a major new force reshaping the (porn) industry: data.
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Ever since Pornhub Insights launched, a large number of articles in the mainstream press about sexual proclivities in the US and around the world have drawn their sourcing from it, or from press releases sent to journalists by Pornhub. This is the other side of data-driven porn. Not only is it changing how the industry makes porn—it’s also increasingly changing the popular narrative about sexuality, by supplying the fodder for sensational stories about people’s “true” kinks.
The resulting dynamic benefits both Pornhub and the media. Pornhub strategically releases “reports” they know will make good clickbait, based on proprietary data that is not independently verifiable. The clickbait, amplified by Twitter and other social media (because sex always sells), then drives traffic both to the news sites that produce it and back to Pornhub itself. In the era of the attention economy, media and porn are in the same business, and have forged a symbiotic relationship to their mutual benefit.
Source: My Stepdad’s Huge Dataset