Most visited porn site reports UK users down 77% since age checks started

PornHub, the most visited pornography site on the internet, has said that visitors from the UK are down 77% since July. That month saw the introduction of the Online Safety Act which required rigorous age verification for sites hosting sexually explicit material.

PornHub is just one of an estimated 240,000 adult websites that need to be regulated by Ofcom, which are visited by eight million users per month in the UK. At present Ofcom have taken action against fewer than 70 sites for non-compliance with the new rules.

According to Ofcom, traffic to pornography sites in general from users in the UK has dropped by a third in the past three months.

The Online Safety Act introduced age verification to prevent children from being able to “easily stumble across porn without searching for it”.

Ofcom commented that “Our new rules end the era of an age-blind internet, when many sites and apps have undertaken no meaningful checks to see if children were using their services”.

The reduction of traffic to sites such as PornHub has come as a result of the Online Safety Act, but it is difficult to judge how this has affected people’s use of pornography. Many may be using Virtual Private Network (VPN) software to mask their location and circumvent the age checks.

Ofcom believe that the number of people using VPNs rose to 1.5 million a day in July, falling to around 1 million currently. Research by Cybernews has estimated there have been more than 10 million downloads of VPN apps this year.

Dr Hanne Stegeman from the University of Exeter said that “it is likely that people not wanting to verify their age or identity to access sexual content, for example because of privacy concerns, are using VPNs to get around this”.