Today we will try to respond to several questions that many of you certainly have considered at some moment in your lives: what impact do sports events have on the traffic generated on the Internet? How is online traffic affected by whether a city’s team loses or wins? Can a sporting event as big as the Super Bowl end up paralysing a country like the USA? We are going to respond to each one of these questions in the following paragraphs. If you would like to spend an entertaining moment discovering the relation between sports and porn consumption on the Internet, rub your eyes for a second and keep reading.
As a starting point we will observe the statistics of Super Bowl LI of 2017. The Atlanta Falcons (28) and the New England Patriots (34) faced off at NRG Stadium of Houston, Texas. It was a tight, hard-fought final game by each team and ended with the New England Patriots hoisting their 5th national title after an incredible comeback.
In 2017 it can be seen how, on a general level, the Super Bowl captures a great part of the attention of Americans, making traffic from 18:00 (00:00 Spanish time) less than the previous Sunday. Last year, only in the USA, there was between 9 and 12% less traffic than normal during the hours of the game (00:00-05:00 Spanish time). The conclusion is clear: an event of the magnitude of the Super Bowl really is capable of paralyzing a country like the United States.
One very interesting detail from the previous graph is the enormous rebound in traffic that happens once the game ends. As can be seen, after the final whistle porn consumption takes off and during the two hours following the end of the game, traffic increases 5% compared to the normal trend.
If we go into detail about the behavior of users in the states corresponding to each one of the teams in the final, we can confirm that, although the Atlanta Falcons of George still haven’t won a national title, people from Massachusetts seem more interested in this final game.
Once again the increase in traffic at the conclusion of the game is visible. Plus, in this case, we see how the increase in traffic among the citizens of Massachusetts, winners of the game, comes on later than that of Georgia users. It seems that, after the painful defeat, in Georgia they decide to quickly put their hands to work with the “tasks” they had put off. In the case of the followers of the New England Patriots it can be confirmed that they focused first on celebrating and only a couple of hours after the end of the game did an increase in traffic happen.
In 2018, Super Bowl LII was played at U.S. Bank Stadium of Minnesota at minus 16 degrees C (although not inside the stadium, which has an incredible translucent roof). The New England Patriots (33) and the Philadelphia Eagles (41) faced off. This time things weren’t so good for the boys from Boston and, in a game with a lot of offense, they didn’t finish any quarter ahead of the Eagles, who won their first national title. If we look again at the traffic trend, we can see that the Super Bowl once again paralyzed the United States of America. In the time zone that goes from 00:00 to 05:00 (Spanish time) we see that the change in traffic varies from -7% to -11%, statistics very similar to those of the previous year.
What does appear to have changed a lot is the behavior of users from Massachusetts. We don’t know if it is because they were tired of winning, that it would be a repeat of the Super Bowl they won in 2005, or simply because they were heavily favored (they had won 2 of the last 3 national championships). The only thing that is clear is that in 2018 people from Pennsylvania were much more interested in Super Bowl LII, something that can be seen in the following comparative graph, with traffic losses that range from 21% to 41% during the course of the final game compared to what would be the norm for this day of the week in the USA.
Once again the rebound in traffic can be clearly seen after the end of the game. And the followers of the losing team are the ones who come back first, and for the rest of the day they remain above the average of normal traffic. We understand it as a good way to forget about their woes.
If you remember, in the 2017 summary post we were saying that the cell phone was the king device, which results in everyone having Internet access within hand’s reach. This causes the drop in traffic in the USA during the hours of the Super Bowl LII of 2018 to not proportionally affect each one of the device categories:
As can be seen in the image, the devices most used from home (computers and tablets) are hurt much more by the variation in traffic produced by this sporting event.
Did you end up eager to learn more about the relationship between sporting events and the consumption of porn? Were you surprised, or are you, on the contrary, among those who don’t put off homework in spite of there being a great sporting event? Whatever the case may be, leave us your comment and follow us. Soon we will bring more curiosities and interrelations between daily life and online porn consumption.
