xHamster Trend Report '2020 will be year Gen Z flexes Porn muscle' -- xHamster VP, Alex Hawkins

2020 will be year Gen Z flexes Porn muscle

Alex Hawkins, Vice President, xHamster

Download 2020 Trend Report here

 Welcome, sexually fluid Gen Z overlords!

xHamster 2020 Trend Report

Thanks to tech innovation and changing demographics, the adult industry is changing rapidly — perhaps more quickly than in 2007, which saw launches of iPhone and of sites like xHamster.

While 2019 saw continued rise in women viewers and censorship fights across the globe, 2020 will be the year Gen Z flexes porn muscle, shifting millennials as the dominant force, shaping what gets made and how it is consumed.

We analyzed past several years datasets and looked at major trend-lines of 2020 and what consumers and adult producers can expect as we start the new decade.

The rise of “real” productions, independents, amateurs, paid, social performer-produced custom clips, and fan-based subscription sites, where fans see (actual) real-life sexual encounters between porn stars, often filmed with high-end phones, this next wave production moves sex out of the studio and into the home, college dorm, or hiking trail.

Expect increase in coming, as high-definition, easy-edit, pro-am phones, like iPhone 11 Pro grow in popularity.

Desktop: New VHS

No one watches porn on desktops anymore. Nearly 80% visitors currently watch porn on mobile devices, the continuing uptrend for years only accelerating — as desktop porn fell -19% last year alone.

Tablets fall 29% — too obvious, everyone watches porn on their phones.

Unoptimized mobile true, major legacy distributors might sell the occasional VHS tape, none rely on it for income.

Unfortunately, studios and sites in our industry redesign aesthetics and function for desktop (they use it), treating mobile as an afterthought.

The Money Shot 2020

One word porn should heed in 2020 is authenticity.

Porn stars document their sex lives and the new generation raised on sexting, shifting gender norms, increasingly turned-on people, connect, talk (cams), look like them (amateur), or imagine them  in the world (natural).

Perhaps a world stretched by political division, geographic strife and senseless violence looks to porn for comfort and validation, not escape.

HOW WE GOT HERE

To understand where we’re going, we have to look at where we’ve been. We gathered top Google searches related to porn over  last decade to give  idea of what's popular over 10 years.

The graph below shows which year, month, each porn term peaked in search popularity  according to Google Trends.

start:

Sasha Grey (peaked Feb 2011), Bukkake (peaked Feb 2012),

Polyamory (June 2019),

Bisexuals (June 2019)

Trans Porn (Dec 2019)

“Generation Cam”

In the past few years, we’ve seen a steady decline in the number of 18-24 year olds coming to xHamster, even as overall traffic has grown. Some of this could be ascribed to aging millennials moving out of  demographic.

But when we looked at data from xHamster Live, we noticed something different.

Cam fans are significantly younger than their tube site counterparts.

For example, this is what age distribution looks like on xHamster.

And this is what age distribution looks like on xHamsterLive.

Cam users skew much younger — dramatically so.

Generation Z — the so-called Digital Natives — expect and crave interaction. From video games to Twitch to FaceTime, they’re used to live media that engages with them. For this emerging generation, which now fully compromises the 18-24 demographic, live cam content dominates.

And forget the conventional wisdom that younger generations won’t pay for adult content.

Almost half — 48% — of all sales on xHamster Premium are made by users under the age of 35, even though they make up only 45% of total visits. Meanwhile, those users aged 45 and over accounted for only 18% of sales, even though they made up 23% of total visits. In other words, younger millennials and Gen Z purchase porn at a higher rate than the Boomers. Looks like pensions and social security isn’t the only thing younger people are subsidizing!

It’s important to remember that Gen Z, in particular, has LESS disposable income than other generations. However, when they do have money, they are more likely to spend it.

While there’s little historical data to show how much Boomers spent on porn in their youth — it was barely legal, and we don’t mean pigtails — Gen Z and late millennials are proving to be a much more avid consumer of adult content than their forbears.

Gen Z is also more diverse than previous generations, which may also help explain the increase in spending. In a recent survey, porn consumers who identified as “white” or “Caucasian” were actually less likely to spend money on adult material than members of nearly every other ethnic group.

We fully expect that as Gen Z comes of age and has disposable income, they will be more willing to spend money for quality adult content, which often means custom content and live cams.

The End of Rough Sex?

Another trend that seems to be fading — the outrageous and rough porn that dominated in the last decade. Last year, we noted that searches for BDRM had dropped 25%. This year, we see a host of terms falling seemingly in unison: POT (-17%), creameries (-11%) and gangstas (-12%). Could sex be becoming … *gasp* … gentler?

Maybe. “Anal” and related keywords have been trending downward as well. In the past few years, searches for anal have been flat or dropping. This year, we saw a continuation of the downward trajectory. While butts-ex is certainly fun, and perhaps even mainstream, the taboo has fallen. And that means there are fewer people searching for it in porn.

For years, anti-porn activists relentlessly prophesied that exposure to adult material will only lead to more extreme material — a theory that might have seemed supported by the growth of BDRM and anal during the 2010s — but now? It looks like the surge may have been curiosity — a side effect of the 50 Shades phenomenon.

Polygamish
That’s not to say that we’re going back to vanilla sex and fake nails.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a growing interest in a broader idea of sexuality — especially with newer generation. Trans porn, long a niche part of adult, is now part of almost every major adult studio line-up. As is fluid sexuality and open relationships. While the fascination with cuckolding seems to have peaked — it’s fallen for the last several years — it’s been replaced by hotwifing. The difference between the two is more than semantic. Like cheating (which is also falling in searches) cuckolding often requires the humiliation of the male partner as part of the fantasy (and, in some cases, the assumed degradation of the wife.)

Hotwifing, on the other hand, is the proud embrace of open relationships, with the man getting off on his wife’s pleasure. It’s up 34% this year.

As we move into 2020, let’s hope this next decade welcomes more open forms of sexuality — with more sharing and less shame.

Back to Nature
Another data point supporting an anti-shame trend? Interest in amateur and homemade content has surged. Amateur remains our top category in the US, and the third most popular worldwide. Within that category, we’ve seen a surge in people looking for “natural” bodies and authentic situations (such as public sex or voyeuristic content).