While the precise numbers don’t exist to really quantify the specifics, but the impression across the industry is that viewership is increasing.
For example, Pornhub, the world’s most popular porn site, provides some the accessible data on its yearly web-traffic report. The first “Year in Review” post in 2013 saw that people visited the site 14.7 billion times. By 2016, that number had almost doubled, to 23 billion, and those visitors watched more than 4.59 billion hours of porn.
And here, Pornhub is just one site.
While Pornhub is the leader in the industry, the smaller ones that are about countless, should not be underestimated.
So here, the digital era of pornography is said to leave a larger carbon footprint than pornography during the days of magazines and VHS. If pornography experts’ estimates are accurate, they suggest a scenario where digitization might have increased the overall consumption of porn so much that porn is actually making things worse for the environment that it ever did before.
Using a formula that Netflix published on its blog in 2015, Nathan Ensmenger, a professor at Indiana University, calculates that if Pornhub streams video as efficiently as Netflix (0.0013 kWh per streaming hour), it used 5.967 million kWh in 2016.
That's about the same amount of energy needed for keep 11,000 light bulbs turned on for a whole year.
But still, it's close to impossible to access all the data inside the porn industry as a whole.
Jon Koomey, a data scientist who studies the environmental impact of the internet, said that there are simply too many variables to be considered. For instance, the growth of porn consumption since the the year 2000 would have to be compared to the growth of all internet data during the same time period.
What's more, the energy and emissions for manufacturing, marketing, transporting, and using porn DVDs would have to be compared to the electricity required to operate servers, the operational cost, network, and specific data center, as well as the electricity used by viewers.
The rise and popularity of online porn, according to Gail Dines, is caused by the principle of the “three As”: affordability, accessibility, and anonymity. “The more anonymous you make porn, the more affordable, the more accessible, the more you drive demand,” said the anti-pornography advocate that is also a sociologist who studies pornography.
In her view, each new technology heightens the three As. Mobile phones, which can be viewed anywhere, are more private than desktop computers. When DVDs, and VHSs, as well as magazines should be stored somewhere, websites like Pornhub require no log-in or credit-card information for users to view adult porn.