Dip in traffic to popular porn sites amid UK age verification rules being enforced

According to data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company, daily visits to Pornhub, the UK’s most used porn site, fell from 3.6 million on July 24, the day before age verification rules were introduced, to 1.9 million on August 8 - a drop of 47%.

Visits to popular sites XVideos and xHamster fell 47% and 39% over the same period.

Pornhub said: "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."

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The prominent drop in visitors to adult sites was not seen in social networking sites such as X and Reddit, which had relatively steady traffic figures after introducing age checks last month, according to Similarweb.

On July 25, media regulator Ofcom began enforcing new requirements for adult sites to check the age of all UK users under the Online Safety Act, one of the world’s toughest new regimes aimed at protecting children on the internet.

Users have been asked to carry out tasks including uploading identity documents, entering credit card details or scanning their faces with a camera to prove they are over 18.

In July, LBC discovered that more than 50 porn websites had no age verification, despite the new checks coming into effect, as part of an exclusive investigation.

Following this, five sites identified in the investigation were among 34 being examined over age checks by Ofcom.

At the time, Ofcom said it had opened formal investigations into whether 8579 LLC, AVS Group Ltd, Kick Online Entertainment S.A. and Trendio Ltd had highly effective age checks in place to protect children from encountering pornography across 34 websites.