CYBERSPACE — Pornhub is currently storing nearly 7,000 years worth of adult content on its servers, ready to stream, according to a new Popular Mechanics article.
Just how long is 7,000 years?
It's a difficult number to put into perspective. It's about 100 times longer than the average human lifespan. It's the number of years it would take to reach the Eagle Nebula if you traveled there at the speed of light. Seven thousand years ago there were no pyramids; written language had barely begun developing. It was still the Stone Age — Bronze was still a thousand years or more away.
But if you traveled back 7,000 years, and somehow brought a laptop with an internet connection along with you — hey, it's only a hypothetical, logic doesn't have to apply — connected to Pornhub and started watching each of their current videos back-to-back, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, you'd finish up their entire collection right about the time this paragraph concludes being written.
So says Pornhub, and some basic cocktail-napkin math, in the Popular Mechanics article about just how much adult content the streaming giant is currently storing.
"Pornhub actually hosts 11 petabytes of content," said company VP Corey Price.
Eric Spitznagel of Popular Mechanics used that as a jumping-off point for some very quick calculations.
"The average bitrate of a streaming video file is one megabit per second," Spitznagel writes. "So we’re looking at six megabytes of data for every minute of video porn. That works out to about 333,333,333 minutes of porn in a single petabyte. Pornhub claims it has 11 petabytes, which works out to 3,666,666,666 minutes of porn. Or roughly 6,976 years."
Forgive us for saying you'd finish watching while this article was being composed; you'd actually finish your Stone-Age-to-modern-day porn marathon sometime around the peak of the early '90s grunge explosion.
What does that much data actually look like? It's not really all that impressive, according to Price.
"Pornhub uses around 100 bare metal powerful servers that we periodically upgrade to the latest hardware," he told Spitznagel. "[T]hey are all commercially available servers."
You can fit a porn collection the length of which would take you from the dawn of civilization to the dawn of cyberspace in one fairly large room. But is this actually the largest porn collection on Earth? It depends on your criteria.
For example, a couple of years ago a few "secret archivists" began what's known as the Petabyte Porn Project, which collects video of adult webcam streams and archives them on Amazon's unlimited cloud storage plan. Spitznagel spoke with one of these digital smut historians, identified as "-Archivist," who couldn't put an exact number on the data they've collected — apparently it takes nine full days just to compile a list of the file names — but put the collection at somewhere between 18 and 22 petabytes.
Meaning that the Petabyte Porn Project is actually twice as large as Pornhub's, right? Well, maybe not. While it's certainly a larger collection of data, a huge amount of it covers the social interaction between cam models and customers chatting for free before-and-after actual sexual acts are performed. -Archivist himself doesn't think the collection he helps curate can compete with Pornhub's stockpile.
"If [the Petabyte Porn Project] was the only porn left, people viewing would get bored pretty quickly," he told Spitznagel. "[Pornhub's] serving millions of people, their interests and specific kinks. "If we were to give porn a value, then Pornhub takes the prize every time."
And if you count actual viewership numbers instead of raw data, Pornhub's number is staggering. According to Pornhub, they transferred 4,403 petabytes in 2018 alone. That's 400 times the 11 petabytes that gave us our 7,000-year figure. It adds up to 2,800,000 years worth of content watched in 2018 on Pornhub alone.
Pornhub transferred nearly 3 million porn-years in 2018. You'd have to go back a million years before human ancestors even stood erect to watch that much content back-to-back and finish by the end of this article.
Read the entire article here.