Traffic from India to major pornographic websites in the world rose sharply in November.
The numbers also reveal that Indians use the Internet for accessing pornographic content more often than globally.
For example, according to similarweb.com, a website that collates monthly web analytics data, there were no pornographic websites included in the list of the top 22 websites in the world.
The most popular website in the category, xvideos.com, is ranked No. 23 by traffic globally, while it is ranked at No. 9 in India.
Globally, the website accounts for about 0.4% of the total traffic (visits), while in India, the website accounted for about 0.9% of the total visits in November.
In the US — its biggest market by far — the website is able to command only 0.5% of the total visits, and is ranked at No. 17.
In fact, there are two porn websites in India in the top 13 — xnxx and xvideos, and both are ranked above Twitter, which comes in at No. 14 in India.
Globally, the top two websites belonging to ‘the category’ are ranked at No 23 and No 30, while Twitter comes in at No 6.
NOVEMBER RISE
Perhaps related to the free data being offered by 4G operators in India, traffic from India to pornographic websites continued to rise.
In November alone, traffic from India to XNXX rose by nearly 8% to 73.7 mln visits. The growth is over 15% in the last two months.
The site accounted for 0.49% of the total traffic from India in October, and this rose to 0.55% in November.
Similarly, xvideos.com — the market leader — overtook Flipkart in terms of visits in November to snap up the 9th place. It had 0.89% share of traffic, improving its tally from 0.81% in October.
The rise of 4G networks has allowed Indian viewers to make their presence felt on these global platforms in a bigger way.
The total share of Indian visitors to xvideos was 6.67% in September. By November, it had risen to 7.49% of the total worldwide visitors. India is ranked No 3 by visitors.
On rival XNXX too, India’s share rose from 6.76% in September to 7.68% in November.
SHIFT TO VIDEO
Interestingly, even as video-based websites make merry, the explosion of high-speed data has been anything but good news for text-based websites.
Xossip, one of the most prominent text-based sources of adult entertainment for Indians, has been seeing a steady decline in visits in the last three months.
The forum had 8.3 mln visits in September, according to similarweb, which fell to 8.1 mln in October and further to 7.4 mln in November.
While earlier people would have had to think twice before watching videos, with free or cheap data, they are able to push such concerns aside.
Interestingly, there has been no such pick-up in the share of Indians among Youtube viewers, which has remained static at around 3.65% throughout the last three months, according to similarweb.