Top Adult Website's 2025 Insights Highlight Shifting Queer Viewing Habits

Pornhub has released its annual 2025 “Year in Review” data report, detailing what millions of users around the world searched for and watched on the platform over the past year, including granular breakdowns of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender viewing trends. The company’s report, presented as a neutral window into contemporary sexual behavior, has quickly circulated across mainstream and LGBTQ+ media, which often frame the findings as revealing culturally significant shifts in desire and identity.

According to Pornhub’s analysis, interest in content labeled as transgender, gay, and gender-diverse has continued to rise, with “Transgender” again among the most-viewed or fastest-growing categories in several regions and age groups. Media coverage has linked these shifts to broader patterns of increasing LGBTQ+ visibility, noting that more young adults worldwide are openly identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or otherwise outside straight and cisgender norms. In the United States, recent polling by the organization Gallup similarly finds that 7.6% of adults now identify as LGBTQ+, up from 5.6% in 2020 and 3.5% in 2012, with over one in five Generation Z adults identifying as LGBTQ+.

Academics have increasingly turned their attention to Pornhub’s annual “big data” releases, asking whether the scale and visibility of these statistics genuinely produce better knowledge about sexuality or simply market-friendly narratives. A recent peer‑reviewed article in the journal Convergence argues that Pornhub’s data posts are often treated by journalists as uniquely authoritative, even though the platform provides limited information on user demographics and internal methodology. The article notes that media outlets frequently describe Pornhub’s analysts as “intrepid statisticians” and portray the data as revealing “a culture’s dirtiest desires,” without adequately interrogating how categories are constructed and whose experiences are centered.

Researchers in public health have likewise cautioned that platform- or search-based metrics can misrepresent queer sexual behavior when they are interpreted too literally. A 2025 study using Google Trends to estimate the population size of men who have sex with men in low‑ and middle‑income countries found that pornography-related search data can be biased because gay and “gay porn” queries are made by heterosexual men and women as well as by gay, bisexual, and queer men. The authors emphasize that extrapolating sexual identity or behavior directly from search or platform statistics can lead to inaccurate assumptions about LGBTQ+ communities.

Pornhub’s recent reports have highlighted rapid growth in viewing of transgender content and have celebrated this as evidence that “mainstream porn is finally making room for trans performers.” LGBTQ+ commentators have acknowledged that increased visibility may bring economic opportunities for some transgender performers and can affirm viewers who seek content reflecting their desires and identities. At the same time, scholars and activists have warned that platform taxonomies often fetishize and tokenize transgender bodies, especially trans women and non‑white performers, by packaging them into narrowly defined categories that can reinforce stereotypes rather than challenge them.

The Convergence article argues that Pornhub’s public-facing data “talks about itself,” using selected statistics about women, queer people, and transgender people to position the company as progressive and caring, even as critics document persistent problems of exploitation, racism, and misogyny in the wider adult industry. Advocacy groups such as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a conservative anti‑pornography organization, have seized on these tensions to call for stricter regulation or removal of mainstream pornography platforms. LGBTQ+ organizations, while often critical of harms within the industry, have simultaneously raised concerns that some anti‑porn campaigns risk stigmatizing consensual queer sexual expression and the livelihood of LGBTQ+ performers.

For many LGBTQ+ people, especially those in regions where same‑sex relationships or gender diversity are criminalized or heavily stigmatized, online pornography and erotic media can be one of the few accessible spaces to see queer desire represented at all. Mental‑health research on pornography use among sexual minority men notes that pornography can validate sexuality and offer models of same‑sex intimacy, even as it can also contribute to negative body image and distress when combined with minority stress and internalized stigma.

Advocates across LGBTQ+ health and media studies are therefore urging a more nuanced approach to interpreting Pornhub’s 2025 numbers: recognizing that demand for diverse queer and transgender content signals real shifts in visibility and desire, while remaining critical of how corporate platforms collect, categorize, and monetize data about some of the most intimate aspects of people’s lives. Many queer and transgender scholars call for centering performer rights, consent, racial and gender justice, and community‑led research, rather than treating platform metrics alone as a definitive portrait of LGBTQ+ sexuality.