Data is beautiful, in that it doesn’t care about its surroundings. Data can be gathered by cloistered nuns, and it can be gathered by pornographers. Massive online porn destination, Pornhub, recently demonstrated this when it released an interactive showing the top three porn search terms, as well as the average length of stay, broken down by each state.

I will include a link to Pornhub’s viz, but first I’d like to put up a link to the “corrected” version I made. I found the original difficult to navigate when you wanted to see a particular state’s results. I fixed this by making the map a control feature. Now, when you click on a state, you only see that state’s information elsewhere on the page. Here’s the link:

http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/PH_avg-visit-durationredshtick/Dashboard1?:embed=y&:display_count=no

It defaults to Louisiana. Simply click on our state to see everyone, or click on another state if you’d just like to jump to their results.

I don’t anticipate working with pornography data again anytime soon. That being said, I would definitely like to get my hands on some of the raw figures involved. I’d just be sure and wash my hands really well after.

Here’s Pornhub’s original visualization, without my snazzy map cotrol:

http://public.tableausoftware.com/shared/HR9SZ66TW?:display_count=yes

And at the moment, they have it saved with a state selected. Not sure what’s up with that. But I applaud their use of the technology. I would love to see more corporations follow their lead. Internal data holds amazing stories – share them with the world!