While Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos duked it out in Super Bowl XLVIII on the 2nd of February 2014, thousands saw it fit to take a break from watching online porn according to an impromptu study by PornHub.

The company noticed that visits to its archive of free porn dropped by 6 percent during the NFL-final. That’s a significant number in a country of more than 300 million people.

Naturally, numbers were down even more in Seattle and Denver, 61 percent and 51 percent respectively, as fans were watching their cities’ teams. It wasn’t even close in the end. Seahawks crushed Broncos 43-8 and clenched its first ever Super Bowl win.

Disgruntled Denver supporters were quick to return to PornHub at a rate of 11 percent over normal, while Seattle fans, who were too busy celebrating, only returned at a far below normal rate of minus 17 percent.

US Breaks From Porn During Super Bowl

PornHub wrote that porn lovers were anxious for the game to be over so they could get right back to their adult entertainment: “When the final whistle blew, we saw positive traffic spikes across the US (4 percent), in Denver (11 percent) as well as a 3 percent rise in Canada… and 1 percent (rise) worldwide. Contrarily, Seattle continued celebrating well into the night with a 17 percent drop until midnight, when it returned to Sunday norms.”

This is not the first event PornHub has monitored in this fashion. Other global and local events affect traffic in surprising ways. While Felix Baumgartner’s record-setting parachute jump from space was going on, visits to PonHub’s archives went up by 5 percent in the US.

The 2012 finale of immensely popular TV show American Idol saw a porn viewer drop of 5 percent. Canadians apparently love Apple’s products so much that PornHub’s traffic dipped by 9 percent during the release of the iPhone 5.

Whether or not Denver supporters were jacking off furiously after the game is only up for speculation. After all, their team did lose by the largest margin in Super Bowl history since 1992.

As interesting and revealing as PornHub’s data is, one mustn’t forget that it’s easy to read too much into the statistics and jump to unsavoury conclusions without any hard evidence.

If we somehow could get our hands on the Colorado sales figures from Kleenex and Vaseline, then we’d know for sure what was going on.

Comments are closed.