Pornhub’s traffic had massive peak after YouTube went down

Millions of viewers were left frustrated when YouTube unexpectedly crashed on Tuesday. However, they didn’t just sit on their hands and wait for cat videos to come back, instead they rushed off to Pornhub to blow off some steam.

The porn giant has released some statistics about its performance when YouTube was out of town, and the figures are very impressive. Traffic jumped 12 percent in the first hour of the outage, and it climbed to 21 percent above average in the second hour.

After this massive peak, it fell by a whopping 25 percent, four percent below normal levels, as YouTube returned and viewers fled to watch vlogs and gaming videos, either that or they were in a collective refractory period. However, fear not, within a couple of hours the porn viewing figures were back to normal.

Pornhub said the surge was a “significant increase by millions of additional viewers during Pornhub’s peak evening hours.”

Interestingly, the company’s number crunchers noticed that some unusual search terms experienced significant increases in popularity while YouTube was offline.

Searches containing “YouTube” increased by more than 183 percent, while other popular YouTube searches also experienced a surge.

Here’s a breakdown of the top search terms during the period.

Given the popularity of searches like “Fortnite,” “Minecraft,” “Pokemon,” and “WWE,” it’s possible that people were trying to use the porn site to get their regular YouTube fix. Well, at least that’s what they’ll tell you.

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