Here's a number to sit with: in 2019, Pornhub users collectively watched 5.8 billion hours of video.
5.8 billion hours. That's enough hours that you could watch every Hollywood film ever made — front to back, every cut, every language — and still have billions of hours left over.
Per session, the average user spent 10 minutes and 9 seconds on Pornhub in 2023. That's not the time spent watching the chosen video — that's time inside the platform, scrolling, browsing, deciding. The platform tracks this religiously. (It went up 15 seconds from 2022 to 2023.)
More than 90% of all this traffic came from mobile devices. By January 2024, Pornhub was getting about 11 billion mobile visits per month versus less than 500 million desktop visits. The shift to mobile isn't accidental — it makes the platform available everywhere. In bed. On the toilet. At work. In the car at lunch. Places desktop never reached.
What's actually being measured here is engineered attention. The 10-minute average isn't an accident either — the site is built to keep you browsing, the same way TikTok optimizes for short-loop completion and YouTube optimizes for session depth.
When you "couldn't stop scrolling" or "didn't know where the time went" — that wasn't a failure of your willpower. That was the platform doing its job. The platform's job is to keep you there.
And it succeeded 5.8 billion hours of the time, on just one site, in just one year.
Average session = 10 min, 9 sec. Over 90% mobile (always available). 5.8 billion hours watched on one site in one year. The 'I can't stop scrolling' feeling isn't a willpower failure — it's an algorithm doing its job.
Look at your own Screen Time data (Settings → Screen Time → See All Activity) for any time period when you were using porn heavily. The number is usually larger than people remember.