Montreal-based Pornhub says it saw a nearly 20 percent drop in Canadian traffic thanks to the July 8th Rogers outage, falling in line with previous estimates that the outage took out roughly a quarter of the country’s internet traffic.
In a report from Pornhub (that link is SFW!), the company says it started to see traffic drop almost immediately after the outage began. By 7am ET, hourly traffic to Pornhub was down 19 percent compared to the same hour on an average day. Moreover, traffic remained below average for the rest of the day, including another 19 percent drop in the early evening.
Interestingly, Pornhub said traffic returned to average levels early Saturday morning, but dropped again throughout the day.
The company noted that 90 percent of Canada’s traffic to Pornhub comes from mobile phones, so it also shared a comparison of mobile and desktop traffic. The latter saw a larger drop of 21 percent in the late afternoon on July 8th.
Finally, Pornhub compared the impacts on Canadian provinces. New Brunswick saw the most immediate drop, falling 49 percent by 6am. Manitoba had the biggest drop in traffic, falling 65 percent by 11am. It also didn’t see the same recovery on Saturday that most provinces did.
Ontario’s traffic dropped as low as 38 percent at 4pm on Friday. At that time, Nova Scotia’s traffic was down 35 percent and Quebec’s was down 21 percent.
Pornhub says it determined percent changes in traffic by comparing the July 8th traffic to average levels of the same day of the week, and the same hour of the day, from the two previous weeks.
While Pornhub’s parent company Mindgeek has a major office in Montreal, the company claims to be based in Luxembourg, a country well-known for taxing corporations at a meagre rate.
Over the years, both porn actors and activists have heavily criticized Mindgeek for holding what is often described as “monopolistic control” over the struggling pornography industry. The platform has also come under fire for hosting illegal videos, resulting in Pornhub reworking its content verification system.
Update 13/07/2022 at 10:37am ET: Added clarification that the outage impacted Canadian traffic, not all traffic to Pornhub.
Source: Pornhub Insights (SFW)
