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Pornhub's year in review defined by 'Fortnite' and Stormy Daniels

More women visited the site this year.

Like Twitter before it, Pornhub is crowning its biggest trends of 2018. There's no mention of its parent Mindgeek's age verification tool for the UK -- which could see it become the gatekeeper for porn in the country -- or its custom VPN and launch of closed-captions for viewers with hearing loss for that matter. Instead, this flashback is all about porn searches. And what a year it's been for the web's leading purveyor of potentially pirated adult entertainment.

"Visits to Pornhub totaled 33.5 billion over the course of 2018, an increase of 5 billion visits over 2017," boasts the site. The bulk of that traffic came from the US. And of those viewers, 29 percent were female, an increase of 3 percent over the previous year.

In tandem with the news cycle, Pornhub's big hitters of 2018 included Stormy Daniels and Fortnite, which eclipsed Overwatch as the site's favorite video game. In third place was 4K ultra-HD, as people sought higher-quality porn beyond 1080p. Of course, that equates to more data hogging up Pornhub's servers: a total of 4,403 petabytes of porn was transferred this year alone. More people were also consuming porn on mobile, with 80 percent of Pornhub's worldwide visits now coming from smartphones and tablets, while desktop's share dropped by 18 percent.

To keep pace with the shifting tech landscape , Pornhub streamed its first awards show in VR, though Kanye West ended up dominating the proceedings. His role as creative director bestowing the ceremony with mainstream clout, complete with pornstars decked out in Yeezy apparel and the premiere of his "I Love It" music video with Lil Pump (an absurd clip that was just begging for the meme treatment).

But little changed when it came to the top searches: as in 2017, "lesbian," "hentai," "milf" and "step mom" made up the top four. Fortnite crashed the top 20 to land at number 15, while "anime" also saw a spike that pushed it to 22nd place overall. As a consolation, Overwatch's Brigitte was the second most-searched for video game character behind Nintendo's Bowsette, with Lara Croft, Overwatch's Mercy and Zelda rounding out the top five.

Fellow Mindgeek site YouPorn has also released its "2018 Year in Retrospect." Like Pornhub, the US accounted for the majority of its 4 billion visits. YouPorn's gender demographics also saw the same 71-29 percent split between male and female viewers. And its biggest search terms were "lesbian," "massage," "Japanese," "Francaise," and "Gangbang."