What is interesting first is that the drop in porn consumption is much greater during important football games in European countries involved in finals than in their South American counterparts, which might have implications about how comfortable Uruguayans are watching sweaty men on one screen, and sweaty men and women on another simultaneously. If you look at the individual countries, it is obvious a fair amount of people were watching football instead of going about their usual PornHub routine. This is to be contrasted drastically to the following years European Cup final, where Italy played Spain. PornHub traffic variance during Copa America final Uruguay were heavy favourites for the game and indeed went on to win comfortably, which might explain why the Uruguayans went back to their normal schedule sooner than their optimistic, and ultimately decimated neighbours. Paraguay showed a drop in 20%, while Uruguay reduced their porn needs by just 12%. Overall in South America, there was a 6% drop in porn consumption, while the figures from the individual countries are much greater. ![]() Starting in South America, you can see below the graph showing PornHub traffic during the Copa America final in Summer 2011 (it says 2012, but the PornHub guys are American so don’t know about football), where Uruguay played against Paraguay. If you are disappointed with that definition of major global events, I am sure there is a less depressing world out there for you somewhere, but in the meantime I will move on to the data. Firstly, by major global events, I mean cultural benchmarks that bring people together en masse, and in this situation specifically they target sports events, holidays, news events, and American TV schedule lynchpins. Anyway, I would highly recommend checking out the full thing for yourself, the results are fascinating. I tried vigorously to embed (giggity) the full interactive graph here in this post, but unfortunately this is not possible and you will have to click here and visit the graph on the PornHub blog if you want to play around with it yourself (ooh sir!), or maybe you will be fully satisfied (I will stop soon, I promise) with my discussion of the results here and not wish to seek any more knowledge on the secret lives of others. That is, until this week when I saw that PornHub released an interactive graph that showed the responsiveness of online porn traffic to major global events. I have followed studies on online behaviour closely for the past decade, and have never really been impressed with any results that have been published. I doubt even the processing power of quantum computing will help us even broach the sociological implications of how people live their online lives, but of course that job belongs to the NSA: they wanted it, let them organise it. So basically we as a society are big data, and through the maintenance of online profiles and social media we contribute towards the biggest dataset in history, which unfortunately for us consists mostly of #neknomination videos, filtered pictures of food, and declarations of love for One Direction. ![]() Even if you have no idea what big data exactly is, the countless news articles and opinion pieces on the subject that were forthcoming once Edward Snowden revealed to the world that each individual has personal data, and (if you have ever had electronic contact with someone in the US) that this ‘metadata’ flows directly to the NSA definitely gives you an idea of the concept. If, like me, you work in the technical end of the professional spectrum, for the past two years all you will have been hearing about is the advent of big data and how it can be used to change our lives for the better.
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