 40.3%.
In fact, 18-24 year old women are 24% more likely to be watching gay porn than all other age groups, whereas women in the 35 to 44 age group are 18% less likely to watch Gay Male porn compared to women of other ages.
Proportionately speaking, women are 69% more likely to watch Gay Male porn than men. If we compare within each age group, we find that 18-24 year old women are 83% more likely to watch this type of video than their male counterparts.
That’s a wrap for this edition of Pornhub Insights. Let us know in the comments if you’d like to see more gender specific breakdowns in the future.
Are you sure there isn’t something erroneous happening here?
I’ve ask around and no female friend said they could comprehend being interested in gay male porn.
the data is straight from google analytics so no, it’s not erroneous.
I am curious on how the study got the information on viewer’s genders… I believe many people watch videos not being logged in, or even watch it on their browser’s “private mode”… so how can Pornhub know if the person watching it is male, female or even their age range?
Our gender (and age) data is not based on logged in users. The anonymous data comes from Google Analytics, which makes it’s own gender determinations based on what you’re most likely to search for and view on websites in general – this data is generally used to assist with targeted Google Adwords advertising. Of our 60 million daily visitors, about 25% have detailed demographics data available. The remainder without would account for people visiting our site in private mode, VPNs, etc. More info can be found from Google: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2799357?hl=en
So Google assumes your gender through algorithms of what you browse or something like that? That does sound highly erroneous.
Yeah, I’m doubtful that Google Analytics can guess gay men as men. Gay men have different interests from straight men, and a study on Facebook data found it very easy to distinguish between the two groups. So maybe gay men are getting lumped together with women? I did a poll about that on a gay forum some months back; 17% of the gay men said Google Analytics guess them as women and 22% as unknown. It guesses me as “unknown” when it comes to gender.
Is there some page where you can see what it guesses you as? It’s suppossed to show on Ads preferences or something but it’s showing my gender and age as what I put on my google account.
www-.-google-.-com / settings/u/0/ads/authenticated
Hi! I don’t want to be condescending, but I do want to let you know that the world is bigger than you realize 🙂
Women being interested in male homosexuality is a very well-documented phenomenon, to the point of being a truism or meme in many communities. See for example the history of slashfic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_fiction
Can you tell me if the share of women among gay porn users has increased or decreased with time?
what if those “women” are just gay guys that chose female as gender during registiration? category of “straight guys” being so popular is suspicious.