Porn Site Visits Plummet With Age Verification

The number of people in the UK visiting the most popular pornography sites has decreased sharply since enhanced age verification rules came into place, new figures indicate. Data analytics firm Similarweb said leading adult site Pornhub lost more than one million visitors in just two weeks.

Pornhub and other major adult websites introduced advanced age checks on 25 July after the Online Safety Act came into force for under-18s to see explicit material.

The new regulations mandate that sites allowing users to view explicit material must implement “highly effective age assurance” to protect minors. In compliance, major platforms like Pornhub and XVideos have introduced strict age checks, leading to a sharp drop in their UK user base.

Data experts at Similarweb compared the daily average user figures of popular pornography sites from 1 to 9 August with the daily average figures for July. 

Pornhub is the UK's most visited website for adult content and it experienced a 47% decrease in traffic between 24 July, one day before the new rules came into place, and 8 August, according to Similarweb's data.Over the same time period, traffic to XVideos, another leading adult site, was also down 47% and OnlyFans saw traffic drop by over 10%.

The number of average daily visits to Pornhub fell from 3.2 million in July to 2 million in the first nine days of August. However, the data also showed that some smaller and less well regulated pornography sites saw visits increase.

This comes after Virtual Private Network (VPN) apps became the most downloaded on Apple's App Store in the UK in the days after the age verification rules were enforced.

VPNs can disguise your location online, allowing you to use the Internet as though you are in another country and  the apps would also make it harder to collect data on how many people are visiting sites from specific locations.

The  British media regulator Ofcom estimates 14 million people watch online pornography. It has set out a number of ways websites can verify the age of users including through credit card checks, photo ID matching and estimating age using a selfie.

While the data indicates that the new law is succeeding in restricting access on major platforms, it is also driving some users to seek out alternatives.Indeed, critics have suggested an unintended consequence of the changes could be to drive people to more extreme content in darker corners of the Internet, on the Dark Web.

TechDigest   |   Desi Blitz   |  Telegraph  |  LBC     |   Heise  |   Smilarweb   |   BBC    

Image: franco alva

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