All the talk following last week’s record breaking Cyber Monday was centered on the vast amounts of money spent by American consumers, but it transpires that the $1.46 billion online shopping spree wasn’t the only noteworthy stat from the holiday weekend.

While online retailers like Amazon and eBay will be thrilled by the thought of all those profits, it seems that many consumers were equally excited, and not just in anticipation of receiving the goods they just purchased. Instead, America’s hordes of online shoppers had something quite different on their minds – a sudden urge to indulge themselves with some internet porn.

The surprising statistic comes from the adult website Pornhub.com, which says that traffic from randy American internet users rose by 15% between 1am and 2am on Cyber Monday.

It’s not immediately clear why so many Americans felt a sudden compulsion to ‘get off’ of sites like Amazon.com and start getting it on with seedier content instead, but it probably had little to do with what they were buying, and more to do with the fact that shopping online doesn’t have quite the same ‘appeal’ as adult entertainment can do.

According to Corey Price, vice president of Pornhub, one reason for the spike in porn traffic could have been due to our habits – and by that we don’t mean a pornography addiction, but the fact that most people choose to call it a day around 1am or 2am.

“A good reason traffic likely escalated between those hours could be attributed to the amount of people online at the time having just finished their shopping after taking advantage of deals that went live at midnight as Cyber Monday began,” explains Price.

Alternatively, Price suggests that it could just be that online shopping so dull that people need to let off some steam once they’ve taken advantage of those deals:

“Refreshing the pages of your favorite retailers could eventually become tedious, so we think people were trying to break the monotony and stress of sitting on the same sites while shopping or even looking for ways to stay awake as they continued shopping.”

But whatever the reason, it looks like the urge to view XXX-rated content after our annual online shopping spree is here to stay, for the increase in traffic wasn’t a one-off – Pornhub saw a similar spike in traffic the year before, albeit not quite so big as this one.