#”Hentai” Tops PornHub Rankings for Fourth Year in a Row

Author’s note: this article does not contain any NSFW imagery.

There’s no denying the appeal of anime, I guess!

PornHub, the most-visited “hub” for online adult entertainment for most of the last decade, shared the latest of their annual “Year in Review” articles this morning. In English, the term “hentai” is most often used as shorthand for pornographic content in the style of Japanese anime and manga, so it should come as little surprise that the term is featured on PornHub. And feature heavily it does!

via PornHub Insights

Since 2021, “hentai” has claimed the top spot on PornHub’s most-searched terms list worldwide, and has only given up the gold in the United States for a single year during the same period. The term “anime” has similarly performed well, joining the top 10 for the first time. 

What’s the point of calling attention to this, though? These annual articles are a data wonk’s delight for sure, and one must really admire the PhD-studded Pornhub Insights team’s work for distributing so much information in such easily-digestible infographics, but why are we talking about it on Anime Trending?

It’s because hentai’s growth in popularity closely mirrors that of anime, and can be used as a lens by which we can better understand the growth of the international anime community. 

Using Google Trends as a rough proxy for general interest in anime, you can see that worldwide interest has spiked a few times, and maintained much of that growth. I dissected the US version of this chart earlier this year if you’re curious about what I identified to be the biggest turning points, but, in short, the years since 2013 have seen incredible growth for the medium.

This acceleration in anime interest is not quite 1:1 with hentai’s ascension on the PornHub rankings; instead, hentai has a small head start. According to research from my consulting firm White Box Entertainment, about half of self-identified anime fans in English-speaking countries say they enjoy hentai on occasion. The distribution is slightly different than you may expect. Split between fans who are brand new to the world of anime and long-term fans, newer fans were slightly more interested in hentai on average. 

But if barely the majority of anime fans are interested in hentai, then how is it #1 on PornHub? Simply, many people who aren’t necessarily self-identified anime fans must be watching it. This has two important implications: 1) a small but notable share of anime fans are introduced to the medium by hentai and 2) there are many people who enjoy hentai but don’t necessarily enjoy anime. This second point is particularly important for today’s conversation, as anime was often unfairly assumed to be pornographic on a cultural level throughout the past.

The people who assume anime = hentai are clearly painting with too broad of a brush, but when the only interaction someone has with anime is within the context of hentai, it’s not hard to see how some portion of PornHub users might make this generalization. Happily, I think the notion of all anime being “Japanese sex cartoons” has largely faded from the public consciousness in the West, which allows people to enjoy both anime and hentai either individually or together without the same volume of assumptions from others.

So congratulations, hentai, for your 4th year as the #1 search term on PornHub. May you stand as a single proud data point representing how popular anime has become.