When Facebook went down for about 10 hours last week on March 13, 2019, it took Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp away from our needy little hands. It looked like everybody migrated to Twitter, where the memes were popping, but there is another platform that usurped whole lot of that flailing attention: Pornhub.
Pornhub shared the stats on their traffic spikes during the Facebook outage on their own ‘Insights’ page, and they are insightful indeed.
Clearly though there were plenty of complaints circling online, a lot of us really *enjoyed* the outage. The traffic spikes do not lie.
But while the Pornhub traffic spike isn’t super surprising, the popular search terms are the really entertaining part.
Pornhub searches for ‘Instagram’ went up 323% and ‘Facebook’ went up 221%. I guess we all mourn absence in different ways.
But the second-largest increase was for the search term ‘tentacle porn’, which went up by 308%. This seems too extreme to be a coincidence but too random to be connected. It is the great tentacle porn mystery of our time.
Searches for ‘celebrity’ were up 72% on March 13th, which signals that people really like celebrity Instagrams. We can’t even handle a few hours without the celeb content, even if it is only vaguely-related porn.
So this is a glimpse into a social-media-less future. If it should ever come, it will be full of tentacle porn.