From January 22nd to 24th, 2016 the mighty Snowzilla – aka Winter Storm Jonas – hit the East Coast of the United States with a vengeance, leaving major cities in a state of virtual shut-down. With nowhere to go, and plenty of time on their hands, people chose to put their hands to good use and headed to Pornhub – much more than usual. Since we found similar traffic trends during last January’s winter storm Juno, the gentlemen at GQ.com asked us to do some more digging after Jonas.

Although millions were affected by Snowzilla, we focused this report on four East Coast cities that were hard hit. Boston’s traffic increased as much as 8% on Saturday, when compared to traffic on a normal Saturday. Similarly, New York jumped 9% on Saturday and remained 8% higher on Sunday.

In Philadelphia, it was Sunday that saw the biggest traffic change with an impressive 14% increase. The nation’s capital takes the cake – with an average increase of 23% over the 3 storm days, peaking at 25% on Sunday.

Further proof that these traffic changes were the result of porn lovers being home-bound can be seen in the traffic by device type. The following chart shows that desktop computer traffic increased significantly more on all three days – up as much as 32% on Saturday in New York City. On Saturday and Sunday we also saw increases of 8% and 5% on Tablets, which are more likely to be used at home than smartphones, which only increased slightly at 3% and 2% on those days.

Traffic By The Hour

As the storm beat down, Pornhub viewers beat on. The following charts help us to see hourly traffic changes by graphing the percent difference compared to the same hours on an average Friday, Saturday or Sunday – all of which are represented by the blue line. As shown in our recent Fappy Hour report, traffic to Pornhub changes throughout the day, with the most visitors coming from 10pm to midnight across all time zones. These results are above and beyond those normal fluctuations.

In Boston, the biggest gains came at 5pm on Sunday with a 30% increase, and again at 10pm on Sunday when it grew 33%.

In New York City, visits were up most of Saturday, but it was also 10pm on Sunday that saw the biggest traffic increase of nearly 35%.

In Philadelphia, traffic jumped nearly 50% from 2am to 4am on Friday – the largest increase we saw that day, and again on Saturday morning around 5am. Like Boston and New York City, Sunday at 10pm had the next biggest increase of 26%.

Last but not least is the nation’s capital. In Washington traffic was up consistently through both Friday and Saturday, but we found the biggest increase of nearly 90% happened from 4am to 5am on Sunday Morning. It increased again by 65% at around 1pm on Sunday, and then the same jump around 10pm on Sunday that we saw in the other three cities.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Pornhub Insights. Stay tuned for more to come!