The Great Indian Sunny Fantasy

Websites tracking internet traffic show that Sunny Leone’s porn audience is largely Indian

With the release of Ragini MMS 2 on 22 March, Sunny Leone continues her Bollywood career, but her porn also has a wide audience in India. Since her appearance on Bigg Boss in 2010, where a majority of Indians learnt about her career as an adult entertainer, viewers of her porn now mostly comprise Indians.

According to Alexa, a top website that analyses internet traffic data, Leone’s X-rated website, sunnyleone.com, gets 75 per cent of its visitors from India. Neighbouring countries Pakistan (6.1 per cent) and Bangladesh (4.1 per cent) are next. In comparison, the combined percentage of visitors from the US (2.6 per cent) and the UK (1.4 per cent) is less than that of Bangladesh. Her viewers, according to Alexa, are mostly male graduates, spending an average of 2.37 minutes on the website at their home computers. This analysis by Alexa focuses only on her website, and does not factor porn featuring her that is distributed free on online platforms.

In a 2012 interview to The Globe And Mail, months after appearing in Bigg Boss, Leone revealed that 80 per cent of the traffic on her website and 60 per cent of her revenue was from India. A one-month membership of her website costs $9.95, a six-month membership $59.95.

Shabir Momin, managing director of Zenga TV, a leading live and video-on-demand mobile TV service in India, says: “Sunny’s appeal is extraordinary.” Zenga TV launched its first official app in partnership with Leone about a month ago. The app features adult-free content that Leone makes available and brings her online existence on forums like Facebook and Twitter onto one platform. According to Momin, Daniel Weber (Leone’s husband), approached Zenga TV late last year, wanting something that brought together their many scattered online appearances. So far, the app has been reportedly downloaded 500,000 times across platforms.

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Lhendup G Bhutia

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