{WonkViz}

Blue states watch more porn. But what’s the matter with Kansas?

According to Pornhub Insights, Kansas leads the nation in porn pageviews per capita at roughly 194. They don’t specify what interval this is over (monthly, weekly, etc), but the state-by-state comparison is nonetheless interesting.

Plotting Obama vote share in 2012 versus porn consumption, it looks like blue states consume more porn per capita than red ones. Aside from Kansas - a clear outlier - and Georgia, the remaining top ten per-capita porn consumers are all blue. Similarly, New Mexico and Maine are the only blue states in the bottom ten per-capita porn consumers.

The data do make you wonder what’s going on in Kansas. Per-capita page views is not the most precise metric - a handful of mega-users could likely skew a state’s view totals, as could a high proportion of page views from bots or search engine crawls. Pornhub is probably being purposefully vague here - when it comes to web analytics, small differences can mean millions of dollars. Giving away too much of that information could give their competitors a leg up.

**EDIT**
Aha - sharp-eyed readers of Andrew Sullivan’s blog have noted that Kansas’ strong showing is likely an artifact of geolocation - when a U.S. site visitor’s exact location can’t be determined by the server, they are placed at the center of the country - in this case, Kansas. So what you’re seeing here is likely a case of Kansas getting blamed (taking credit for?) anonymous Americans’ porn searches.