{"id":341535,"date":"2025-08-13T16:02:20","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T16:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/341535\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T16:02:20","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T16:02:20","slug":"porn-site-traffic-plummets-as-uk-age-verification-rules-enforced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/341535\/","title":{"rendered":"Porn site traffic plummets as UK age verification rules enforced"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Over the same time period, traffic to XVideos, another leading adult site, was also down 47% and OnlyFans saw traffic drop by over 10%.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

However, the data also showed that some smaller and less well regulated pornography sites saw visits increase.<\/p>\n

This comes after Virtual private network (VPN) apps<\/a> became the most downloaded on Apple’s App Store in the UK in the days after the age verification rules were enforced.<\/p>\n

VPNs can disguise your location online – allowing you to use the internet as though you are in another country.<\/p>\n

The apps would also make it harder to collect data on how many people are visiting sites from specific locations.<\/p>\n

Media regulator Ofcom estimates 14 million people watch online pornography.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pornhub is the UK’s most visited website for adult content and it experienced a 47% decrease in traffic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341536,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-341535","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115022302048042405","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}