You surprised and feel guilty now?
It's official. Porn really is for losers.
On Tuesday morning, after their crushing defeat at the Super Bowl, Denver Broncos fans were subjected to another ritual humiliation that proved beyond doubt they were, for a while at least, the biggest w*****s in America.
A mere 24 hours after their loss, PornHub - the world's biggest free porn website - released data to show that in the Denver area, fans experienced a 70% swing in porn use as their team staggered towards a crushing 43-8 defeat to the Seattle Seahawks. At the start of the game, porn use in Denver was 51% below national average; by the time the drubbing was complete, it was 10.8% above.
Figures for Seattle - where jubilant Seahawks fans were too busy doing old-fashioned things like drinking beer, laughing, talking and watching action replays - were 17.1% below national average, post-game.
While initially hilarious - after all, you can't beat the misery of other sports fans - this data offered two chilling insights.
Firstly, it was conclusive proof that most men turn to porn not when they are happy, but when they are at their most vulnerable.
This chimed with my own experience as a TV documentary maker. Last year, I spent six, gruelling months totally immersed in the murky world of porn when I fronted .
During filming, I met with some of the heaviest porn users in the UK, including one 19-year-old called Calum who used porn 28 times per day who, along with other young men I met at the , the UK's first porn rehab residential programme, thought he was addicted to porn.
As well as a cheap thrill between filing online tax returns, porn is often used to block out reality, be it sporting loss or, at the extreme end of the scale, feelings of shame and even suicide that the most serious porn addicts like Calum experience.
Secondly, and perhaps more chillingly, this week's revelation showed that the porn barons are meticulously compiling data on their users, studying their habits and counting their clicks. If men who watch porn think that they themselves are not being watched, they are mistaken.
I was shown this first hand during filming Porn On The Brain, when I sat down with David Levy, who is recognised as the global authority on the dirty business of porn. We googled "porn" and went on an annotated journey where he showed me how the porn barons are continually attempting to convert us into fee-paying porn users.
This is how it works.
Until October last year, PornHub was owned by the Mr Big of porn, German billionaire Fabian Thylmann. Through his company (one of the world's largest online porn providers and owners of several porn portals, with estimated revenue of $100 million per annum) Thylmann introduced a highly lucrative business model to porn: where grot is piled high, seemingly free, but aimed at converting a small percentage of billions of users into paying customers.
Manwin, with which Thylmann parted company a few months ago, firstly monetises porn users by capturing details. Ever wondered why you keep getting Viagra emails? Somewhere, on a server, not only your IP address, but specific details of what you click on, and how long you spend on it, are being monitored, logged and recorded.
The next time you go back, some of the cleverest software in existence remembers you, and every time you click on a video, complex algorithms offer you a personal menu of what might get your rocks off, based on other users' data - only this time the heat is notched up.
By continually offering racier porn, so begins the path towards converting you into a paying customer. An estimated 10 per cent of porn users will ultimately pay. Maybe not this week, or even this year. Maybe not ever. But the porn providers, who are in it for the long haul, are patient.
And while 10 per cent might not seem a lot, 10 per cent of billions of users is a super-sized business that Fabian Thylmann and his ilk are getting fat on.
Did you honestly think the porn barons give you freebies out of the goodness of their hearts? "Personalised porn" is the future: free porn as a gateway to paid, real-life webcam or escort services, HD quality porn, and stuff too racy even for mainstream broadcast.
Every single porn user is being used, manipulated and watched. It is this feeling that I was no longer in control that put me off porn forever. We are all of us mere pawns in the hyper-capitalised world of porn.
So, as another ritual World Cup humiliation inexorably awaits England fans this summer, perhaps you should think twice before logging on to PornHub to block out the misery of yet another penalty shoot-out. Because, whichever sex act you are watching, someone somewhere is watching you. And let's face it, they don't even force humiliation like that on residents of the Big Brother house.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thi...sers-dont-realise-they-are-being-watched.html
It's official. Porn really is for losers.
On Tuesday morning, after their crushing defeat at the Super Bowl, Denver Broncos fans were subjected to another ritual humiliation that proved beyond doubt they were, for a while at least, the biggest w*****s in America.
A mere 24 hours after their loss, PornHub - the world's biggest free porn website - released data to show that in the Denver area, fans experienced a 70% swing in porn use as their team staggered towards a crushing 43-8 defeat to the Seattle Seahawks. At the start of the game, porn use in Denver was 51% below national average; by the time the drubbing was complete, it was 10.8% above.
Figures for Seattle - where jubilant Seahawks fans were too busy doing old-fashioned things like drinking beer, laughing, talking and watching action replays - were 17.1% below national average, post-game.
While initially hilarious - after all, you can't beat the misery of other sports fans - this data offered two chilling insights.
Firstly, it was conclusive proof that most men turn to porn not when they are happy, but when they are at their most vulnerable.
This chimed with my own experience as a TV documentary maker. Last year, I spent six, gruelling months totally immersed in the murky world of porn when I fronted .
During filming, I met with some of the heaviest porn users in the UK, including one 19-year-old called Calum who used porn 28 times per day who, along with other young men I met at the , the UK's first porn rehab residential programme, thought he was addicted to porn.
As well as a cheap thrill between filing online tax returns, porn is often used to block out reality, be it sporting loss or, at the extreme end of the scale, feelings of shame and even suicide that the most serious porn addicts like Calum experience.
Secondly, and perhaps more chillingly, this week's revelation showed that the porn barons are meticulously compiling data on their users, studying their habits and counting their clicks. If men who watch porn think that they themselves are not being watched, they are mistaken.
I was shown this first hand during filming Porn On The Brain, when I sat down with David Levy, who is recognised as the global authority on the dirty business of porn. We googled "porn" and went on an annotated journey where he showed me how the porn barons are continually attempting to convert us into fee-paying porn users.
This is how it works.
Until October last year, PornHub was owned by the Mr Big of porn, German billionaire Fabian Thylmann. Through his company (one of the world's largest online porn providers and owners of several porn portals, with estimated revenue of $100 million per annum) Thylmann introduced a highly lucrative business model to porn: where grot is piled high, seemingly free, but aimed at converting a small percentage of billions of users into paying customers.
Manwin, with which Thylmann parted company a few months ago, firstly monetises porn users by capturing details. Ever wondered why you keep getting Viagra emails? Somewhere, on a server, not only your IP address, but specific details of what you click on, and how long you spend on it, are being monitored, logged and recorded.
The next time you go back, some of the cleverest software in existence remembers you, and every time you click on a video, complex algorithms offer you a personal menu of what might get your rocks off, based on other users' data - only this time the heat is notched up.
By continually offering racier porn, so begins the path towards converting you into a paying customer. An estimated 10 per cent of porn users will ultimately pay. Maybe not this week, or even this year. Maybe not ever. But the porn providers, who are in it for the long haul, are patient.
And while 10 per cent might not seem a lot, 10 per cent of billions of users is a super-sized business that Fabian Thylmann and his ilk are getting fat on.
Did you honestly think the porn barons give you freebies out of the goodness of their hearts? "Personalised porn" is the future: free porn as a gateway to paid, real-life webcam or escort services, HD quality porn, and stuff too racy even for mainstream broadcast.
Every single porn user is being used, manipulated and watched. It is this feeling that I was no longer in control that put me off porn forever. We are all of us mere pawns in the hyper-capitalised world of porn.
So, as another ritual World Cup humiliation inexorably awaits England fans this summer, perhaps you should think twice before logging on to PornHub to block out the misery of yet another penalty shoot-out. Because, whichever sex act you are watching, someone somewhere is watching you. And let's face it, they don't even force humiliation like that on residents of the Big Brother house.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thi...sers-dont-realise-they-are-being-watched.html
