Pornhub is losing one million visitors to its site a day
The UK's biggest porn site has lost one million visitors every day over the last two weeks, and it's all for one specific reason.
Pornhub, long regarded as the number one site for sexual content online, is currently a little less popular than it once was.
Data experts at Similarweb have studied the numbers from the past two weeks and found that Pornhub's daily numbers have dropped by a massive 47 percent between 24 July and 8 August.
The number of average daily visits to Pornhub fell from 3.2 million in July to 2 million in the first week of August.
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In the same period, traffic to OnlyFans fell by 10 percent, while adult site XVideos lost 47 percent of its daily visitors.
If you haven't tried to get on an adult site in the last two weeks, then good for you, because pornography is actually doing a huge amount of damage to people's mental state and often even their sex lives.
But you perhaps won't have seen the new legislations in place, which mean that UK visitors must verify that they are over the age of 18, by uploading a photo and their details onto the website, which naturally is putting a lot of people off.
This is due to the UK's new Online Safety Act, which requires sites that host adult content to introduce more thorough checks to stop underage users accessing it.
While the new laws were brought in to prevent children from accessing explicit content online, it's having the added effect of stopping a lot of adults as well, even with plenty finding a loophole which allows them to access the exact same content they did a few weeks ago.
How does Pornhub verify users' ages and why is there backlash?
Many adults are concerned their personal data could be compromised. In the case of adult sites, this could be devastating - leaking intensely personal information, and even potentially outing people's sexuality.
Pornhub allows users to verify their age a number of ways: via credit card, via 'email based digital footprint age estimation', via their mobile network provider, via open banking, and via digital IDs stored in their Google wallet.
Pornhub insists that 'all verification activities are conducted independently by trusted third-party providers, who return only a binary outcome, pass or fail' and 'identity or age-related data is never shared with or retained by' Pornhub's parent company Aylo or its age verification partner.
Speaking about age verification generally and not specifically about Pornhub, Andrew Wailes of PlaySafe ID told LADbible that companies who run adult sites are 'legally responsible and liable' for your data.
He added: "It might be stored somewhere good it might be behind good security, but ultimately, you need to trust the company.
"They're ultimately in charge of what happens to your stuff."
How could the Online Safety Act have unintended consequences?
Unfortunately, Similarweb's study also found that unregulated sites were experiencing an increase in traffic, which means that those looking for adult content online and now simply accessing it away from the mainstream, where they may be subject to far more extreme content.
A spokesperson for Pornhub told the BBC: "As we've seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites."
These websites, if discovered by OFCOM, will face some serious sanctions, as failure to comply with the new rules means that sites and their owners run the risk of being fined £18 million or 10 percent of their revenue.
Alex Kekesi, who is the Brand and Community head at Aylo - the parent company of Pornhub - previously told LADbible about the negative impact of the new bill, which has nothing to do with website numbers.
He said: "We know that when people choose not to age verify, they do not stop looking for adult content, they migrate to those irresponsible platforms.
"We continue to believe that to make the internet safer for everyone, every phone, tablet or computer should start as a kid-safe device.
"Only verified adults should unlock access to things like dating apps, gambling, or adult content.
"This is the core premise of device- based age verification, which we believe is the safest and most effective option for protecting children and maintaining user privacy online."
LADbible has contacted Pornhub for comment.
Topics: PornHub, UK News, Adult Industry
James Moorhouse