Like every year, the YouPorn adult content platform surprises us with its content consumption statistics. Data collected through the platform's Google Analytics metrics confirm that pornography remains the most popular content on the Internet in the course of 2019.

This year, YouPorn received more than 5 billion visits, one billion more than in 2018. Users also saw 4 billion more videos than the previous year, for a total of 18 billion videos played in 2019.  Searches also increased by 1 billion from 2018.

The category "Latina" was one of the most viewed by the American female audience on the PornHub websites. When broken down by state, women had very different preferences: women from specific racial demographic groups seem to have sought out videos where they were represented. In other words, in areas with large numbers of Latinas, such as Arizona, Texas, and Florida, "Latina" was the most sought after.

The platform has also pointed out that, since the launch of the "Search by Emoji" function, the use of symbols in the search engine has been growing. 

According to 2019 statistics, YouPorn found that the most used emojis in the search bar was the peach representing the “Big Butt“ and the eggplant emoji for the “Big Dick” category. Although there is no longer talk of sentimental love, romance never died among porn users: the emoji of the heart also produced searches, giving the 'Romantic' content the third place in the platform's searches.

Pornhub's VP, Corey Price, stated in 2016 that the first experiment of searching with emoji via SMS had "become the main method of conversation" with its users. It is not surprising that, for the last three years, YouPorn has continued to experiment with emojis as a strategy that understands these symbols as a unique new world alphabet. 

Just as the Esperanto project language wanted to be, emojis are allowing much of today's communication, as well as simplified search for themes or purchase of products and content, even bring sex to the digital through sexting in a private chat.

Although the use of emoji searches has not taken off completely in the United States, users can search for food options such as pizza or burritos in the Postmates application. 

In addition, emojis searches have been supported by search engines such as Bing and the Yelp app since 2014, as well as by Google in 2016. Despite Zubi Advertising’s initiative in 2015 of a group of emojis inspired by Latin American food and culture, they have not been yet included in the emoji Unicode Consortium. 

But why hasn't their use exploded both in the Latin world and globally? Because it is not that easy. One could suppose that searching in Google or Bing using emojis would lead to the same results as if entering the equivalent text to the related concept of emoji, but this is not the case. 

For the most part, queries based on emojis within search engines give results that belong to the emoji itself: thousands of images of the emoji, explaining the emoji in emojipedia, etc; but there are interesting cases for marketing specialists and philologists, particularly with regard to videos of adult content in search results. Just experimenting with the Google bar is enough.

However, the exception to the rule in searches with emoji has been Instagram, which forbade its users to search content with the eggplant emoji and, in October of this year, with the peach, for fear that they might find some images with high erotic content. 

Eggplant and peach seem to be the only victims of Instagram's censorship and a new way of giving meaning to emojis. However, other sexually suggestive emoticons such as banana, water drops or tongue can still be labeled.

Emojis and their censorship or increased searches open the door to debate about freedom of expression, the new languages of the future, privacy and adult content: will an eggplant cease to be an eggplant? Will we create new symbols and meanings to talk about sexuality on the Internet? Will we be making political corrections to the current language or do we need to create more debates about sexuality on the Internet?