What About Spring Fever?

Megan Garber:

According to a paper just published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, Internet pornography -- like so many storms, like so much kale -- is seasonal. Porn's peak seasons? Winter and late summer.
Researchers at Villanova examined the Google trends for such commonly-searched-for terms as "porn," "xxx," "xxvideos" ... and other, more descriptive phrases that, because I am looking at a portrait of James Russell Lowell as I write this, I will let you look up in the paper itself. Once they'd gathered those terms, the authors examined them in Google Trends. And what they found was a defined cycle featuring clear peaks and valleys -- recurring at discernible six-month intervals. The cycle, as you can see in the chart above, maps surprisingly well to the world's calendar seasons.
Other searches don't. The researchers also ran a control group consisting of Google searches for non-sexual terms. And those terms demonstrated no such cyclical pattern.
So there's something about sex itself, it seems. Porn is periodical. Which is born out by another (semi-)control in the Villanova experiment. Researchers determined search terms associated with a relatively purpose-driven category of sexytime -- prostitution and dating websites -- and found that, for those terms ... the six-month cycle showed up again.
Which: fascinating. The seasonal Internet! The sex-seasonal Internet!

Late summer and winter?  I would guess those are the times when people might be inside more, when it is hotter than hell or cold.  I don't know, though.  I'd have thought there would have been some sort of spring fever effect.