How Many People Watch Porn? 2026 Global Statistics

Short answer: No one has a reliable worldwide head count, but the scale is enormous. The 10 biggest adult websites logged about 7.2 billion visits in August 2026, roughly 230 million visits a day (Similarweb). And in national surveys across Australia, North America, and Europe, 70% to 94% of adults say they’ve watched porn at some point in their lives (Bőthe et al., 2024).

That’s the headline. The details are more interesting, and a lot of the porn statistics you’ll find online are years out of date or were never real in the first place. Every number below comes from a named source, and we’ve flagged the popular claims that don’t hold up.

Porn Statistics 2026: Key Numbers at a Glance

Statistic	Number	Source
Monthly visits to the 10 biggest adult sites	~7.2 billion	Similarweb, Aug 2026
Monthly visits to Pornhub	1.3 billion (#25 site worldwide)	Similarweb, Aug 2026
Pornhub visits per minute	~29,000	Derived from Similarweb, Aug 2026
US adults who have ever watched porn	70%	Grubbs et al., 2019
US adults who consume porn	61% (up from 55% in 2015)	Barna, 2024
US women who consume porn	44% (up from 39% in 2015)	Barna, 2024
Pornhub visitors who are women	38%	Pornhub Year in Review, 2025
Average Pornhub visit	9 minutes 33 seconds	Pornhub Year in Review, 2025
Pornhub visits from phones	87%	Pornhub Year in Review, 2025
US teens (13–17) who have seen porn	73%	Common Sense Media, 2023
Average age of first exposure	12 (US), 13 (England)	Common Sense Media; Children’s Commissioner
US states with age-verification laws in effect	27	Free Speech Coalition, 2026
Adults at risk of problematic porn use (strictest screen)	3.2% (men 6.3%, women 0.7%)	International Sex Survey, 2024

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How Many People Watch Porn Worldwide?

The most honest answer is “billions of visits a month, from a large share of the world’s adults.” Here’s what the best available data shows.

The biggest porn sites by traffic

These are the adult sites in Similarweb’s global top 100 for August 2026:

Site	World rank	Monthly visits	Change vs. Aug 2025
pornhub.com	#25	1.3 billion	−19%
xhamster.com	#27	1.2 billion	−8%
xvideos.com	#34	956 million	−23%
stripchat.com	#40	744 million	−10%
eporner.com	#52	628 million	+6%
xnxx.com	#61	546 million	−28%
chaturbate.com	#76	427 million	n/a
onlyfans.com	#82	379 million	n/a
erome.com	#91	352 million	n/a

Add a regional xHamster mirror (636 million) and the 10 adult domains in the top 100 come to about 7.2 billion visits a month.

Two caveats matter here. First, visits aren’t people: one person can visit dozens of times a month. Second, these figures leave out apps, social media, and the long tail of thousands of smaller sites. In the UK alone, people visited 21,260 different adult services in a single month (Ofcom, 2025).

For context, Netflix.com (1.6 billion visits) now gets more web traffic than Pornhub, and Google (86.6 billion) gets more than every adult site in the top 100 combined, roughly 12 times over.

What share of people have watched porn?

There’s no representative global survey, but national studies paint a consistent picture. Across national probability studies in Australia, North America, and Europe, 70% to 94% of adults report having watched porn at some point, as summarized by the International Sex Survey, a study of 82,243 people in 42 countries.

The last time Pornhub published its total traffic was 2019: 42 billion visits that year, or about 115 million a day (Newshub). Its yearly reports now share rankings and percentages instead of totals.

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How Many People Watch Porn Every Day?

• Pornhub: about 42 million web visits a day, or roughly 29,000 a minute (calculated from Similarweb’s August 2026 data).
• The 10 biggest adult sites combined: about 230 million visits a day, or roughly 160,000 a minute.
• Daily users: about 5% of US adults say they use porn daily or more often, including about 8% of men and 2% of women (Grubbs et al., 2019).
• Hours watched: Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, says its platforms stream more than 13 million hours of video a day (Aylo).
• Time per visit: the average Pornhub visit lasted 9 minutes and 33 seconds in 2025, slightly shorter than in 2024 (Gigazine).

What about “right now”? At any given moment, tens of thousands of people are starting a visit to a porn site. You may have seen the claim that “2.5 million people visit porn sites every 60 seconds.” That number has no traceable source, and the math doesn’t work: 2.5 million visits a minute would add up to about 108 billion a month, more than Google gets. (An earlier version of this article repeated that claim. We’ve corrected it.)

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How Many Men and Women Watch Porn?

Men watch porn more often than women in every reliable data set, but the gap is narrower than most people assume, and it’s shrinking.

Men

• About 69% of US men watched porn in the past year, in a census-weighted national survey (Grubbs et al., 2019).
• 46% of men aged 18–39 intentionally watched porn in a given week, according to 2014 US national data (Regnerus et al., 2016).

Women

• 44% of US women consume porn, up from 39% in 2015 (Barna, 2024).
• About 33% of US women watched porn in the past year, and 16% of women aged 18–39 watched in a given week (Grubbs 2019; Regnerus 2016).
• 38% of Pornhub’s visitors are women, according to the company. Women are the majority of visitors in the Philippines (64%), Colombia (56%), and Argentina (56%) (Gigazine).

A note on that 38%: Similarweb’s independent estimate puts the female share of Pornhub’s audience much lower, at about 22% (Similarweb). Pornhub’s figure comes from its own analytics; Similarweb’s is a panel-based estimate. The real number is likely somewhere in between.

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How Many Americans Watch Porn?

• 61% of US adults consume porn, up from 55% in 2015 (Barna, 2024).
• 70% have watched porn at some point, and 51% watched in the past year (Grubbs et al., 2019).
• The US sends more traffic to Pornhub than any other country (Tyla).
• In the US, Pornhub (222 million visits), XVideos (219 million), xHamster (212 million), and OnlyFans (207 million) all rank in the country’s top 50 websites (Similarweb US, Aug 2026).

There’s a striking gap between what Americans do and what they approve of. Even though most adults watch porn, Gallup’s 2026 Values and Beliefs survey found that a majority of Americans still call pornography morally wrong (Gallup). Researchers call this “moral incongruence,” and it helps explain why so many people feel conflicted about their own porn use.

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How Many People Watch Porn in the UK?

• 29% of UK online adults, about 13.8 million people, visited a porn site in May 2024, including 43% of men and 16% of women (Ofcom Online Nation 2024).
• Pornhub reached 15% of UK online adults in August 2025, down from 18% in 2023 and 2024. Its UK monthly audience fell from 11.9 million (Aug 2023) to 9.8 million (Aug 2025) (Ofcom, 2025).
• When mandatory age checks began on July 25, 2025, Pornhub’s UK visitors dropped 31% in a month. Daily VPN app users more than doubled, from about 650,000 to over 1.4 million at the mid-August peak.
• Even with age checks, an average of 7.8 million UK visitors a day still reach adult sites that verify age (Ofcom, 2025).
• Some smaller rivals grew: Stripchat’s UK audience rose from 4.0 million to 6.8 million, and xHamster’s from 5.9 million to 7.3 million, year over year to August 2025.

How Many People Watch Porn in India?

There’s no reliable national estimate. India’s government ordered internet providers to block 827 porn sites in 2018, and India no longer appears in Pornhub’s top 20 countries. The best local survey, of 2,525 adults in Bengaluru, found that 8.3% admitted to watching porn (Sharma et al., 2019), but the interviews were done face to face, so the real figure is almost certainly much higher.

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Which Countries Watch the Most Porn?

These are the top 10 countries by traffic to Pornhub in 2025, according to the company’s annual Year in Review:

1. United States
2. Mexico (up 2 places)
3. Philippines
4. Brazil
5. Germany
6. France (down 4 places after Pornhub blocked the country)
7. Italy
8. United Kingdom (down 3 places after age checks)
9. Spain
10. Canada

Keep in mind that this ranks total traffic, which favors big online populations. By time spent per visit, Japan leads at about 11 minutes, and the US sits at about 10 minutes (Unilad Tech).

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Teens and Porn: How Early Does Exposure Start?

Most people see porn long before adulthood, and often by accident.

• 73% of US teens aged 13 to 17 have seen porn. The average age of first exposure is 12, and 15% saw it at 10 or younger (Common Sense Media, 2023).
• 58% of US teens have come across porn accidentally, and 41% of teens who’ve seen porn have seen it during the school day.
• In England, 70% of 16- to 21-year-olds have seen porn, up from 64% in 2023. The average age of first exposure is 13, and 27% saw it by age 11 (Children’s Commissioner, 2025).
• Young people in England were more likely to have seen porn on X (45%) than on dedicated porn sites (35%), and 39% of those who’d seen porn had seen AI-generated porn.

If you’re a parent, our guide to talking with teens about pornography covers how to start that conversation.

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How Porn Use Is Changing in 2025 and 2026

1. Age verification has gone mainstream

On June 27, 2025, the US Supreme Court upheld Texas’s age-verification law in a 6–3 decision (Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton). As of 2026, 27 US states have similar laws in effect (Free Speech Coalition). The UK began enforcing age checks in July 2025, Pornhub’s owner cut off access in France in June 2025 rather than comply, and it restricted access in Australia in March 2026.

2. Traffic is shifting, not disappearing

Pornhub’s web visits fell 19% year over year, XVideos’ fell 23%, and XNXX’s fell 28%. But smaller sites like Eporner grew, VPN use surged, and Ofcom found millions of UK users still reaching adult content every day. Age checks are moving people around more than they’re stopping them.

3. Porn is moving onto social and subscription platforms

OnlyFans is now one of the 50 most visited websites in the US, and social media is a major source of exposure for young people. In England, X has overtaken dedicated porn sites as the place young people most often see porn.

4. AI-generated porn is going mainstream

Nearly 4 in 10 young people in England who’ve seen porn have seen AI-generated content. In response to the rise of sexual deepfakes, the US passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act in 2025, which requires platforms to remove reported non-consensual intimate images, including AI fakes, within 48 hours.

5. It’s almost all on phones

87% of Pornhub visits now come from smartphones, compared with 11% from computers (Gigazine). That makes porn more private, more impulsive, and harder to step away from, which is why phone-level blockers and habits matter so much for anyone trying to cut back.

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How Many People Struggle With Porn Use?

Watching porn and having a problem with it are different things. Most people who watch porn don’t meet any clinical definition of problematic use, but a meaningful minority do.

• 3.2% of participants in 42 countries were at risk of problematic porn use on the strictest screening scale, including 6.3% of men and 0.7% of women. The scale’s six-item short form put the figure at 9.8%, and the Brief Pornography Screen at 16.6% (International Sex Survey, 2024).
• Only 4% to 10% of those at risk had ever sought treatment, and another 21% to 37% wanted help but never got it.
• 11% of US men and 3% of US women agree at least somewhat with the statement “I am addicted to pornography” (Grubbs et al., 2019).
• 8.6% of US adults meet the clinical threshold for distress about out-of-control sexual behavior, including 10.3% of men and 7.0% of women (Dickenson et al., 2018).

The World Health Organization recognizes compulsive sexual behaviour disorder in the ICD-11: a persistent pattern of failing to control intense sexual urges, lasting months and causing significant distress or problems in daily life (Kraus et al., 2018). Importantly, feeling guilty about porn because of moral beliefs isn’t enough on its own for a diagnosis.

If you’re reading these numbers because your own use feels out of control, you’re far from alone, and it’s very fixable. Start with why it’s so hard to stop watching porn, then read our practical guide on how to quit porn. If you’ve tried and keep slipping, asking for help is a strong next step. Not sure whether your use is a problem? Take our 2-minute porn addiction self-test.

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Porn Statistics That Aren’t True

Many porn statistics still circulating online are outdated, misquoted, or were never real. Here are the most common ones:

Popular claim	What the evidence shows
”2.5 million people visit porn sites every 60 seconds”	No traceable source. Pornhub’s own peak, in 2019, was about 80,000 visits a minute.
”40 million Americans regularly visit porn sites”	Traces back to a 2006–2010 internet infographic with no stated method.
”Porn sites get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined”	False today. In August 2026, Netflix, Amazon, and X together got about 9 billion visits, versus about 7.2 billion for the 10 biggest adult sites.
”30% of all internet traffic is porn”	Traces back to a 2013 infographic from a porn startup, not to any measurement.
”Pornhub gets 115 million visits a day”	Real, but from 2019. Similarweb’s 2026 data suggests about 42 million web visits a day.

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How We Sourced These Numbers

We prioritized peer-reviewed research, national surveys, regulators like Ofcom, and independent traffic measurement from Similarweb. Pornhub’s Year in Review figures are the company’s own data, reported through news coverage, and we label them that way. Traffic numbers count visits, not unique people, and surveys tend to undercount porn use because people under-report it. We review these numbers regularly; this page was last updated on October 19, 2026.

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Sources

• Similarweb, Top 100 most visited websites, August 2026 and US top 100
• Bőthe, B., et al. (2024). Problematic pornography use across countries, genders, and sexual orientations: Insights from the International Sex Survey. Addiction, 119(5), 928–950.
• Grubbs, J. B., Kraus, S. W., & Perry, S. L. (2019). Self-reported addiction to pornography in a nationally representative sample. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 8(1), 88–93.
• Regnerus, M., Gordon, D., & Price, J. (2016). Documenting pornography use in America. The Journal of Sex Research.
• Barna Group (2024). Over half of practicing Christians admit they use pornography.
• Gallup (2026). Moral acceptability falls for several behaviors.
• Ofcom (2025). Online Nation 2025.
• Common Sense Media (2023). Teens and Pornography.
• Children’s Commissioner for England (2025). ‘Sex is kind of broken now’: children and pornography.
• Dickenson, J. A., et al. (2018). Prevalence of distress associated with difficulty controlling sexual urges, feelings, and behaviors in the United States. JAMA Network Open.
• Kraus, S. W., et al. (2018). Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder in the ICD-11. World Psychiatry.
• Sharma, M. K., et al. (2019). Pornography use among adults in Bengaluru. National Medical Journal of India.
• Supreme Court of the United States (2025). Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton.
• Free Speech Coalition. State age verification laws.
• Pornhub 2025 Year in Review, as reported by Tyla, Gigazine, and Unilad Tech.