Bowsette and Fortnite Make It To Pornhub’s Top 10 Searches That Defined 2018

Every year, the internet gets stranger and stranger.

According to adult site Pornhub, there were huge search spikes that pertained to Fortnite and the viral trend of Bowsette on their website. In particular, searches for Bowsette-related pornography jumped by 3 million in just one week.

If your eyes aren’t too delicate, you can check out some excerpts from their report below:

Fantasy plays a big role in pornography (and indeed in human sexuality), so it’s only natural that people will desire seeing sexual scenarios involving the game characters they emotionally connect with. In April when Fortnite’s servers crashed, searches for Fortnite increased by as much as 60% over a 24 hour period.

Life imitates art, and eventually porn imitates everything, so perhaps it’s no surprise to see that ‘Bowsette’ also made our list of searches that defined 2018. After the original Nintendo fan-art went viral, searches for Bowsette exceeded 3 million in just one week and resulted in the release of a live-action Bowsette themed porn parody (NSFW) with more than 720,000 views.

There’s good reason that Bowsette became one of our top 10 terms that defined 2018, with an incredible 34.6 million searches! (See Bowser and Bowsette Insights for more coverage). Although she was based on fan art and never actually appeared in any games, we nonetheless felt that Bowsette deserved a spot at the top of our game character searches.

Video game Fortnite gave 2017’s favorite Overwatch a run for it’s money in 2018, but Overwatch characters were still on top when it came to searches. Overwatch’s Brigitte was the most searched game character at 4.8 million with a massive surge in searches after the March game update. (See Overwatch Brigitte Insights). Mercy was the second most popular Overwatch character at 3.2 million searches, followed by the Ashe character who only arrived in November but managed 2.6 million views in just over a month. (See Overwatch Ashe Insights).

As one of 2018’s defining terms, Fortnite had a big year on Pornhub, beginning with our first Fortnite Battle Royal Insights in March. When the Fortnite Server Outage happened in April, searches for Fortnite increased by 60% as players were looking for something else to keep their hands busy. The Fortnite Season 5 release caused another increase in searches, as did Fortnite Season 6 in September. Season 6 introduced the character Calamity who would be Fortnite’s most searched character of 2018 with 2.5 million searches.

Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft is a top game (and movie) character search year after year. Her popularity was bolstered in 2018 with both a fresh game and big screen movie release leading to 4.5 million searches. Lara Croft is also one of our top Halloween Costume Searches each year.