Porn site traffic plunges as UK age verification rule takes effect — reports
LONDON, United Kingdom — Visits to major adult film sites like Pornhub decreased drastically in the United Kingdom (UK) following the implementation of new age verification rules, a BBC news report indicates.
Data from the analytics firm Similarweb said Pornhub, which is the leading adult site, lost more than one million visitors in just two weeks.
Major adult websites in the UK introduced advanced age checks two weeks ago, on July 25, in response to the Online Safety Act, which mandated that they make it harder for minors to see explicit material.
The report said average user figures of popular pornography sites in the first nine days of August were compared with the daily average figures for July.
Pornhub experienced a 47 per cent decrease in traffic between July 24, one day before the new rules came into place, and August 8, according to Similarweb’s data.
Over the same period, XVideos, another leading adult site saw traffic drop 47 per cent, and OnlyFans saw traffic drop by over 10 per cent.
In addition, the number of average daily visits to Pornhub fell from 3.2 million in July to two million in the first nine days of August.
In contrast, the report said smaller and less regulated sites saw an uptick in users and virtual private network (VPN) apps, which can disguise a user’s location, became the most downloaded on Apple’s App Store in the UK.
The report notes that critics have suggested an unintended consequence of the changes could be to drive people to more extreme content in darker corners of the internet, such as the dark web.
