Some minor good news landed yesterday. The Guardian report that traffic to pornographic websites has fallen in the UK since age verification checks were brought in. You can read the story in The Guardian here. They report:
Ofcom said the enforcement of age vetting on 25 July led to an immediate fall in visits to popular online porn publishers, including the most visited provider in the UK, Pornhub.
The regulator said visitor numbers to Pornhub in August were 9.8 million, a decline of 1.5 million compared with the same period in 2024. Ofcom said in its annual Online Nation report that, overall, visitor numbers to the 10 most-visited pornography services in the UK have now settled at a “lower level” than before 25 July.
Figures given to the Guardian by Similarweb, the US data firm that provided the Ofcom figures, shows that the slump in pornography viewing appears to have continued beyond August. The number of unique visitors to Pornhub was 7.2 million last month, a decline of 36% since August 2024. Visits to Xvideos and Chaturbate – the next two biggest sites – fell by 27% and 18% respectively over the same period.
Fundamentally, this is good news for a society currently drowning in porn.
Of course, it is not unmitigated good news. As much as traffic has fallen to the most popular pornographic websites, Ofcom have noted that there has been a rise in VPN usage which can re-route traffic through other countries and work around the restrictions. They state:
VPN usage more than doubled in the wake of age checking being introduced, rising from 650,000 users to a peak of more than 1.4 million in mid-August. The VPN number now stands at 900,000.
“Since August VPN usage has continued to steadily decline,” said Ofcom. “The level of daily VPN use is much lower than user numbers for porn services.”
Whilst this is a very crude measure, it seems the 250,000 increase in VPN users is nevertheless considerably less than the 1.5m drop in unique visitors, which from a pro-restriction point of view is a significant net gain.
The other point of note is as follows:
Pornhub, owned by a Canadian private equity firm, said the loss of user numbers was “not a surprise” and was consistent with other jurisdictions that have introduced stringent age checks. It has claimed the changes have driven porn users to sites that are not compliant with the OSA.
It is hard to know whether this is just the kind of comment to expect from those who previously benefited from unrestricted access to their material or whether there is some credit to the claim that the restrictions have driven users to non-compliant sites. My suspicion (based on very little) is some probably have gone to non-compliant sites, but much like the uptick in VPN usage, there is probably a net gain from a pro-restriction point of view.
These are welcome bits of news. When even young men who consider themselves to be porn-addicted are supporting these kind of restrictions, it does seem like the proverbial no-brainer. It also seems like these restrictions will be part and parcel of further measures to come. Whilst those who are so minded will inevitably find the material they want to find, in a world saturated by porn and a society living with the deleterious effects of it simply being everywhere all at once, anything that makes it less readily available must be welcomed.